Categorical and spatial modes of representation in young children's recall

Preschool children aged 4 and 6 were asked to recall a set of line drawings under two conditions: pictures blocked in category groups, and pictures blocked in noncategory groups. For 4-year-olds, the blocking condition made no difference in the structure of their recall; but for the 6-year-olds, the category blocking served as a support for category clustering of their recall lists. No purely spatial clustering appeared at either age. It was concluded that 6-year-olds' use of classes is closely linked to concrete spatial arrangement of objects.     

The assessment of suicidal behavior in adolescents.

All available assessment instruments (N = 29) used to study suicidal behaviors in adolescents and young adults (age 12-20) were collected and reviewed. Instruments were found to vary substantially in purpose, format, informat, and theoretical orientation. The items from these tools (N = 461) were categorized according to behavior type (thoughts, feelings, or actions) and content categories (death/life-related, disease-promoting/preventing, injury-producing/reducing, person-reducing/enhancing, and factual information). The majority of the items were found to assess thoughts and were focused on death-related content. Recommendations include the need for more rigorous validation of instruments, clearer operational definitions, additional normative information, and expansion of the pool of available items to encompass a broader array of self-destructive behaviors.     

Weathering a political storm. A contextual perspective on a psychological research controversy

In the spring of 1999, a storm of controversy arose at the local, state, and national levels surrounding an article on the effects of child sexual abuse published in 1998 in Psychological Bulletin. The article was vehemently denounced by various media outlets, conservative grassroots organizations, members of the general public, state legislatures, and ultimately by the United States Congress. The authors chronicle these unprecedented events and related challenges faced by the American Psychological Association. The authors also describe the Association's efforts to resolve the crisis, while staunchly upholding academic freedom and scientific integrity, and review the lessons learned for the field of psychology.     

Sad and happy emotion discrimination in music by children with cochlear implants

Children using cochlear implants (CIs) develop speech perception but have difficulty perceiving complex acoustic signals. Mode and tempo are the two components used to recognize emotion in music. Based on CI limitations, we hypothesized children using CIs would have impaired perception of mode cues relative to their normal hearing peers and would rely more heavily on tempo cues to distinguish happy from sad music. Study participants were children with 13 right CIs and 3 left CIs (M = 12.7, SD = 2.6 years) and 16 normal hearing peers. Participants judged 96 brief piano excerpts from the classical genre as happy or sad in a forced-choice task. Music was randomly presented with alterations of transposed mode, tempo, or both. When music was presented in original form, children using CIs discriminated between happy and sad music with accuracy well above chance levels (87.5%) but significantly below those with normal hearing (98%). The CI group primarily used tempo cues, whereas normal hearing children relied more on mode cues. Transposing both mode and tempo cues in the same musical excerpt obliterated cues to emotion for both groups. Children using CIs showed significantly slower response times across all conditions. Children using CIs use tempo cues to discriminate happy versus sad music reflecting a very different hearing strategy than their normal hearing peers. Slower reaction times by children using CIs indicate that they found the task more difficult and support the possibility that they require different strategies to process emotion in music than normal.     

Auditory Processing Measures: Correlation with Neuropsychological Measures of Attention,Memory, and Behavior

It has been suggested that measures of auditory processing (AP) are sensitive measures of attention resulting in the high comorbidity of auditory processing disorder (APD) and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Others have found that selected AP measures share significant variance with memory tasks. The current study investigated the relation between AP measures and various neuropsychological measures presumed to measure attention and memory in 36 children with a mean age of 7.78 years (SD = 1.61) referred to an outpatient facility. Results indicate that AP measures significantly correlated with each other as well as with some measures of attention, memory, and behavior ratings. Results suggest that although AP measures include elements of both attention and memory, these measures also appear to assess processes not tapped by other measures of attention and memory. The correlation of AP measures with parent-and teacher-rated withdrawal, parent-rated somatization, conduct, and depression, as well as teacher-rated attention, anxiety, learning problems, social skills, and leadership suggest that auditory processing problems may manifest in myriad behaviors across settings. Implications for practice and future research are presented.     

Evaluation of developmental surveillance by physicians at the two-month preventive care visit

We evaluated the effects of feedback and instruction on resident physician performance during developmental surveillance of infants at 2-month preventive care visits. Baseline data were obtained by videotaping 3 residents while they performed the physical and developmental exam components. Training consisted of individualized feedback and a brief instructional module, after which the residents were again videotaped while they performed preventive care visits. All 3 residents showed improved performance following training.