Conceptualizing and Measuring Safe,Stable, Nurturing Relationships and Environments in Educational Settings

Most children and adolescents older than 5 years spend at least 6 h of their day in school settings. Like parents, education professionals can promote health and protect youth from harm by providing safe, stable, nurturing relationships and environments. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has developed a framework which posits that safe, stable, nurturing relationships and environments are Essentials for Childhood and are fundamental to promoting health and well-being; protecting youth from maltreatment and other violence and victimization; and ensuring optimal, healthy development. In this paper, the authors propose an approach to applying safe, stable, nurturing relationships and environments to the school ecology; review select survey measures to examine these constructs within educational settings; and suggest available indicators to measure safety, stability, and nurturance within the school context.     

Erratum to: Reducing the Floor Effect in the SF-6D: A Feasibility Study

Applied Research in Quality of Life -     

Masked suffix priming and morpheme positional constraints

Although masked stem priming (e.g., dealer–DEAL) is one of the most established effects in visual word identification, it is less clear whether primes and targets sharing a suffix (e.g., kindness–WILDNESS) also yield facilitation. In a new take on this issue, we show that prime nonwords facilitate lexical decisions to target words ending with the same suffix (sheeter–TEACHER) compared to a condition where the critical suffix was substituted by another one (sheetal–TEACHER) or by an unrelated nonmorphological ending (sheetub– TEACHER). We also show that this effect is genuinely morphological, as no priming emerged in noncomplex items with the same orthographic characteristics (sportel–BROTHEL vs. sportic–BROTHEL vs. sportur–BROTHEL). In a further experiment, we took advantage of these results to assess whether suffixes are recognized in a position-specific fashion. Masked suffix priming did not emerge when the relative order of stems and suffixes was reversed in the prime nonwords—ersheet did not yield any time saving in the identification of teacher as compared to either alsheet or obsheet. We take these results to show that –er was not identified as a morpheme in ersheet, thus indicating that suffix identification is position specific. This conclusion is in line with data on interference effects in nonword rejection and strongly constrains theoretical proposals on how complex words are identified. In particular, because these findings were reported in a masked priming paradigm, they suggest that positional constraints operate early, most likely at a prelexical level of morpho-orthographic analysis.     

Motor processing modulates word comprehension

We evaluated whether movement modulates the semantic processing of words. To this end, we used homograph words with two meanings, one associated with hand movements (e.g., ‘abanico’, ‘fan’ in Spanish) or foot movements (‘bota’, ‘boot’ in Spanish), and the other not associated with movement (‘abanico’, ‘range’ in Spanish; ‘bota’, ‘wineskin’ in Spanish). After the homograph, three words were presented, and participants were asked to choose the word related to one of the two homograph meanings. The words could be either related to the motor meaning of the homograph (‘fan-heat’), to the non-motor meaning of the homograph (‘range-possibility’) or unrelated (‘fan-phone’). The task was performed without movement (simple condition) or by performing hand (Experiment 1) and foot (Experiment 2) movements. Compared with the simple condition, the performance of movement oriented the preference towards the motor meaning of the homograph. This pattern of results confirms that movement modulates word comprehension.     

Development of visuo-haptic transfer for object recognition in typical preschool and school-aged children

Object recognition is a long and complex adaptive process and its full maturation requires combination of many different sensory experiences as well as cognitive abilities to manipulate previous experiences in order to develop new percepts and subsequently to learn from the environment. It is well recognized that the transfer of visual and haptic information facilitates object recognition in adults, but less is known about development of this ability. In this study, we explored the developmental course of object recognition capacity in children using unimodal visual information, unimodal haptic information, and visuo-haptic information transfer in children from 4 years to 10 years and 11 months of age. Participants were tested through a clinical protocol, involving visual exploration of black-and-white photographs of common objects, haptic exploration of real objects, and visuo-haptic transfer of these two types of information. Results show an age-dependent development of object recognition abilities for visual, haptic, and visuo-haptic modalities. A significant effect of time on development of unimodal and crossmodal recognition skills was found. Moreover, our data suggest that multisensory processes for common object recognition are active at 4 years of age. They facilitate recognition of common objects, and, although not fully mature, are significant in adaptive behavior from the first years of age. The study of typical development of visuo-haptic processes in childhood is a starting point for future studies regarding object recognition in impaired populations.     

The first direct replication on using verbal credibility assessment for the detection of deceptive intentions

Verbal deception detection has gained momentum as a technique to tell truth‐tellers from liars. At the same time, researchers' degrees of freedom make it hard to assess the robustness of effects. Replication research can help evaluate how reproducible an effect is. We present the first replication in verbal deception research whereby ferry passengers were instructed to tell the truth or lie about their travel plans. The original study found truth‐tellers to include more specific time references in their answers. The replication study that closely mimicked the setting, procedure, materials, coding, and analyses found no lie–truth difference for specific time references. Although the power of our replication study was suboptimal (0.77), Bayesian statistics showed evidence in favor of the null hypothesis. Given the great applied consequences of verbal credibility tests, we hope this first replication attempt ignites much needed preregistered, high‐powered, multilab replication efforts.     

Divergent thinking and the core executive functions: a state-of-the-art review

Cognitive Processing - The study of the relationships between divergent thinking and the core executive functions is long standing. However, the literature on this topic is not conclusive. The...     

AN EVALUATION OF THE NUMBER OF PRESENTATIONS OF TARGET SOUNDS DURING STIMULUS—STIMULUS PAIRING TRIALS

We evaluated the differential effects of 2 variations of a stimulus–stimulus pairing procedure on the vocalizations of 2 children with autism. For both participants, presenting 1 sound per pairing trial resulted in a higher rate of vocalizations than 3 sounds per pairing trial.