A comparative investigation of the speech-associated coping responses reported by adults who do and do not stutter

The Behavior Checklist, a self-report test procedure, was administered to 42 adults who stutter and 76 who do not in order to investigate the number, frequency of usage, type and nature of the responses that they reportedly employ to cope with the anticipation and/or presence of speech disruption. As a group, the participants who stutter reported a significantly greater number of speech-associated coping responses and a greater use of them than their nonstuttering peers did. Moreover, factor analysis made apparent fundamental between-group differences in the type and nature of certain forms of the coping responses reported by those who stutter and those who do not. This suggests that the quantitative and qualitative differences in the coping responses of those who do and do not stutter are potentially useful with respect to differential diagnostic and therapeutic decision making. EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES: (1) The reader will be able to describe differences in the number, frequency and types of coping behaviors used by PWS and PWNS. (2) The reader will be able to list similarities and differences in the type and nature of coping behaviors used by PWS and PWNS. (3) The reader will be able to discuss the features and use of the Behavior Checklist, a self-report procedure for assessing the responses used by adults to cope with the anticipation and occurrence of speech disruption.     

It's about timing and change: pubertal transition effects on symptoms of major depression among African American youths

Effects of early physical maturation and accelerated pubertal changes on symptoms of major depression were examined in 639 African American children. Three rival hypotheses, early timing, off-time, and stressful change, were tested using 2 waves of data (mean ages = 11 and 13 years). The pubertal effect operates differently according to children's gender and age. For girls, early maturation was consistently associated with elevated levels of depressive symptoms. For boys, early maturers manifested elevated levels of depression only at age 11, but these symptoms subsided by age 13. Boys who experienced accelerated pubertal growth over time displayed elevated symptom levels. Results support the early timing hypothesis for girls and the stressful change hypothesis for boys. Time at assessment is critical when examining boys' pubertal transition.     

African American Single Mothers and Children in Context: A Review of Studies on Risk and Resilience

This paper presents a comprehensive review of research linking single-parent family structure to parenting processes, maternal well-being, and child developmental outcomes among African Americans. The approaches used to study these families, related methodological and conceptual concerns, and the factors linked to maternal well-being, effective parenting processes, family functioning, and child outcomes are addressed. Much work remains to be done on conceptualizing and assessing parenting processes among African Americans in general and single African American mothers in particular. Researchers must examine more carefully the circumstances that foster or impede successful parenting among these mothers. Studies also are needed to disentangle the interactions between economic stress and parenting behavior and to determine the extent to which the findings can be applied to middle-income single African American parents.     

Navigating two-dimensional mazes: chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and capuchins (Cebus apella sp.) profit from experience differently

We examined whether navigation is impacted by experience in two species of nonhuman primates. Five chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and seven capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) navigated a cursor, using a joystick, through two-dimensional mazes presented on a computer monitor. Subjects completed 192 mazes, each one time. Each maze contained one to five choices, and in up to three of these choices, the correct path required moving the cursor away from the Euclidean direction toward the goal. Some subjects completed these mazes in a random order (Random group); others in a fixed order by ascending number of choices and ascending number of turns away from goal (Ordered group). Chimpanzees in both groups performed equivalently, demonstrated fewer errors and a higher rate of self-correcting errors with increasing experience at solving the mazes, and made significantly fewer errors than capuchin monkeys. Capuchins were more sensitive to the mode of presentation than chimpanzees; monkeys in the Ordered group made fewer errors than monkeys in the Random group. However, capuchins’ performance across testing changed little, and they remained particularly susceptible to making errors when the correct path required moving away from the goal. Thus, these two species responded differently to the same spatial challenges and same learning contexts. The findings indicate that chimpanzees have a strong advantage in this task compared to capuchins, no matter how the task is presented. We suggest that differences between the species in the dynamic organization of attention and motor processes contribute to their differences in performance on this task, and predict similar differences in other tasks requiring, as this one does, sustained attention to a dynamic visual display and self-produced movements variably towards and away from a goal.     

There’s more to the working memory capacity—fluid intelligence relationship than just secondary memory

The present study examined the claim that secondary memory processes account for the correlation between working memory capacity and fluid intelligence via a latent variable analysis. In the present study, participants performed multiple measures of secondary memory, working memory capacity, and fluid intelligence. Structural equation modeling suggested that both secondary memory and working memory capacity account for unique variance in fluid intelligence. These results are inconsistent with recent claims that working memory capacity does not account for variance in fluid intelligence over and above what is accounted for by secondary memory. Rather, the results are consistent with models of working memory capacity that suggest that both maintenance and retrieval processes are needed to account for the substantial relation between working memory capacity and fluid intelligence.     

Genetic moderation of contextual effects on negative arousal and parenting in African-American parents

A three-stage context amplification model was tested with a sample of 345 African-American parent-child dyads. The model combined the conceptual structure of stress generation with recent findings regarding genetic susceptibility. Because the 7R + allele of the dopamine transporter (DRD4) has the potential to enhance contextual priming and arousal, this allele was examined as a potential moderator of each stage of the amplification process. Particular attention was given to the hypothesized influence of parental negative arousal on valence of parent-child interactions. The literature on genetic susceptibility led to the hypothesis that DRD4 would moderate each stage of the model in a "for better or for worse" manner. The model was partially supported. DRD4 moderated effects at all three stages of the model and, as hypothesized, DRD4 moderated contextual effects on negative arousal in a "for better or for worse" manner. Effects on parent-child interaction, however, were moderated in a "for worse" manner only. These results indicate that parenting interactions may amplify the effects of positive and negative contexts in a stress-generating manner, and that a susceptibility framework captures the way in which DRD4 moderates the impact of context on negative arousal.     

The role of working memory capacity in autobiographical retrieval: individual differences in strategic search

Remembering previous experiences from one's personal past is a principal component of psychological well-being, personality, sense of self, decision making, and planning for the future. In the current study the ability to search for autobiographical information in memory was examined by having college students recall their Facebook friends. Individual differences in working memory capacity manifested itself in the search of autobiographical memory by way of the total number of friends remembered, the number of clusters of friends, size of clusters, and the speed with which participants could output their friends' names. Although working memory capacity was related to the ability to search autobiographical memory, participants did not differ in the manner in which they approached the search and used contextual cues to help query their memories. These results corroborate recent theorising, which suggests that working memory is a necessary component of self-generating contextual cues to strategically search memory for autobiographical information.     

Evidence for noisy contextual search: examining the dynamics of list-before-last recall

The dynamics of free recall in the list-before-last task were examined in the current study. List-length was manipulated and probability of recall was influenced by target list-length but not by intervening list-length. Participants also performed free recall on control lists matched on target list-length. Critically, list-before-last recall was worse than recall on the control list, suggesting that the mere presence of an intervening list reduced recall. An examination of intrusion errors suggested that participants recalled both prior and intervening list intrusions and retrieval was influenced by the length of the intervening list-length. Finally, an examination of recall latency suggested that target list-length, but not intervening list-length, influenced recall dynamics. However, recall latency in list-before-last recall was longer than in the control lists, suggesting that the mere presence of intervening list influenced recall latency. Taken together, the results are consistent with the notion that in list-before-last recall participants rely on noisy contextual cues that activate both target and non-target items, leading to an increase in their search sets.