What is the shape of developmental change?

Developmental trajectories provide the empirical foundation for theories about change processes during development. However, the ability to distinguish among alternative trajectories depends on how frequently observations are sampled. This study used real behavioral data, with real patterns of variability, to examine the effects of sampling at different intervals on characterization of the underlying trajectory. Data were derived from a set of 32 infant motor skills indexed daily during the first 18 months. Larger sampling intervals (2-31 days) were simulated by systematically removing observations from the daily data and interpolating over the gaps. Infrequent sampling caused decreasing sensitivity to fluctuations in the daily data: Variable trajectories erroneously appeared as step functions, and estimates of onset ages were increasingly off target. Sensitivity to variation decreased as an inverse power function of sampling interval, resulting in severe degradation of the trajectory with intervals longer than 7 days. These findings suggest that sampling rates typically used by developmental researchers may be inadequate to accurately depict patterns of variability and the shape of developmental change. Inadequate sampling regimes therefore may seriously compromise theories of development.     

Online interpretation of scalar quantifiers: insight into the semantics-pragmatics interface

Scalar implicature has served as a test case for exploring the relations between semantic and pragmatic processes during language comprehension. Most studies have used reaction time methods and the results have been variable. In these studies, we use the visual-world paradigm to investigate implicature. We recorded participants’ eye movements during commands like “Point to the girl that has some of the socks” in the presence of a display in which one girl had two of four socks and another had three of three soccer balls. These utterances contained an initial period of ambiguity in which the semantics of some was compatible with both characters. This ambiguity could be immediately resolved by a pragmatic implicature which would restrict some to a proper subset. Instead in Experiments 1 and 2, we found that participants were substantially delayed, suggesting a lag between semantic and pragmatic processing. In Experiment 3, we examined interpretations of some when competitors were inconsistent with the semantics (girl with socks vs. girl with no socks). We found quick resolution of the target, suggesting that previous delays were specifically linked to pragmatic analysis.     

DISCREPANCY IN FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS RESULTS ACROSS TWO SETTINGS: IMPLICATIONS FOR INTERVENTION DESIGN

Functional analyses that were conducted in two settings (playground and classroom) indicated that problem behavior was sensitive to adult attention on the playground and tangible items in the classroom. Attention‐ and tangible‐based interventions were designed based on the results from each of the assessment environments and were compared. The attention‐based intervention was more effective on the playground, and the tangible‐based intervention was more effective in the classroom. Findings are discussed in regards to the generality of functional analysis results across environments.     

Starting over: international adoption as a natural experiment in language development

Language development is characterized by predictable shifts in the words children produce and the complexity of their utterances. Because acquisition typically occurs simultaneously with maturation and cognitive development, it is difficult to determine the causes of these shifts. We explored how acquisition proceeds in the absence of possible cognitive or maturational roadblocks, by examining the acquisition of English in internationally adopted preschoolers. Like infants, and unlike other second-language learners, these children acquire language from child-directed speech, without access to bilingual informants. Parental reports and speech samples were collected from 27 preschoolers, 3 to 18 months after they were adopted from China. These children showed the same developmental patterns in language production as monolingual infants (matched for vocabulary size). Early on, their vocabularies were dominated by nouns, their utterances were short, and grammatical morphemes were generally omitted. Children at later stages had more diverse vocabularies and produced longer utterances with more grammatical morphemes.     

The Affective Regulation of Social Interaction

The recent publication of David Heise's Expressive Order (2007) provides an occasion for discussing some of the key ideas in Affect Control Theory. The theory proposes that a few dimensions of affective meaning provide a common basis for interrelating personal identities and social actions. It holds that during interpersonal interactions, social behavior is continually regulated to maintain an affective tone compatible with whatever social roles or identities define the situation. We outline the intellectual history of the proposed dimensions and of the idea that each social action invites an action from the other that has a particular location along these dimensions. We also relate these ideas to the Affect-as-Information hypothesis, an approach that often guides research in psychology on the role of affect in regulating judgment and thought.     

Internet‐based self‐tailored deposit contracts to promote smoking reduction and abstinence

Deposit contracting may reduce costs and increase efficacy in contingency management interventions. We evaluated two Internet‐based deposit contract arrangements for smoking. In Experiment 1, nine participants deposited self‐selected amounts that could be earned back for meeting goals. During treatment, participants were reimbursed for breath samples with less than or equal to 6 parts per million carbon monoxide and met the criterion for 47% of samples compared to 1% during baseline. In Experiment 2, 10 participants’ deposits were matched up to $50. No samples met the criterion during baseline but 41.5% met it during treatment. The average deposit was $82 in Experiment 1 and $49 in Experiment 2. Participants rated the intervention favorably and sample submission rates were high. These experiments suggest that Internet‐based self‐tailored deposits are acceptable, feasible, and can promote brief reduction and abstinence in some smokers. Future research should investigate individual and intervention factors that affect long‐term cessation and uptake of deposit contracts.     

Attentional focus affects how events are segmented and updated in narrative reading

Readers generate situation models representing described events, but the nature of these representations may differ depending on the reading goals. We assessed whether instructions to pay attention to different situational dimensions affect how individuals structure their situation models (Exp. 1) and how they update these models when situations change (Exp. 2). In Experiment 1, participants read and segmented narrative texts into events. Some readers were oriented to pay specific attention to characters or space. Sentences containing character or spatial-location changes were perceived as event boundaries—particularly if the reader was oriented to characters or space, respectively. In Experiment 2, participants read narratives and responded to recognition probes throughout the texts. Readers who were oriented to the spatial dimension were more likely to update their situation models at spatial changes; all readers tracked the character dimension. The results from both experiments indicated that attention to individual situational dimensions influences how readers segment and update their situation models. More broadly, the results provide evidence for a global situation model updating mechanism that serves to set up new models at important narrative changes.     

What motivates deviant behavior in the workplace? An examination of the mechanisms by which procedural injustice affects deviance

This research examines the motivational and social-cognitive processes underlying the procedural injustice and deviance relationship. Based on psychological need and self-determination theories, it was hypothesized that intrinsic motivation would mediate the relationship between procedural injustice and deviance. Based on the general aggression model and social-cognitive theory, it was hypothesized that this positive indirect effect would be moderated by dispositional aggression. Two studies were conducted, including multi-wave and multi-source data, to test these relationships through mediation and moderated mediation procedures. Results supported both hypotheses: intrinsic motivation mediated the procedural injustice and deviance relationship; and this positive indirect effect was moderated by dispositional aggression, such that higher levels of aggression increased the magnitude of the indirect effect. Results were consistent across multiple measures of intrinsic motivation, aggression, and deviance (self- and other-report). Theoretical and practical contributions include support for a process-based theory of deviant behavior in the workplace and organizational interventions aimed at enriching one’s job to develop greater feelings of intrinsic motivation.