Adjustment and family functioning of grandmothers rearing their grandchildren

The adjustment and family functioning of grandmothers who were rearing one or more of their grandchildren were examined in two studies. One study used the Dyadic Adjustment Scale and the Family Assessment Device. There were no differences between guardian and non-guardian grandmothers on the seven FAD scales, but guardians were higher on the DAS Dyadic Cohesion and lower on Dyadic Consensus. The second study used a 4-hour individual, structured interview to identify personal adjustment difficulties and coping strategies resulting from having to rear a grandchild. Results indicate that guardian grandparent families frequently may provide therapeutic challenges and that they have the potential to provide unique insights into transgenerational family processes.Study one is based on the first author's master's thesis submitted to the Graduate School of Texas Woman's University in December, 1986. The second study was supported by a grant to the second author from the Office of Research and Grants, Texas Woman's University. The authors express their gratitude to Dr. Jack Sibley for coining the terms puervinism and puervitic.     

Structure and ideology of shelters for battered women

Recent literature concerning battered women's shelters includes untested suggestions that shelters can be categorized by their ideological differences and that their ideologies predict their organizational structures. However, widely accepted principles of organizational theory predict that older shelters would have a different structure than newer shelters. Some of the presumed consequences of organizational age conflict with the structural characteristics presumably demanded by certain shelter ideologies. In the present study both ideology and organizational age were studied as predictors of shelter organization's structure. A nationwide survey of 111 shelters provided the data. Feminist versus other ideologies were associated with a distinctive pattern of priorities for the shelters. However, organizational age was found to be more important than ideology in predicting structural variables.     

Military Psychology: Applicable Research1

Many psychologists and social scientists are unaware of the field of military psychology. Although marginally aware of Division 19: Military Psychology of the American Psychological Association (APA), a number of psychologists have very mistaken ideas about what military psychology includes and the uses thereof (APA Monitor, 1984). The purpose of this special issue is to present some research conducted under the rubric of military psychology. This issue of the Journal of Applied Social Psychology (JASP) may provide some preliminary answers to the frequently asked questions: What is this creature called military psychology? Who does it? What kinds of research are classified as military psychology?What Is Military Psychology?     

Processes operative during delay of gratification

Sixty-four middle-class preschool children chose between waiting for a preferred item and receiving a less desired item immediately. The items were of different classes, i.e., one food and one toy, and subjects waited with one, both, or neither of the rewards available for viewing. The likelihood that a subject would continue waiting for the delayed reward was found to increase as a function of previous waiting time rather than decrease or remain constant as required by two current theories of delay of gratification processes, an aversive affect model implied by Mischel and Ebbesen (1970) and Atkinson and Birch's (1970) dynamics of action. Although display of rewards impaired successful delay, replicating previous results, dynamics of action predictions of differential effects for display of immediately available and delayed outcomes of different classes were not confirmed. Systematic observation of spontaneous subject activities during the delay period offered additional support for the notion that distraction facilitates successful waiting behavior. A decision-attention model is proposed to account for the present results as well as those of previous studies of delay of gratification.We would like to thank the director, Mr. Jack Lewis, and the staff of the Red Bell Nursery of Plymouth, Michigan, for helping us obtain subjects for this study and providing access to their facilities. We are also grateful to Ms. Shirley St. Peter and Ms. Carolyn Jagacinski for their work as experimenters.     

Induction of Relational Schemas: Common Processes in Reasoning and Complex Learning

Five experiments were performed to test whether participants induced a coherent representation of the structure of a task, called a relational schema, from specific instances. Properties of a relational schema include: An explicit symbol for a relation, a binding that preserves the truth of a relation, potential for higher-order relations, omnidirectional access, potential for transfer between isomorphs, and ability to predict unseen items in isomorphic problems. However relational schemas are not necessarily coded in abstract form. Predictions from relational schema theory were contrasted with predictions from configural learning and other nonstructural theories in five experiments in which participants were taught a structure comprised of a set of initial-state,operator → end-state instances. The initial-state,operator pairs were presented and participants had to predict the correct end-state. Induction of a relational schema was achieved efficiently by adult participants as indicated by ability to predict items of a new isomorphic problem. The relational schemas induced showed the omnidirectional access property, there was efficient transfer to isomorphs, and structural coherence had a powerful effect on learning. The “learning to learn” effect traditionally associated with the learning set literature was observed, and the long-standing enigma of learning set acquisition is explained by a model composed of relational schema induction and structure mapping. Performance was better after reversal of operators than after shift to an alternate structure, even though the latter entailed more overlap with previously learned tasks in terms of the number of configural associations that were preserved. An explanation for the reversal shift phenomenon in terms of induction and mapping of a relational schema is proposed. The five experiments provided evidence supporting predictions from relational schema theory, and no evidence was found for configural or nonstructural learning theories.     

Relational processing following stroke

The research examined relational processing following stroke. Stroke patients (14 with frontal, 30 with non-frontal lesions) and 41 matched controls completed four relational processing tasks: sentence comprehension, Latin square matrix completion, modified Dimensional Change Card Sorting, and n-back. Each task included items at two or three levels of relational complexity. Relational processing was impaired in the stroke groups. This was due mainly to items at the intermediate ternary-relational level of complexity. Less complex binary-relational items and more complex quaternary-relational items (the latter are difficult for adults generally) were less sensitive to stroke status. Impairment was greater in frontal than non-frontal stroke patients. Positive inter-correlations among measures supported the domain-general nature of relational processing. Implications for assessment and intervention are discussed.     

Impaired prospective memory but intact episodic memory in intellectually average 7- to 9-year-olds born very preterm and/or very low birth weight

Relatively little is known about episodic memory (EM: memory for personally-experienced events) and prospective memory (PM: memory for intended actions) in children born very preterm (VP) or with very low birth weight (VLBW). This study evaluates EM and PM in mainstream-schooled 7- to 9-year-olds born VP (≤ 32 weeks) and/or VLBW (< 1500 g) and matches full-term children for comparison (n = 35 and n = 37, respectively). Additionally, participants were assessed for verbal and non-verbal ability, executive function (EF), and theory of mind (ToM). The results show that the VP/VLBW children were outperformed by the full-term children on the memory tests overall, with a significant univariate group difference in PM. Moreover, within the VP/VLBW group, the measures of PM, verbal ability and working memory all displayed reliable negative correlations with severity of neonatal illness. PM was found to be independent of EM and cognitive functioning, suggesting that this form of memory might constitute a domain of specific vulnerability for VP/VLBW children.