Poetry as a Mnemonic Prompt in Children's Stories

This research investigates the effects of prosody on children's recall for stories using two successive studies. Study 1 is an ethnographic exploration of a group of fifth graders creating summaries of a children's story with overt prosodic elements. Study 2 is a quasi-experiment in which the story summaries created by students who heard one of two versions (more or less prosodic) of the story from Study 1 were compared. Overall, we find that the amount of prosody in a story has a significant effect on children's story recall and the quality of the stories they produce.     

Are bilingual children better at ignoring perceptually misleading information? A novel test

Does speaking more than one language help a child perform better on certain types of cognitive tasks? One possibility is that bilingualism confers either specific or general cognitive advantages on tasks that require selective attention to one dimension over another (e.g. Bialystok, 2001 ; Hilchey & Klein, 2011 ). Other studies have looked for such an advantage but found none (e.g. Morton & Harper, 2007 ; Paap & Greenberg, 2013 ). The present study compared monolingual and bilingual children's performance on a numerical discrimination task, which required children to ignore area and attend to number. Ninety‐two children, ages 3 to 6 years, were asked which of two arrays of dots had ‘more dots’. Half of the trials were congruent, where the numerically greater array was also larger in total area, and half were incongruent, where the numerically greater array was smaller in total area. All children performed better on congruent than on incongruent trials. Older children were more successful than younger children at ignoring area in favor of number. Bilingual children did not perform differently from monolingual children either in number discrimination itself (i.e. identifying which array had more dots) or at selectively attending to number. The present study thus finds no evidence of a bilingual advantage on this task for children of this age.     

Use of Genetic Tests among Neurologists and Psychiatrists: Knowledge,Attitudes, Behaviors,and Needs for Training

This study explores neurologists’ and psychiatrists’ knowledge, attitudes, and practices concerning genetic tests. Psychiatrists (n?=?5,316) and neurologists (n?=?2,167) on the American Medical Association master list who had agreed to receive surveys were sent an email link to a survey about their attitudes and practices regarding genetic testing; 372 psychiatrists and 163 neurologists responded. A higher proportion of neurologists (74 %) than psychiatrists (14 %) who responded to the survey had ordered genetic testing in the past 6 months. Overall, most respondents thought that genetic tests should be performed more frequently, but almost half believed genetic tests could harm patients psychologically and considered legal protections inadequate. Almost half of neurologists (49 %) and over 75 % of psychiatrists did not have a genetics professional to whom to refer patients; those who had ordered genetic tests were more likely than those who did not do so to have access to a genetic counselor. Of respondents, 10 % had received patient requests not to document genetic information and 15 % had received inquiries about direct-to-consumer genetic testing. Neurologists reported themselves to be relatively more experienced and knowledgeable about genetics than psychiatrists. These data, the first to examine several important issues concerning knowledge, attitudes and behaviors of neurologists and psychiatrists regarding genetic tests, have important implications for future practice, research, and education.     

Religio‐Spiritual Participation in Two American Indian Populations

Following a previous investigation of religio‐spiritual beliefs in American Indians, this article examined prevalence and correlates of religio‐spiritual participation in two tribes in the Southwest and Northern Plains (N = 3,084). Analysis suggested a “religious profile” characterized by strong participation across three traditions: aboriginal, Christian, and Native American Church. However, sociodemographic variables that have reliably predicted participation in the general American population, notably gender and age, frequently failed to achieve significance in multivariate analyses for each tradition. Religio‐spiritual participation was strongly and significantly related to belief salience for all traditions. Findings suggest that correlates of religious participation may be unique among American Indians, consistent with their distinctive religious profile. Results promise to inform researchers’ efforts to understand and theorize about religio‐spiritual behavior. They also provide tribal communities with practical information that might assist them in harnessing social networks to confront collective challenges through community‐based participatory research collaborations.     

Well-Being and Experience

The Journal of Ethics - Robert Nozick argued that we would not plug into his machine that could give us any experiences we chose. More recently Richard Kraut has argued that it would be...     

Weaving with the world: Winnicott's re-imagining of reality

For Winnicott, at the root of psychic life is primary creativity from which meaningfulness emerges spontaneously. One non-psychoanalytic source of Winnicott's view can be found in the work of the English romantic poets Wordsworth and Coleridge. Winnicott discovered in these poets kindred spirits who deepened his appreciation of the delicate area between what is perceived and what conceived. The author suggests one way to read Winnicott's theory of primary creativity is as a re-imagining of what it means to have contact with reality. For Winnicott, the emphasis is less on conflict between pleasure and reality and more on contrast between two different kinds of relationship with reality as it becomes increasingly external.