Against all odds – is a more differentiated view of personality development in emerging adulthood needed? The case of young apprentices

Personality development in emerging adults who do not attend college after high school has been largely overlooked so far. In this study, we investigated personality development in emerging German adults (N_T1 = 1,886, M_ageT1 = 18.01 years, 29% female) undergoing vocational education and training (VET). The trainees were assessed at the start of VET, 1.5 years later, and another 1.5 years after that, just before graduation. Longitudinal latent change score analyses were applied. Bivariate analyses investigated life satisfaction and job strain as social and work‐related aspects that are potentially reciprocally related to personality development. Mean‐level personality changes included increases in neuroticism and decreases in agreeableness and conscientiousness in the first interval. In the second interval, neuroticism decreased and conscientiousness increased. Simultaneously, trainees reported a gradual decrease in extraversion and openness across the 3‐year time span. Personality, especially agreeableness and conscientiousness, emerged as a stronger predictor of changes in job strain and life satisfaction than vice versa. For example, more agreeable and more conscientious trainees subsequently showed increases in life satisfaction. Trainees reporting higher job strain subsequently showed decreases in agreeableness. Trajectories of personality development partly support the maturity principle that has been established in many college student samples.     

Parental Strategies for Knowledge of Adolescents’ Friends: Distinct from Monitoring?

Parental monitoring is defined as a set of behaviors used to gain knowledge about an adolescent’s whereabouts, friends and associates, and activities. However, can knowledge of adolescents’ whereabouts/activities, and friends all be attained through the same strategies? Or do they require their own strategies? This study used qualitative interviews with 173 parents of older adolescents from 100 families. Emergent themes described strategies by which parents gain information about their adolescents’ friends and the substance use of those friends. The strategies included direct interaction with the friend, gaining information from the teen, using second-hand sources, and making assumptions. Some of these strategies were consistent with previous research, while others raise new questions and provide interesting new directions to pursue. Primarily, additional consideration needs to be given to assessments of parental monitoring that include strategies for gaining knowledge of adolescents’ friends and their substance use.     

Innate intersubjectivity: newborns' sensitivity to communication disturbance

In most of our social life we communicate and relate to others. Successful interpersonal relating is crucial to physical and mental well-being and growth. This study, using the still-face paradigm, demonstrates that even human neonates (n = 90, 3-96 hr after birth) adjust their behavior according to the social responsiveness of their interaction partner. If the interaction partner becomes unresponsive, newborns will also change their behavior, decrease eye contact, and display signs of distress. Even after the interaction partner resumes responsiveness, the effects of the communication disturbance persist as a spillover. These results indicate that even newborn infants sensitively monitor the behavior of others and react as if they had innate expectations regarding rules of interpersonal interaction.     

Gender‐related differences in neonatal imitation

Socio‐emotional behaviour is in part sex‐related in humans, although the contribution of the biological and socio‐cultural factors is not yet known. This study explores sex‐related differences during the earliest communicative exchange, the neonatal imitation in 43 newborn infants (3–96 hours old) using an index finger extension imitative gesture. Results showed that although the experimenter presented comparable stimuli to both sexes, and the total number of movements was similar in boys and girls, girls showed more fine motor movements, a higher number of specific imitative gestures, responded faster during the imitation and showed a higher baseline heart rate during the experiment. Newborn girls, with their faster and more accurate imitative abilities, may create a more responsive and interactive social environment, which in turn may lead to differences in socio‐emotional and cognitive development between girls and boys. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Use of derivational morphology during reading

This study examines contrasting predictions made by models of the lexicon in which stem morphemes play a central accessing role versus models in which stem morphemes play no particular role. Models which assign an independent role to morphemes predict that derivationally suffixed words have both inhibitive and facilitative effects on the reading process. A reading comprehension task was administered to good and poor high-school-age readers to assess their use of both the lexical-semantic and syntactic information provided by morphemes in derivationally suffixed target words. The subjects appeared to use the stem morpheme of a derivationally suffixed word to establish overall sentence meaning but often did not use the syntactic information contained in the derivational suffix. The failure to use syntactic information in the suffix was significantly greater for lower-ability readers than for those reading at or above grade level. The results offer support for morphologically organized models of the lexicon.     

Saccades in Neal’s “Square o f Three”

A contact-lens optical lever was used to measure saccades during maintained fixation of an “op art” painting that produces striking perceptual effects. Saccade frequency was not affected, but saccade vector magnitude was slightly, but reliably, larger with the painting than with a control stimulus. The perceptual effects, however, do not depend on saccades because saccades could be suppressed and the perceptual effects remained.     

The extraretinal signal for the visual perception of direction

The dependence of the perception of direction on two kinds of extraretinal signals was measured by asking Ss to indicate the position of a fixation target relative to the subjective straight ahead. Outflow was studied by making such localizations while the fixating eye was loaded by means of weights attached to a suction contact lens. Inflow was studied by making such localizations with brief test flashes to a passively rotated eye while the other eye fixated. Shifts in the perceived direction, of the fixation target were in line with predictions from outflow theory and not influenced by conflicting inflow signals.