THE COPYING OF UPRIGHT AND TILTED SQUARES BY SWAZI CHILDREN AND ADULTS

Children aged 5–12, and adults from a rural area of Swaziland, along with urban based adults were assessed on their copying ability for a square orientated in two ways, squarely and obliquely; and under five different conditions. The children and rural adults experienced significant difficulties in copying the obliquely orientated shape, while the urban adults produced the shape without difficulty, although they all easily perceived the shapes and programmed the required movements. The results indicate that the process of planning the fine movements for drawing is learned, improves with age, and practice is necessary. Where planning is more complex, in the production and combination of oblique lines, it appears that the lack of practice in Swazi rural schools, and generally little requirement to use the skills, results in a delay of those particular drawing abilities.     

Self-Efficacy for Affect Regulation as a Predictor of Future Life Satisfaction and Moderator of the Negative Affect—Life Satisfaction Relationship

Life satisfaction is an important index of mental health and also predicts other important outcomes such as longevity and decreased mortality. Negative affect has a unique inverse relationship with life satisfaction across the life span. Therefore, determining psychological factors that uniquely predict future life satisfaction and that reduce the trait negative affect—life satisfaction relationship is theoretically and clinically important. In light of recent evidence from long-term longitudinal studies that self-efficacy for regulation of negative emotions (SERN) predicts higher future life satisfaction, as well as evidence from a cross-sectional study that a subtype of SERN—self-efficacy for regulating anger—buffers the relationship between trait negative affect and life satisfaction, we tested whether SERN and subtypes of SERN predicted higher life satisfaction and buffered the negative affect—life satisfaction relationship longitudinally over short time periods. After controlling for time 1 life satisfaction, higher time 1 self-efficacy for regulating despondency and distress (SEDes) predicted higher future life satisfaction over average time periods of 17 days (N = 127), 32 days (N = 83), and 41 days (N = 65) among college students. However, in post hoc exploratory regressions that included self-efficacy for experience and expression of positive emotions (SEPos), SEDes predicted higher time 2 life satisfaction, but only SEPos uniquely predicted higher time 3 and time 4 life satisfaction.     

Evolving Development: An Evolutionary Perspective on Development for an Interconnected World

The notion of development has been permeated by concepts and methods from positivistic science. As a result, many development initiatives are reductionistic, myopic, and with little or impact on the improvement of the quality of life and the sustainability of communities and societies. This article marks the beginning of a transdisciplinary inquiry among the authors, motivated by direct interest in the issue of development, per se, and in particular, Mexico's development. Our inquiry departs from and weaves together our various areas of expertise and experience, including: systems theory, general evolution theory, economic development, technology transfer, social innovation, sustainable development, environmental behavior, social systems design, and education. The article reviews the concept of development from an evolutionary and systemic perspective. It outlines the foundations of evolutionary development in terms of theory, philosophy, and methodology and provides a conceptual framework for future research aimed at the articulation of a practical model for evolutionary development.     

Recovery of Lost Transfer Effects

Tracking tasks known to facilitate or interfere with one another were investigated under various sequences of alternation. Double and treble alternating sequences of 2 tasks were used. 6 groups of 12 Ss practiced for 20 10-sec. trials, with 50-sec. intertrial intervals. Trend analyses were employed in comparing the results of the double and treble alternating sequences with the single alternating sequence and postshift trials of the previous study (Laszlo & Pritchard, 1969). The results showed that facilitation or interference lost with single alternation was recovered with double or treble alternating sequences. Rate and degree of recovery appeared to depend upon the degree of transfer between tasks and strategies employed by S. These results were discussed in terms of motor program consolidation.     

Much ado about norming: The Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function

The Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function (BRIEF) is a rating scale designed to assess executive functions in everyday life that is widely used in school and clinical settings and in research studies. It has been recently suggested, however, that the limited geographic stratification of the standardization sample renders the measure overly sensitive. We evaluated this hypothesis by examining BRIEF scores across studies of typically developing children and adolescents. Thirty-nine studies were identified that included at least one of three possible index scores. Mean scores across studies were (a) within one to two T-score units from the standardization sample mean of 50, (b) tended to be slightly lower than 50, and (c) were unrelated to geographic location (US Census regions or internationally). These findings refute recent claims that the BRIEF is overly sensitive and further add to the large body of literature supporting the validity of the measure.     

Measures of dynamic stability: Detecting differences between walking overground and on a compliant surface

Numerous measures of dynamic stability have been proposed to gauge fall risk in the elderly, including stride interval variability and variability of the center of mass. However, these measures have been deemed inadequate because they do not take into account temporal information. Therefore, research on the measurement of dynamic stability has turned to other analysis methods such as stride interval dynamics and the maximum Lyapunov exponent. Stride interval dynamics reflect the statistical persistence of an individual’s stride interval time series and the Lyapunov exponent quantifies local dynamic stability – the sensitivity of the system to infinitesimal perturbations. In this study, we compare the ability of these measurement tools to detect changes between overground and compliant-surface walking, a condition known to affect stability, to determine their aptness as measures of dynamic stability. Fourteen able-bodied participants completed three 15 min walks, two overground and one on a compliant surface. Our results show that the Lyapunov exponent may be more sensitive to gait changes than stride interval dynamics and gait variability measures.     

Reinforcing Functions of Altruism and Leaving the Scene

The reward value of helping and the reward value of leaving the scene were assessed separately by means of a social analog of instrumental escape conditioning. Both helping and leaving the scene proved to have reward value, with that of helping being much greater. The altruistic reward afforded by helping produced strong, regular, sustained learning of the instrumental response throughout the course of acquisition. The reward afforded by leaving the scene was much weaker in its effects but, nonetheless, superior to nonreinforced controls.     

Sex differences in subjective distress to unfaithfulness: testing competing evolutionary and violation of infidelity expectations hypotheses

According to an evolutionary psychology perspective, men's and women's processing of threats to their sex-linked mate selection strategies cause sex differences in infidelity distress. An alternative account assumes that the distress results from men's and women's processing of expectation violations regarding the content of an unfaithful partner's actions with a rival. Logistic regressions supported the conclusion that the participant's sex-but not the processing of expectation violations-was the best predictor of the most distressing infidelity presented in forced-choice, mutually exclusive, and combined formats. Our results also indicated that the sex differences in infidelity distress were neither limited to using data from a forced-choice response format nor caused by the distinct inferences that men and women draw about the relation between love and sex.