Inattention/Overactivity Following Early Severe Institutional Deprivation: Presentation and Associations in Early Adolescence

The current study examined the persistence and phenotypic presentation of inattention/overactivity (I/O) into early adolescence, in a sample of institution reared (IR) children adopted from Romania before the age of 43 months. Total sample comprised 144 IR and 21 non-IR Romanian adoptees, and a comparison group of 52 within-UK adoptees, assessed at ages 6 and 11 years. I/O was rated using Rutter Scales completed by parents and teachers. I/O continued to be strongly associated with institutional deprivation, with continuities between ages 6 and 11 outcomes. There were higher rates of deprivation-related I/O in boys than girls, and I/O was strongly associated with conduct problems, disinhibited attachment and executive function but not IQ more generally, independently of gender. Deprivation-related I/O shares many common features with ADHD, despite its different etiology and putative developmental mechanisms. I/O is a persistent domain of impairment following early institutional deprivation of 6 months or more, suggesting there may be a possible pathway to impairment through some form of neuro-developmental programming during critical periods of early development.     

Do Theory of Mind and Executive Function Deficits Underlie the Adverse Outcomes Associated with Profound Early Deprivation?: Findings from the English and Romanian Adoptees Study

Theory of Mind (ToM) and Executive Function (EF) have been associated with autism and with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and hence might play a role in similar syndromes found following profound early institutional deprivation. In order to examine this possibility the current study included a group of 165 Romanian adoptees, of whom 144 were adopted into the UK from deprived institutional settings before 43months of age, and a group of 52 within-UK adoptees, all adopted before 6months of age. Both groups were assessed at 6 and 11years. The Strange Stories task was used to assess ToM and the Stroop task was used to assess EF, both at age 11. The Romanian adoptees displayed deficits in both ToM and EF compared with the within-UK adoptee group. The degree of deficit was greater for children who had experienced more than 6months of institutional deprivation. Deficits in both domains (ToM and EF) were associated with each of the three apparently deprivation-specific problems, namely quasi-autism, disinhibited attachment and inattention/overactivity. Statistical analyses indicated a mediating role for both ToM and EF with respect to quasi-autism; possibly a partial mediating role for EF with respect to inattention/overactivity; and probably no mediating role for either ToM or EF in the case of disinhibited attachment. In conclusion, there is evidence for a possible mediating role for ToM and EF in the development of some apparently deprivation-specific difficulties in institution-reared Romanian adoptees, but neither accounts for the overall pattern of deprivation-related difficulties.     

The Family Life and Adjustment of Hmong American Sons and Daughters

We examined gender differences in intergenerational family conflict and its associations with psychological and academic adjustment using a United States sample of 121 Hmong American first-year college students. Hmong women and men reported similar levels of family conflict. Family conflict was related to psychological distress, above and beyond neuroticism. Gender moderated the relationship between family conflict and substance usage and academic performance. For Hmong college men, higher family conflict was associated with lower rates of smoking and higher rates of completing the first year of college. For Hmong college women, higher family conflict was associated with greater likelihood of alcohol consumption in their lifetime.     

Relational memory during infancy: evidence from eye tracking

Here we report evidence from a new eye‐tracking measure of relational memory that suggests that 9‐month‐old infants can encode memories in terms of the relations among items, a function putatively subserved by the hippocampus. Infants learned about the association between faces that were superimposed on unique scenic backgrounds. During test trials, infants were shown three faces presented on a familiar scene. All three faces were equally familiar; however, one had been presented with the test background earlier. Visual behavior was recorded continuously using a TOBII eye tracker. Infants looked preferentially at the face that matched the test background very early in the trial; however, the time course of this preferential looking effect varied as a function of delay. These results suggest that by 9 months of age infants can form memories that represent the relations among items and maintain them over short delays.     

Can infants map meaning to newly segmented words? Statistical segmentation and word learning

The present experiments investigated how the process of statistically segmenting words from fluent speech is linked to the process of mapping meanings to words. Seventeen-month-old infants first participated in a statistical word segmentation task, which was immediately followed by an object-label-learning task. Infants presented with labels that were words in the fluent speech used in the segmentation task were able to learn the object labels. However, infants presented with labels consisting of novel syllable sequences (nonwords; Experiment 1) or familiar sequences with low internal probabilities (part-words; Experiment 2) did not learn the labels. Thus, prior segmentation opportunities, but not mere frequency of exposure, facilitated infants' learning of object labels. This work provides the first demonstration that exposure to word forms in a statistical word segmentation task facilitates subsequent word learning.     

Women remember more faces than men do

Women have been found to outperform men on face recognition tasks, specifically in the recognition of female faces. Men do not seem to exhibit a corresponding own-sex bias. To examine the generality and possible reasons for these patterns, 107 men and 112 women viewed faces of both children and adults of either Swedish or Bangladeshi origin, for later recognition. As expected, women were especially good at remembering female faces, but also outperformed men on male faces. Men did not show an own-sex bias. Thus, regardless of age and ethnicity of the faces, women performed at a higher level than men on both female and male faces, possibly reflecting enhanced interest in faces, and in particular, female faces.     

Girls and women: challenges for careers guidance practice

This article reviews the position of women in the UK labour market and the increasing complexity of their employment patterns. It criticises current career theory for girls and women and examines enhancers and inhibitors of women's career development. Finally, some promising developments in theory-building for girls and women are briefly discussed, together with some implications for practice.     

Prenatal Diagnosis for Inherited Deafness—What is the Potential Demand?

Genetic testing for inherited deafness is now available within some genetics centres. This study used a structured questionnaire to assess the potential uptake of prenatal diagnosis (PND) for inherited deafness, and document the opinions of deaf and hearing individuals toward PND and termination of pregnancy (TOP) for hearing status. Participants were self-selected from the whole of the UK, of whom 644 were deaf, 143 were hard of hearing or deafened, and 527 were hearing individuals who had either a deaf parent or child. The results showed that 21% of deaf, 39% of hard of hearing and deafened, and 49% of hearing participants said they would consider PND for deafness. Six percent of deaf, 11% of hard of hearing and deafened, and 16% of hearing participants said they would consider a TOP if the fetus was found to be deaf. Two percent of deaf participants said they would prefer to have deaf children and would consider a TOP if the fetus was found to be hearing.     

Blindness to background: an inbuilt bias for visual objects

Sixty‐eight 2‐ to 12‐year‐olds and 30 adults were shown colorful displays on a touchscreen monitor and trained to point to the location of a named color. Participants located targets near‐perfectly when presented with four abutting colored patches. When presented with three colored patches on a colored background, toddlers failed to locate targets in the background. Eye tracking demonstrated that the effect was partially mediated by a tendency not to fixate the background. However, the effect was abolished when the targets were named as nouns, whilst the change to nouns had little impact on eye movement patterns. Our results imply a powerful, inbuilt tendency to attend to objects, which may slow the development of color concepts and acquisition of color words. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/TKO1BPeAiOI . [Correction added on 27 January 2017, after first online publication: The video abstract link was added.]     

Spectral tilt as a cue to word segmentation in infancy and adulthood

Across a variety of tasks, adults respond differently to syllables with multiple stress cues than to syllables with only one cue to stress. This series of experiments was designed to explore how infants and adults use partial stress as a cue to word boundaries. In the first experiment, 9-month-old infants treated syllables with only one cue to stress (spectral tilt) as a strong cue to word boundaries. The second experiment shows that whereas adults treat syllables with multiple cues to stress as word onsets, they do not consider syllables marked only by spectral tilt to be strong indicators of word boundaries. Thethird experiment shows that 1-year-old infants are more adultlike than 9-month-olds in their use of stress cues. Taken together, these results suggest a rapid development of stress cue knowledge in infancy, perhaps due to infants' experience with word segmentation.