Psychometric properties of the children's atypical development scale

The Children's Atypical Development Scale (CADS) is a 53-item rating scale designed to measure unusual behaviors in children. Principal-factor analysis on a clinic-referred and pediatric sample of 474 children resulted in a four-factor solution: Communication Deficits, Lability, Social Relatedness Deficits, and Preoccupation. The CADS is internally consistent and has adequate temporal stability. CADS factor scores were differentially associated with parent and teacher rating scales, IQ, and Continuous Performance Test errors. The scale shows promise as a clinical and research tool for assessing atypical behaviors associated with pervasive developmental disorder and other neurobehavioral disorders.This research was supported in part by a grant from the Smart Family Foundation. The authors are grateful to James P. O'Donnell, Catherine Lord, and Frank A. Zelko for their comments on an earlier draft.     

A systematic review of physical guidance procedures as an open‐mouth prompt to increase acceptance for children with pediatric feeding disorders

This article reviews behavioral treatments of pediatric feeding disorders using physical guidance procedures as an open‐mouth prompt (i.e., jaw prompt, finger prompt, Nuk prompt, side deposit) to increase food acceptance. We identified 9 articles containing 35 systematic evaluations. We coded participant and study characteristics and assessed the experimental rigor, quality, and outcomes of each evaluation. Of the high‐quality research present, the finger prompt variation and side deposit reliably increased acceptance. We found mixed results on the efficacy of the jaw prompt, although it was the most widely researched procedure. Further, authors reported interobserver agreement for 100% of the participants, procedural integrity for 60%, social validity for 80%, fading for 5%, and follow‐up for 55%. Based on the invasive nature of physical guidance, we provide recommendations for researchers and clinicians to increase the quality of their treatment evaluations. We discuss limitations, implications for practice, and future research.     

Maladaptive Emotional Schemas and Emotional Functioning: Evaluation of an Integrated Model Across Two Independent Samples

Journal of Rational-Emotive & Cognitive-Behavior Therapy - Recent advancements in emotion theory propose that emotional schemas—individualized conceptualizations and beliefs about...     

Representing Sudden Shifts in Intensive Dyadic Interaction Data Using Differential Equation Models with Regime Switching

A growing number of social scientists have turned to differential equations as a tool for capturing the dynamic interdependence among a system of variables. Current tools for fitting differential equation models do not provide a straightforward mechanism for diagnosing evidence for qualitative shifts in dynamics, nor do they provide ways of identifying the timing and possible determinants of such shifts. In this paper, we discuss regime-switching differential equation models, a novel modeling framework for representing abrupt changes in a system of differential equation models. Estimation was performed by combining the Kim filter (Kim and Nelson State-space models with regime switching: classical and Gibbs-sampling approaches with applications, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1999) and a numerical differential equation solver that can handle both ordinary and stochastic differential equations. The proposed approach was motivated by the need to represent discrete shifts in the movement dynamics of \(n= 29\) mother–infant dyads during the Strange Situation Procedure (SSP), a behavioral assessment where the infant is separated from and reunited with the mother twice. We illustrate the utility of a novel regime-switching differential equation model in representing children’s tendency to exhibit shifts between the goal of staying close to their mothers and intermittent interest in moving away from their mothers to explore the room during the SSP. Results from empirical model fitting were supplemented with a Monte Carlo simulation study to evaluate the use of information criterion measures to diagnose sudden shifts in dynamics.     

The Relationship Between Religious and Psychospiritual Measures and an Inflammation Marker (CRP) in Older Adults Experiencing Life Event Stress

Journal of Religion and Health - Inflammation, often measured by C-reactive protein (CRP), is thought to be related to a number of debilitating illnesses as we age, including cardiovascular...     

Cultural Differences in Visual Search for Geometric Figures

While some studies suggest cultural differences in visual processing, others do not, possibly because the complexity of their tasks draws upon high‐level factors that could obscure such effects. To control for this, we examined cultural differences in visual search for geometric figures, a relatively simple task for which the underlying mechanisms are reasonably well known. We replicated earlier results showing that North Americans had a reliable search asymmetry for line length: Search for long among short lines was faster than vice versa. In contrast, Japanese participants showed no asymmetry. This difference did not appear to be affected by stimulus density. Other kinds of stimuli resulted in other patterns of asymmetry differences, suggesting that these are not due to factors such as analytic/holistic processing but are based instead on the target‐detection process. In particular, our results indicate that at least some cultural differences reflect different ways of processing early‐level features, possibly in response to environmental factors.     

Breadwinner and caregiver: A cross‐sectional analysis of children's and emerging adults’ visions of their future family roles

Participants were 150 school‐age boys and girls, 58 high school students, and 145 university students drawn from communities in the Southeastern United States. In this cross‐sectional study, family role attitudes and expectations were examined across development. Parental work traditionality (occupational prestige and traditionality, and employed hours) predicted daughters’ social role attitudes and plans for future family roles, such that daughters’ envisioned families resembled that of their parents. Sons’ and daughters’ own attitudes about adult family roles predicted their plans to work or stay home with their future children; however, mothers’ work traditionality predicted daughters’ future plans over and above daughters’ own attitudes. The only exception to this was in the case of university daughters, where university women's attitudes about social roles fully mediated this relationship. It may be that, as young women approach adulthood and the formation of families, they adjust their vision of their future self to match more closely their own attitudes about the caregiving role.     

Networks,Space, and Residents’ Perception of Cohesion

Community scholars increasingly focus on the linkage between residents’ sense of cohesion with the neighborhood and their own social networks in the neighborhood. A challenge is that whereas some research only focuses on residents’ social ties with fellow neighbors, such an approach misses out on the larger constellation of individuals’ relationships and the spatial distribution of those relationships. Using data from the Twin Communities Network Study, the current project is one of the first studies to examine the actual spatial distribution of respondents’ networks for a variety of relationships and the consequences of these for neighborhood and city cohesion. We also examine how a perceived structural measure of cohesion—triangle degree—impacts their perceptions of neighborhood and city cohesion. Our findings suggest that perceptions of cohesion within the neighborhood and the city depend on the number of neighborhood safety contacts as well as on the types of people with which they discuss important matters. On the other hand, kin and social friendship ties do not impact cohesion. A key finding is that residents who report more spatially dispersed networks for certain types of ties report lower levels of neighborhood and city cohesion. Residents with higher triangle degree within their neighborhood safety networks perceived more neighborhood cohesion.     

Understanding age-related reductions in visual working memory capacity: Examining the stages of change detection

Visual working memory (VWM) capacity is reduced in older adults. Research has shown age-related impairments to VWM encoding, but aging is likely to affect multiple stages of VWM. In the present study, we recorded the event-related potentials (ERPs) of younger and older adults during VWM maintenance and retrieval. We measured encoding-stage processing with the P1 component, maintenance-stage processing with the contralateral delay activity (CDA), and retrieval-stage processing by comparing the activity for old and new items (old–new effect). Older adults showed lower behavioral capacity estimates (K) than did younger adults, but surprisingly, their P1 components and CDAs were comparable to those of younger adults. This remarkable dissociation between neural activity and behavior in the older adults indicated that the P1 and CDA did not accurately assess their VWM capacity. However, the neural activity evoked during VWM retrieval yielded results that helped clarify the age-related differences. During retrieval, younger adults showed early old–new effects in frontal and occipital areas and a late central–parietal old–new effect, whereas older adults showed a late right-lateralized parietal old–new effect. The younger adults’ early old–new effects strongly resembled an index of perceptual fluency, suggesting that perceptual implicit memory was activated. The activation of implicit memory could have facilitated the younger adults’ behavior, and the lack of these early effects in older adults may suggest that they have much lower-resolution memory than do younger adults. From these data, we speculated that younger and older adults store the same number of items in VWM, but that younger adults store a higher-resolution representation than do older adults.     

Perpetuating Stereotypes: A Study of Gender,Family, and Religious Life in Jewish Children's Books

This paper examines award‐winning Jewish children's literature as a medium to explore how religiosity gets constructed differently for men and women. We analyze three decades of winners of the Sydney Taylor Jewish Book Award, a prestigious annual award given by the Association of Jewish Libraries to an outstanding Jewish children's book. We demonstrate how these award‐winning books produce and perpetuate gendered religious stereotypes that associate men with agency and women with communion. We also show how these books construct images of a “domestic Judaism” for women and a “public Judaism” for men and how women have been symbolically annihilated from the titles and central character roles in these books. Drawing on Cecilia Ridgeway's ( 2011 ) gender‐framing perspective, we argue that the gender stereotypes evident in these books matter to society because they produce and enforce gender inequalities in religiousness.