Reasons to attend college among ethnically diverse college students

A survey of 713 ethnically diverse university freshmen (463 Latino, 167 Asian American, 54 African American, 29 European American) assessed reasons for attending college, ethnic identity, family interdependence, and college adjustment. Results revealed three reasons for attending college not reported in previous research: to help one's family, to prove one's self-worth, and because of encouragement. Attending college to help the family was stronger among students from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds. Ethnic identity and family interdependence contributed positively to some reasons for attending college, but did not mediate ethnic differences; with cultural factors and socioeconomic status included as predictors, ethnic minority students still gave greater importance to family oriented motives than did European Americans. Career/personal and humanitarian motives contributed positively to college adjustment.     

Group process in Jungian analytic training and institute life

Group process experience for analytic candidates is a neglected dimension of training, and receives little attention in the analytic literature. Jung observed group dynamics, but he never studied them closely, attending instead to the psychology of the individual. Unconscious currents in small groups have been studied by others, most notably by Wilfred Bion, and there are similarities between his theories of the group unconscious and Jung's theories of complexes. Experiential and didactic seminars in group process were added to the analytic curriculum at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco in the early 1990s, leading to changes in the group dynamic of trainees and analysts alike. A discussion of the theories of Bion and Jung are followed by a report on our experiences of facilitating group process for analytic candidates. We give quotes from candidates and analyst members to illustrate the group process and its effects. The need for further study to develop a uniquely Jungian perspective on the unconscious structure and dynamics of the group is suggested.     

Factors Moderating Children's Adjustment to Parental Separation: Findings From a Community Study in England

Research findings show that there is marked variability in children's response to parental separation, but few studies identify the sources of this variation. This prospective longitudinal study examines the factors modifying children's adjustment to parental separation in a community sample of 5,635 families in England. Children's behavioral/emotional problems were assessed when children were aged 47 and 81 months; marital quality, maternal depression, socioeconomic circumstances, and demographic variables were assessed prior to the separation from maternal report. Results indicated that 346 mothers separated from their partners in the 3-year period. Preseparation differences were found for measures of family process and parent risk factors, with effect sizes ranging from small to trivial. Parental separation was associated with a significant but modest increase in behavioral/emotional problems, independent of marital quality, maternal depression, socioeconomic circumstances, and demographic variables. Moderation analyses showed that children of cohabiting parents had a greater increase in adjustment problems following parental separation than children of married parents. Further research elucidating the factors that moderate children's adjustment to parental separation is needed to improve our understanding of who may most likely benefit from preventive interventions.     

Stability in cognition across early childhood. A developmental cascade

Children confront the formidable task of assimilating information in the environment and accommodating their cognitive structures to that information. Developmental science is concerned equally with two distinctive features of these processes: children's group mean level of performance through time and the standing of individual children through time. Prevailing opinion since the inception of the mental-measurement movement has been that individual development is unstable-that individual children change unpredictably in their abilities. We report results of a large-scale controlled, multivariate, prospective, microgenetic, 4-year longitudinal study that reveals a statistically significant cascade of species-typical cognitive abilities from infancy to childhood. Infancy is a recognizable starting point of life; we find that to a small but significant degree, infancy also represents a setting point in the life of the individual.     

Complexity factors in visuo‐spatial working memory

Three experiments are presented that use a technique of selective interference—irrelevant pictures—to develop our understanding of visuo‐spatial working memory. Visual noise fields are used as the irrelevant pictures. Using two related measures of simple visual complexity, the experiments demonstrate that the greater the complexity the greater the degree of interference, even within a paradigm where subjects are instructed to look at but otherwise ignore the irrelevant pictures. Both the number of dots and the density of the dots comprising the visual noise fields affect the degree of interference in a concurrent memory task. In addition, increasing the size of the field increases the amount of interference. It is argued that the results give insight into the properties of visual working memory and contribute to its theoretical development. For example, it is argued that the store is directly accessible by externally presented interference and that particular aspects of the noise displays cause interference with visual memory.     

Very Long-term Recall in Infants: Infantile Amnesia Reconsidered

Abstract

Subjects who had participated in a study on non-verbal recall before their first birthday returned to the laboratory one year later and were tested for recall of their previous visit. During their previous visit they had shown recall of both familiar and novel actions on a set of novel objects. However, after a year's delay, evidence for recall was found for the familiar actions only. One action in particular was responsible for this finding: feeding a teddy bear with a schematic bottle. The majority of the returning subjects who had been shown this action repeated it after a year, whereas none of the other returning subjects and few of the subjects in the control groups performed this action. The results indicate that young infants have the ability to recall an event both at 11 months of age and after a delay as long as one year. The finding that infants can recall during a period that later becomes inaccessible to memory is important to our understanding of infantile amnesia.