Effects of Cross-Age Peer Tutoring Networks Among Students with Autism and General Education Students

In this investigation peer networks were formed consisting of students with autism and fourth grade peers. They were trained to tutor first grade students in sight word recognition. The purpose of the study was to determine if the target students could be trained effectively as tutors, to determine outcomes for the first graders, and to determine effects on social integration of network students. Effects were measured for implementation of tutoring steps, increases in sight words learned on a weekly basis for the tutees, and social interactions among network students during free time activities. Using a reversal design, with a multiple baseline component, results demonstrated higher gains on weekly pre- and posttests for first graders than control students who received classroom instruction only, successful implementation of peer tutoring steps by the network participants, and increased duration of social interaction time for the target students with autism and network companions. These findings were replicated in the following year. The peer network system for students with autism, thus not only increased their time and social engagement with typical peers but also provided a productive, socially acceptable activity for increasing academic performance for first graders exhibiting delays.     

The Relation of Story Structure Properties to Recall of Television Stories in Young Children with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Nonreferred Peers

In this study, the authors examined memory for televised stories to gain insight into similarities and differences in story comprehension between young children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and their typical peers. In particular, the authors investigated the extent to which 4- to 6-year-old children's free recall of story events is predicted by several structural properties of story events (number of causal connections, whether an event is on or off the story's causal chain, story-grammar category, and position in the story's hierarchical structure), whether differences exist between children with ADHD and nonreferred comparison children in their sensitivity to structural features of stories, and whether age differences in sensitivity to structural features are similar for both groups. For both groups, recall of story events was predicted by all four structural properties, but the effects of the two causal properties was stronger for comparison children than for children with ADHD. Further examination revealed that this difference was observed only when a competing activity was available during television viewing. These findings indicate that both groups of preschool children are able to benefit from causal structure when recalling television stories, but that children with ADHD lose this benefit when attention is divided. Consistent with previous findings for nonreferred children (P. W. van den Broek, E. P. Lorch, & R. Thurlow, 1996), in both diagnostic groups the effects of causal properties increased across age, and older children were more likely to include causally important protagonists' goals in their recalls than younger children.     

Lethal Stereotypes: Hair and Eye Color as Survival Characteristics During the Holocaust1

In spite of many false negatives and false positives quite familiar to the people of Nazi‐dominated Europe, dark hair and eyes were salient among the physical stereotypes of Jews that the Nazis promulgated along with psychosocial ones. Many narratives of the Holocaust refer to someone surviving because he or she “did not look Jewish,” and others being caught and killed because they did. A quantitative test of the validity and impact of this attribution showed that a higher proportion of Holocaust survivors than of a North American Jewish control group had light‐colored hair, eyes, or both during the relevant period. The paper discusses possible reasons why these were survival characteristics under the conditions of the Holocaust, the possible short‐ and long‐term effects of such selectivity, and implications for stereotyping in other situations of ethnic persecution and genocide.     

The Influence of Income Level and Ethnicity on Coping Strategies

The Ways of Coping Questionnaire (WCQ) by S. Folkman and R. S. Lazarus (1988) has been used widely; however, few studies have evaluated this assessment tool in research concerning populations from different income levels and ethnic backgrounds. The purpose of this study was to compare the endorsement of the 8 coping strategies as outlined by Folkman and Lazarus's original research with Caucasian, middle class participants to the endorsement of coping approaches in a low income, primary care sample. Results suggest that low income individuals report utilizing greater rates of coping strategies overall and specifically employ emotion-focused coping strategies more than Folkman and Lazarus's original sample. Ethnic differences within the present study's low income sample were also examined and suggest that even within this low income sample, African Americans use certain emotion-focused coping strategies significantly more than Caucasian participants.     

Linking emotion regulation strategies to affective events and negative emotions at work

This study examined the use of specific forms of emotion regulation at work, utilizing Gross’s [Gross, J. J. (1998). The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review. Review of General Psychology 2, 271–299] process-based framework of emotion regulation as a guiding structure. In addition to examining employee self-reported usage of these emotion regulation strategies, we assessed the types of discrete negative emotions and negative affective events associated with their use. Results demonstrated that employees reported using a wide variety of emotion regulation strategies, and that each strategy tended to align with a distinct set of discrete negative emotions and affective events. These findings support expanding the focus of emotion regulation strategies at work beyond the deep acting (i.e., changing feelings) and surface acting (i.e., changing expressions) distinction. The results also suggest that focusing on specific strategies, rather than categories of emotion regulation, could enhance understanding of how employees manage their emotions at work.     

Benevolent cognitions as a strategy of relationship maintenance: "don't sweat the small stuff".... But it is not all small stuff

To maintain intimate relationships in the face of negative experiences, many recommend cognitive strategies that minimize the implications of those experiences for global evaluations of the relationship. But are such strategies always adaptive? Suggesting otherwise, 2 longitudinal studies spanning the 1st 4 years of 251 new marriages revealed that the effects of benevolent cognitions on relationship development depended on the initial levels of negativity in the relationship. Cross-sectionally, the tendency to make positive attributions or otherwise disengage global evaluations of the relationship from negative experiences was associated with higher levels of satisfaction in marriages characterized by more frequent negative behavior and more severe problems. Longitudinally, in contrast, such strategies only demonstrated benefits to healthier marriages, whereas they predicted steeper declines in satisfaction among spouses in more troubled marriages by allowing marital problems to worsen over time. These findings highlight the limits of purely cognitive theories of relationship maintenance and suggest that widely recommended strategies for improving relationships may harm vulnerable couples by weakening their motivations to address their problems directly.     

Intimate partner violence and children's reaction to peer provocation: the moderating role of emotion coaching

The current study examined the relation between intimate partner violence (IPV) and children's reactions to a stressful peer interaction in a community-based sample. The moderating role of parental emotion coaching in buffering children from negative reactions to a peer was also examined. Children participated in a peer provocation paradigm and mothers completed the Parent Meta-Emotion Interview. Both adaptive (i.e., laughing, ignoring) and maladaptive (i.e., hostile/challenging, odd behaviors) reactions to the provocative peer were examined. IPV was positively related to children's laughing and odd behaviors but was unrelated to ignoring and hostile/challenging behaviors. Additionally, emotion coaching was found to moderate relations between IPV and children's laughing and odd behaviors. The importance of understanding protective factors in families experiencing IPV and of developing emotion coaching parenting programs is discussed.     

Social class and the experience of work-family conflict during the transition to adulthood

The challenges of juggling work and family responsibilities are well known, but there has been little attention to the distinctive work and family experiences of young adults. This chapter explores how class affects young adults' exposure to work-family conflicts and the strategies they use to manage their work and family responsibilities. Using data from a recent cohort of young adults, we find class and gender variations in work and family roles and work-family conflict. Early family formation, coupled with poor working conditions, lead those with lower educational attainments to experience more years of family-to-work interference. In contrast, young adults with more education have more work-to-family interference, and this is especially true for college-educated women.     

Identifying topic sentencehood

Four experiments were conducted to assess two models of topic sentencehood identification: the derived model and the free model. According to the derived model, topic sentences are identified in the context of the paragraph and in terms of how well each sentence in the paragraph captures the paragraph's theme. In contrast, according to the free model, topic sentences can be identified on the basis of sentential features without reference to other sentences in the paragraph (i.e., without context). The results of the experiments suggest that human raters can identify topic sentences both with and without the context of the other sentences in the paragraph. Another goal of this study was to develop computational measures that approximated each of these models. When computational versions were assessed, the results for the free model were promising; however, the derived model results were poor. These results collectively imply that humans' identification of topic sentences in context may rely more heavily on sentential features than on the relationships between sentences in a paragraph.