Tracing Leadership in Gifted Children

The aim of this study was to determine whether characteristics of leadership identified among adults also exist among young gifted children. The study was conducted in Israel among 63 gifted children aged 10 to 14 who completed the Leadership Questionnaire, constructed especially for this study. The characteristics found to distinguish between high and low scorers on leadership were responsibility, desire to dominate, consistency, physical energy, achievement orientation, expressive and persuasive powers, cooperation, adaptability, daring, self-confidence, and emotional equilibrium. The results confirmed our hypothesis that the characteristics of leadership identified in adults do exist among gifted children.     

Words and possible words in early language acquisition

In order to acquire language, infants must extract its building blocks—words—and master the rules governing their legal combinations from speech. These two problems are not independent, however: words also have internal structure. Thus, infants must extract two kinds of information from the same speech input. They must find the actual words of their language. Furthermore, they must identify its possible words, that is, the sequences of sounds that, being morphologically well formed, could be words. Here, we show that infants’ sensitivity to possible words appears to be more primitive and fundamental than their ability to find actual words. We expose 12- and 18-month-old infants to an artificial language containing a conflict between statistically coherent and structurally coherent items. We show that 18-month-olds can extract possible words when the familiarization stream contains marks of segmentation, but cannot do so when the stream is continuous. Yet, they can find actual words from a continuous stream by computing statistical relationships among syllables. By contrast, 12-month-olds can find possible words when familiarized with a segmented stream, but seem unable to extract statistically coherent items from a continuous stream that contains minimal conflicts between statistical and structural information. These results suggest that sensitivity to word structure is in place earlier than the ability to analyze distributional information. The ability to compute nontrivial statistical relationships becomes fully effective relatively late in development, when infants have already acquired a considerable amount of linguistic knowledge. Thus, mechanisms for structure extraction that do not rely on extensive sampling of the input are likely to have a much larger role in language acquisition than general-purpose statistical abilities.     

The Planning of Change: Readings in the Applied Behavioral Sciences by Warren G. Bennis,Kenneth D. Benne,and Robert Chin

This paper explains the concept of di-egophrenia and contrasts the dynamics of and treatment approach for di-egophrenics with those advocated for borderlines. The essential difference between the two is that the former functions with an introjected parental pseudo-ego and a submerged ego, while the latter suffers from a split ego. Ambivalence is described as the central feature of the di-egophrenic. Treatment of the di-egopltrenic is then detailed, with psychoanalysis in groups recommended as a treatment adjunct of particular value along with the alternate session. An experimental group solely composed of di-egophrenics is described and outcomes for members of this group are discussed.     

Examining the Course of Suicidal and Nonsuicidal Self-Injurious Thoughts and Behaviors in Outpatient and Inpatient Adolescents

Suicidal and nonsuicidal self-injurious thoughts and behaviors (SITBs) among youth are major public health concerns. Although a growing body of research has focused on the complex association between nonsuicidal and suicidal self-injury, the temporal relationship between these two classes of behaviors is unclear. The current study addresses this empirical gap by examining the course of SITBs in adolescents receiving outpatient (N = 106; 82.1 % female) and inpatient (N = 174; 75.9 % female) treatment. SITBs (co-occurrence, age-of-onset, and time lag between SITBs) and major psychiatric disorders were assessed at a single time point with well-validated structured interviews. Adolescents in both clinical samples reported high co-occurrence of SITBs: most adolescents reported both lifetime nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) and suicidal thoughts. A similar temporal pattern of SITBs was reported in the two samples: thoughts of NSSI and suicide ideation had the earliest age-of-onset, followed by NSSI behaviors, suicide plans, and suicide attempts. However, the age-of-onset for each SITB was younger in the inpatient sample than in the outpatient sample. In terms of time lag between SITBs, suicide ideation occurred on average before initial engagement in NSSI, suggesting that pathways to NSSI and suicidal behavior may occur simultaneously rather than in succession from nonsuicidal to suicidal self-injury. Results also indicated that the time to transition between SITBs was relatively fast, and that a key period for intervention and prevention is within the first 6–12 months after the onset of suicidal thinking. Taken together, these findings have important implications for understanding the time-lagged relationship between nonsuicidal and suicidal self-injury.     

Interactions Between Maternal Parenting and Children’s Early Disruptive Behavior: Bidirectional Associations across the Transition from Preschool to School Entry

This study was a prospective 2-year longitudinal investigation of associations between negative maternal parenting and disruptive child behavior across the preschool to school transition. Our main goals were to 1) determine the direction of association between early maternal negativity and child disruptive behaviors across this important developmental transition and 2) examine whether there would be different patterns of associations for boys and girls. Participants were 235 children (111 girls; T1; M = 37.7 months, T2; M = 63.4 months) and their mothers and teachers. Observational and multi-informant ratings of child disruptive behavior showed differential patterns of stability and associations with measures of parenting risk. Results indicated bidirectional and interactive contributions of externalizing behavior and negative parenting across time. Results also indicated that risk mechanisms operate similarly for both sexes. Findings support transactional models of disruptive child behavior that highlight the joint contributions of parents and children.     

Influences of preclinical dementia and impending death on the magnitude of age-related cognitive deficits

The authors examined the influence of preclinical dementia and impending death on the cross-sectional relationship between age and performance in tasks assessing episodic memory, visuospatial skill, and verbal fluency. Increasing age was associated with a general decrease in cognitive performance. In addition, those who were to be diagnosed with dementia or had died by a 3-year follow-up, were older, and performed at a lower level than the remaining sample across all cognitive tasks at baseline. Nevertheless, removal of the preclinical dementia and impending death groups from the original sample affected the cross-sectional age-cognition relations relatively little. This pattern of findings suggests that the biological aging process exerts negative influences on cognitive functioning beyond those resulting from disease and mortality.     

The shared leadership process in decision-making teams

The present study examined the process of shared leadership in 45 ad hoc decision-making teams. Each team member's leadership behavior (n = 180) was assessed by behaviorally coding videotapes of the teams' discussions. The within-team patterns of leadership behavior were examined using cluster analysis. Results indicated that the likelihood of a team experiencing a full range of leadership behavior increased to the extent that multiple team members shared leadership, and that teams with shared leadership experienced less conflict, greater consensus, and higher intragroup trust and cohesion than teams without shared leadership. This study supports previous findings that shared leadership contributes to overall team functioning, and begins to delineate the extent to which team members may naturally share leadership.     

Perceived partner support in pregnancy predicts lower maternal and infant distress

Maternal postpartum emotional distress is quite common and can pose significant risk to mothers and infants. The current study investigated mothers' relationships with their partners during pregnancy and tested the hypotheses that perception of prenatal partner support is a significant predictor of changes in maternal emotional distress from midpregnancy to postpartum, and contributes to maternal ratings of infant distress to novelty. Using a prospective longitudinal design, 272 adult pregnant women were interviewed regarding their partner support, relationship satisfaction, and interpersonal security (attachment style and willingness to seek out support), and they completed standardized measures of prenatal symptoms of depression and anxiety (distress). At 6 to 8 weeks' postpartum, mothers reported these symptoms again and completed measures of their infants' temperament. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to test direct and indirect contributions of partner support, relationship satisfaction, and interpersonal security to maternal and infant postpartum distress. Mothers who perceived stronger social support from their partners midpregnancy had lower emotional distress postpartum after controlling for their distress in early pregnancy, and their infants were reported to be less distressed in response to novelty. Partner support mediated the effects of mothers' interpersonal security and relationship satisfaction on maternal and infant outcomes. A high-quality, supportive partner relationship during pregnancy may contribute to improved maternal and infant well-being postpartum, indicating a potential role for partner relationships in mental health interventions, with possible benefits for infants as well.     

Newborns learn to identify a face in eight/tenths of a second?

A number of recent studies have shown that newborns prefer to look at mother's face rather than at the face of a stranger. This preference can be seen as the result of familiarity with the mother's face, stemming from a greater number of encounters with mother's face. A schema theory can deal with this kind of recognition. Recent work with verbal stimuli has shown that newborns are sensitive to primacy and recency as well as simple familiarity. A pilot and one complete experiment were carried out to examine whether primacy and recency operated with faces as well. Results indicated that primacy, but not recency, was effective. The results show very rapid learning, learning that may outpace the capacity of any extant model of perceptual learning.