Understanding Girls' Circle as an intervention on perceived social support, body image, self-efficacy, locus of control, and self-esteem

The Girls' Circle is a support group for adolescent girls developed by Beth Hossfeld and Giovanna Taormina as a unique program that addresses the needs of girls by focusing on increasing connections, building empathic skills, and developing resiliency. The present study evaluates the effectiveness of the Girls' Circle intervention on improving social support, body image, locus of control, self-efficacy, and self-esteem. Sixty-three girls from 9 support groups (comprising 5 to 15 girls each) across the United States completed the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support, the Body Parts Satisfaction Scale, the Nowicki-Strickland Personal Reaction Survey, Schwarzer's General Self-Efficacy Scale, and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem scale both before and after the 10-week Girls' Circle program. Results revealed a significant increase in social support, body image, and self-efficacy after completion of the program.     

Children’s eyewitness memory: A comparison of two interviewing strategies as realized by forensic professionals

A critical issue for developmental psychology is how to obtain accurate and complete eyewitness memory reports from preschoolers without offering suggestions that might result in false allegations. We examined effects of two interviewing strategies (police/verbal interviews and clinician/prop-assisted interviews) on young children’s reports about a medical examination. A total of 58 4-year-olds participated in the study, which conformed to a 2 (Interview Type) × 2 (Number of Interviews) factorial design. Analyses revealed that interviewers spent less time off topic and asked more free recall questions in the police/verbal interviews than in the clinician/prop-assisted interviews. Compared with police/verbal interviews, clinician/prop-assisted interviews resulted in significantly more correct rejections and commission errors in children’s memory reports. However, on a final free recall test, error rates were comparable across conditions. Higher child verbal intelligence predicted memory accuracy in police/verbal interviews, and greater parental attachment anxiety predicted children being asked a higher number of misleading questions. The study provides new insights into interview techniques that promote preschoolers’ accurate eyewitness reports.     

Supervision Is a Relationship Too: A Contemporary Approach to Psychoanalytic Supervision

This paper discusses clinical cases presented by Comins and Eliot within a paradigm of psychoanalytic supervisory work based on relational theory. Here, in making the medium of supervision more symmetrical with the message of contemporary psychoanalytic ideas about structure of mind health, pathology, and treatment, the relationship between the supervisor and supervisee is considered to contain crucial supervisory data to be delineated and discussed by both members of the dyad. The supervisory relationship is described using three dimensions: power and authority, the data held to be relevant for supervisory conversations, and the mode of the supervisor's participation in the supervisory process.     

The Performance of Hamsters in the Maze Situation Utilizing Gravitation and the Vestibular Sense as Motivation

The hypotheses of this study of sex differences on a measure of self-esteem are as follows: 1) the scales good, nice, generous, pleasant, dependable, honest, and active will group together to form the outer esteem dimension of the semantic differential; 2) the scales strong, leader, powerful, confident, curious, inventive, sharp, and active will group together to form the inner esteem dimension of the semantic differential; 3) males will score significantly higher than females on the inner esteem dimension of the semantic differential; 4) females will score significantly higher than males on the outer esteem dimension of the semantic differential; 5) there will be a significant difference between the scoring patterns of males and females on the two dimensions of the semantic differential after controlling for the effects of race and social desirability. The sample of 442 sixth through eighth grade students consisted of two subsamples made heterogeneous on race, geographic location, and type of school. The Franks-Marolla Self-Esteem Semantic Differential and the Lunneborg and Lunneborg Child's Social Desirability Scale were administered. The findings support each of the hypotheses and indicate that there is a significant difference between the sexes on the Franks-Marolla Semantic Differential Measure of Self-Esteem. It is concluded that additional research in self-esteem might specify the meaning of sex differences in esteem by measuring esteem relative to an individual's structural social positions rather than measuring esteem in the general and environmentally nonspecific contexts as advocated by some.     

The undesired selves of repressors

Previous research has shown that prototypes of familiar categories are preferred over novel exemplars of familiar and unfamiliar categories. The present research demonstrates a reversal of this effect by simply inducing an exploratory mindset. Specifically, participants were asked to judge the attractiveness of dot patterns that represented prototypes of familiar categories, exemplars of familiar categories, or exemplars of novel categories. An exploratory mindset was manipulated by asking participants to imagine the stimuli as stars (versus as peas). Results show that participants in the exploration condition preferred exemplars of novel categories (thereby reversing the classical prototypicality effect), whereas participants in the control condition preferred prototypes. The role of mindsets and familiarity in attractiveness ratings is discussed.     

Neuropsychological impairments on the NEPSY-II among children with FASD

Background: We examined the pattern of neuropsychological impairments of children with FASD (compared to controls) on NEPSY-II measures of attention and executive functioning, language, memory, visuospatial processing, and social perception.

Methods: Participants included 32 children with FASD and 30 typically developing control children, ranging in age from 6 to 16 years. Children were tested on the following subtests of the NEPSY-II: Attention and Executive Functioning (animal sorting, auditory attention/response set, and inhibition), Language (comprehension of instructions and speeded naming), Memory (memory for names/delayed memory for names), Visual-Spatial Processing (arrows), and Social Perception (theory of mind). Groups were compared using MANOVA.

Results: Children with FASD were impaired relative to controls on the following subtests: animal sorting, response set, inhibition (naming and switching conditions), comprehension of instructions, speeded naming, and memory for names total and delayed, but group differences were not significant on auditory attention, inhibition (inhibition condition), arrows, and theory of mind. Among the FASD group, IQ scores were not correlated with performance on the NEPSY-II subtests, and there were no significant differences between those with and without comorbid ADHD.

Conclusions: The NEPSY-II is an effective and useful tool for measuring a variety of neuropsychological impairments among children with FASD. Children with FASD displayed a pattern of results with impairments (relative to controls) on measures of executive functioning (set shifting, concept formation, and inhibition), language, and memory, and relative strengths on measures of basic attention, visual spatial processing, and social perception.     

Effect of the Healthy MOMs Lifestyle Intervention on Reducing Depressive Symptoms Among Pregnant Latinas

Depression during the prenatal and postpartum periods is associated with poor maternal, perinatal and child outcomes. This study examines the effectiveness of a culturally and linguistically tailored, social support-based, healthy lifestyle intervention led by trained community health workers in reducing depressive symptoms among pregnant and early postpartum Latinas. A sample of 275 pregnant Latinas was randomized to the Healthy MOMs Healthy Lifestyle Intervention (MOMs) or the Healthy Pregnancy Education (control) group. More than one-third of participants were at risk for depression at baseline. MOMs participants were less likely than control group participants to be at risk for depression at follow-up. Between baseline and 6 weeks postpartum, MOMs participants experienced a significant decline in depressive symptoms; control participants experienced a marginally significant decline. For MOMs participants, most of this decline occurred during the pregnancy intervention period, a time when no change occurred for control participants. The change in depressive symptoms during this period was greater among MOMs than control participants (“intervention effect”). From baseline to postpartum, there was a significant intervention effect among non-English-speaking women only. These findings provide evidence that a community-planned, culturally tailored healthy lifestyle intervention led by community health workers can reduce depressive symptoms among pregnant, Spanish-speaking Latinas.     

Neighborhood Context and Perceptions of Stress Over Time: An Ecological Model of Neighborhood Stressors and Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Resources

We examine the association between neighborhood socio-economic disadvantage and perceived stress during middle and late adolescence among African American youth (N = 665; 51 % female; M = 15.9 years at baseline). In addition, we explored the ways through which neighborhood stressors interacted with an individual’s intra- and interpersonal resources (e.g., coping, social support and substance use), to affect their perceived stress trajectories during adolescence. First, we tested a neighborhood stressors model and found that youth who lived in neighborhoods with greater socioeconomic disadvantage had higher baseline stress and a steeper increase in stress over time. When we included individual-level risk and promotive factors in the model, however, the effect of neighborhood disadvantage on perceived stress was no longer significant, and the stress trajectory was explained by adolescent substance use, social support and perceptions of the neighborhood. Our results support theories of stress and coping, and the importance of proximal intra- and interpersonal factors in either amplifying or mitigating perceptions of stress. We discuss implications of the neighborhood context and how our findings may inform future prevention and intervention related to adolescent stress and development.     

Young Children's Trust in Overtly Misleading Advice

The ability of 3‐ and 4‐year‐old children to disregard advice from an overtly misleading informant was investigated across five studies (total n = 212). Previous studies have documented limitations in young children's ability to reject misleading advice. This study was designed to test the hypothesis that these limitations are primarily due to an inability to reject specific directions that are provided by others, rather than an inability to respond in a way that is opposite to what has been indicated by a cue. In Studies 1 through 4, a puppet identified as The Big Bad Wolf offered advice to participants about which of two boxes contained a hidden sticker. Regardless of the form the advice took, 3‐year olds performed poorly by failing to systematically reject it. However, when participants in Study 5 believed they were responding to a mechanical cue rather than the advice of the Wolf, they were better able to reject misleading advice, and individual differences in performance on the primary task were systematically correlated with measures of executive function. Results are interpreted as providing support for the communicative intent hypothesis, which posits that children find it especially difficult to reject deceptive information that they perceive as being intentionally communicated by others.     

The Relationship Between Blood Lead,Bone Lead and Child Intelligence

We report associations between serial measures of blood lead and intelligence in children age 10–12 years, half heavily exposed to lead from the prenatal period onward, and half relatively unexposed. For a subsample, we examine bone lead-IQ associations, comparing them with blood lead associations. Both blood and bone lead levels were associated with intelligence decrements, small relative to the contribution of social factors. For each doubling of Tib-Pb, Full Scale, Performance, and Verbal IQ decreased by an estimated 5.5, 6.2, and 4.1 points, respectively. Bone lead-IQ associations were stronger than those for blood lead, which nonetheless provide robust analogues. Current BPb, easy to obtain, provides a useful means for assessing Pb exposure/IQ associations.