Prevalence of Child and Adolescent Exposure to Community Violence

Emerging as one of the most significant health issues facing American youth today, child and adolescent exposure to community violence has generated much interest across multiple disciplines. Most research to date has focused on documenting the prevalence of community violence and the emotional and behavioral ramifications. This paper provides an overview of the current literature regarding prevalence of youth exposure to community violence, and identifies those areas where further research is warranted. In addition to examining overall rates of community violence exposure, this paper reviews the prevalence of different types of community violence, such as weapon use, physical aggression, and crime-related events. Predictors of community violence exposure, including gender, age, race, socioeconomic status, behavior patterns, and geography, are discussed.     

Developmental change in young children's use of haptic information in a visual task: the role of hand movements

Preschoolers who explore objects haptically often fail to recognize those objects in subsequent visual tests. This suggests that children may represent qualitatively different information in vision and haptics and/or that children’s haptic perception may be poor. In this study, 72 children (2½-5 years of age) and 20 adults explored unfamiliar objects either haptically or visually and then chose a visual match from among three test objects, each matching the exemplar on one perceptual dimension. All age groups chose shape-based matches after visual exploration. Both 5-year-olds and adults also chose shape-based matches after haptic exploration, but younger children did not match consistently in this condition. Certain hand movements performed by children during haptic exploration reliably predicted shape-based matches but occurred at very low frequencies. Thus, younger children’s difficulties with haptic-to-visual information transfer appeared to stem from their failure to use their hands to obtain reliable haptic information about objects.     

What's parenting got to do with it: emotional autonomy and brain and behavioral responses to emotional conflict in children and adolescents

Healthy parenting may be protective against the development of emotional psychopathology, particularly for children reared in stressful environments. Little is known, however, about the brain and behavioral mechanisms underlying this association, particularly during childhood and adolescence, when emotional disorders frequently emerge. Here, we demonstrate that psychological control, a parenting strategy known to limit socioemotional development in children, is associated with altered brain and behavioral responses to emotional conflict in 27 at‐risk (urban, lower income) youth, ages 9–16. In particular, youth reporting higher parental psychological control demonstrated lower activity in the left anterior insula, a brain area involved in emotion conflict processing, and submitted faster but less accurate behavioral responses—possibly reflecting an avoidant pattern. Effects were not replicated for parental care, and did not generalize to an analogous nonemotional conflict task. We also find evidence that behavioral responses to emotional conflict bridge the previously reported link between parental overcontrol and anxiety in children. Effects of psychological control may reflect a parenting style that limits opportunities to practice self‐regulation when faced with emotionally charged situations. Results support the notion that parenting strategies that facilitate appropriate amounts of socioemotional competence and autonomy in children may be protective against social and emotional difficulties.     

Acknowledging Discrimination as a Key to the Gender Pay Gap

I comment again on issues raised in my initial paper in this issue (Lips 2012, this issue) and respond to commentaries by Huffman (2012, this issue), Olson (2012), Stockdale and Nadler (2012) and Tharenou (2012). Even in the light of a large and growing body of evidence for the gender pay gap, a lack of awareness of the gap still exists. This lack of awareness may have roots in system-justification beliefs. Such beliefs can be reinforced by a human capital approach, which may appear to rationalize the gender pay gap by attributing it mainly to the choices individuals make, while downplaying the role of discrimination. Although, as commentators on my original article have pointed out, some researchers who use this model may be aware of its limitations, and some may have moved beyond it because of its limitations, such limitations may not be so obvious to consumers of the research. Thus, a continuing, careful critique of the human capital model, and attention to the impact of cultural gender stereotypes on the variables it encompasses, is warranted. However, as several commentators have also noted, there are other useful ways of analyzing the gender pay gap, such as focusing on institutional variables associated with it or examining it from the perspective of cumulative disadvantage. These too should also be vigorously pursued in the service of understanding and eliminating the gap.