Early life events as discriminators of socialized and undersocialized delinquents

The relationship between early life events and the socialized and undersocialized dimensions of conduct disorder was investigated. Subjects were 40 incarcerated male delinquents and their mothers. The mothers were administered the Children's Life Events Questionnaire and the Developmental Questionnaire. Youths were administered the Adolescent Parent Relations Scale. The results indicated that the undersocialized delinquents had a greater number of stressful life events during their first 4 years of life than did the socialized delinquents. Discriminant function analysis indicated that stressful life events during the 2nd and 4th years were the most important predictors of membership in the undersocialized group. The discriminant function generated was able to classify 82.5% of the sample correctly. The remaining variables did not significantly discriminate the groups.     

Syntactic competence and reading ability in children

The effect of syntactic context on auditory word identification and on the ability to detect and correct syntactic errors in speech was examined in severely reading disabled children and in good and poor readers selected from the normal distribution of fourth graders. The poor readers were handicapped when correct reading required analysis of the sentence context. However, their phonological decoding ability was intact. Identification of words was less affected by syntactic context in the severely disabled readers than in either the good or poor readers. Moreover, the disabled readers were inferior to good readers in judging the syntactical integrity of spoken sentences and in their ability to correct the syntactically aberrant sentences. Poor readers were similar to good readers in the identification and judgment tasks, but inferior in the correction task. The results suggest that the severely disabled readers were inferior to both good and poor readers in syntactic awareness, and in ability to use syntactic rules, while poor readers were equal to good readers in syntactic awareness but were relatively impaired in using syntactic knowledge productively.     

Transition to motherhood and the self: measurement, stability, and change

Different ways of conceptualizing and measuring change in attitudes during transition to motherhood are examined. A series of analyses was performed on data from a cross-sectional sample (N = 667) and a smaller longitudinal sample (n = 48) to demonstrate sound psychometric properties for 2 new scales and to show construct comparability across different phases of childbearing. For Childbearing Attitudes Questionnaire, results demonstrated equality of covariance for 16 scales and comparability of structure and meaning of 4 higher order factors--identification with motherhood, social orientation, self-confidence, and negative aspects of giving birth. For Mothering Self-Definition Questionnaire, results demonstrated equality of covariance of 5 scales and comparability of structure and meaning of a single higher order factor, interpreted as reflecting positive feelings about one's mothering characteristics. Analyses of correlations and mean differences identified areas of change and stability.     

Information-seeking and maternal self-definition during the transition to motherhood

The self-definitional processes accompanying the transition to motherhood were examined in this study. A cross-sectional sample of more than 600 women who were planning to get pregnant within 2 years, pregnant, or in the postpartum stage completed extensive questionnaires pertaining to their experiences of pregnancy and motherhood. On the basis of the assumption of the "self-socialization" perspective that individuals actively construct their identities in response to life transitions, our analyses focused on the role of information-seeking in the developing self-definitions of women becoming mothers. As predicted, (a) women actively sought information in anticipation of a first birth, (b) they used this information to construct identities incorporating motherhood, and (c) after the birth the determinants of their self-definitions shifted from indirect sources of information to direct experiences with child care. Hence, consistent with the self-socialization perspective, information-seeking did play an important role in the women's developing self-conceptions during this life transition. Mechanisms by which information gathered may alter self-conception are discussed.     

Disinhibition in pitch memory

Recognition of the pitch of a tone is disrupted by the interpolation of other tones during the retention interval. The disruptive effect of an interpolated tone varies systematically as a function of its pitch relationship to the tone to be remembered, and is maximal at a 2/3-tone separation. When such a tone is interpolated, the interpolation in addition of a further tone that is 2/3 tone removed from this disruptive tone (and 4/3 tone removed from the tone to be remembered) causes recognition of the first tone substantially to return. When recognition performance is plotted as a function of the pitch relationship between these two interpolated tones, the results accord well with a model assuming mutual inhibitory interactions between pitch memory elements.