Long Lasting Marriages in Chile

Reports the Chilean segment of a multicultural, multicountry (Canada, Germany, Israel, Netherlands, South Africa, Sweden, USA) study on long-term marriages. This pilot study is seen as a starting point in research focusing on the childhood background and family history of long-term marital partners in Chile. No statistically significant association between marital satisfaction and economic or educational level was found. A positive correlation was found between marital satisfaction and happiness during childhood. Love, trust, and loyalty appear to be the main ingredients of satisfaction for both satisfied and unsatisfied couples. The findings across countries as to the essential ingredients reported here have been remarkably similar.     

Attitudes Toward Homosexuals Among Students at a Canadian University

We examined attitudes toward homosexuals amonga broad selection of undergraduates (101 men, 98 women)attending a Canadian university, where a vast majorityof the students are from working- or middle-class families of European descent. Attitudes towardgay men were more negative than attitudes towardlesbians. Compared to Science or Business students,students in the faculties of Arts or Social Science had more positive attitudes toward gay men, andwomen were more positive than men. Attitudes toward gaymen also improved with time spent at college, but onlyfor male students. Although attitudes toward lesbians improved with time at college, they were notassociated with students' gender or faculty ofenrollment. Thus, a college education may promote areduction in anti-homosexual prejudice among youngpeople, particularly among young men.     

REPLICATION OF THE ACHIEVEMENT PLACE MODEL IN CALIFORNIA1

Attempting to replicate procedures from Achievement Place, token reinforcement procedures were used to modify savings, conversational interruptions, and table-setting of delinquent boys residing in a home-style, community based, treatment setting. The tokens (points) were redeemable for various privileges and could be earned for specified appropriate behaviors and lost for specified inappropriate behaviors. Contingent point fines reduced the frequency of interruptions. Point rewards improved table-setting, but even large point rewards did not substantially increase savings. Baseline data indicated that lateness to dinner was not a problem, as it was in Achievement Place. Withdrawal of contingent points and back-up rewards did not disrupt the clean-up behavior of two boys.     

Do special education recommendations differ for Asian American and White American students?

Social Psychology of Education - Asian American students are underrepresented in special education, a state of affairs that threatens their access to academic resources. We propose that student...     

Life satisfaction in divorced or separated people: a comparison between Spain and Chile / La satisfacción vital en personas divorciadas o separadas: una comparación entre España y Chile

This paper analyses life satisfaction after divorce, comparing Chilean and Spanish divorced or separated people. There were 468 divorced people included in the study, 240 Spanish and 228 Chilean. 71.5% of the Chilean and 100% of the Spanish people had children. An analysis of the variance identified that life satisfaction is higher in Chilean people than in Spanish people, although the size of the effect is moderate. Regression analysis of the data sets shows that the time since divorce and provenance explain life satisfaction for those divorced people who participated in this study. Separate analyses by country show that while for divorced Spanish people time since their divorce was the only predictor of life satisfaction, age and time since separation were the predictors of life satisfaction for Chilean divorced people.     

Neuropsychological,Cognitive, and Theoretical Considerations for Evaluation of Bilingual Individuals

As the number of bilinguals in the USA grows rapidly, it is increasingly important for neuropsychologists to be equipped and trained to address the unique challenges inherent in conducting ethical and competent neuropsychological evaluations with this population. Research on bilingualism has focused on two key cognitive mechanisms that introduce differences between bilinguals and monolinguals: (a) reduced frequency of language-specific use (weaker links), and (b) competition for selection within the language system in bilinguals (interference). Both mechanisms are needed to explain how bilingualism affects neuropsychological test performance, including the robust bilingual disadvantages found on verbal tasks, and more subtle bilingual advantages on some measures of cognitive control. These empirical results and theoretical claims can be used to derive a theoretically informed method for assessing cognitive status in bilinguals. We present specific considerations for measuring degree of bilingualism for both clients and examiners to aid in determinations of approaches to testing bilinguals, with practical guidelines for incorporating models of bilingualism and recent experimental data into neuropsychological evaluations. This integrated approach promises to provide improved clinical services for bilingual clients, and will also contribute to a program of research that will ultimately reveal the mechanisms underlying language processing and executive functioning in bilinguals and monolinguals alike.     

Access to institutional resources as a measure of social exclusion: relations with family process and cognitive development in the context of immigration

Few studies have examined how experiences associated with being an undocumented immigrant parent affects children's development. In this article, the authors apply social exclusion theory to examine how access to institutional resources that require identification may matter for parents and children in immigrant families. As hypothesized, groups with higher proportions of undocumented parents in New York City (e.g., Mexicans compared to Dominicans) reported lower levels of access to checking accounts, savings accounts, credit, and drivers' licenses. Lack of access to such resources, in turn, was associated with higher economic hardship and psychological distress among parents, and lower levels of cognitive ability in their 24-month-old children.     

Object permanence and method of disappearance: looking measures further contradict reaching measures

Piaget proposed that understanding permanency, understanding occlusion events, and forming mental representations were synonymous; however, accumulating evidence indicates that those concepts are not unified in development. Infants reach for endarkened objects at younger ages than for occluded objects, and infants’ looking patterns suggest that they expect occluded objects to reappear at younger ages than they reach for them. We reaffirm the latter finding in 5‐ to 6‐month‐olds and find similar responses to faded objects, but we fail to find that pattern in response to endarkened objects. This suggests that looking behavior and reaching behavior are both sensitive to method of disappearance, but with opposite effects. Current cognition‐oriented (i.e. representation‐oriented) explanations of looking behavior cannot easily accommodate these results; neither can perceptual‐preference explanations, nor the traditional ecological reinterpretations of object permanence. A revised ecological hypothesis, invoking affordance learning, suggests how these differences could arise developmentally.     

Values most extolled in Nobel Peace Prize speeches

The authors randomly selected 50 Nobel Peace Prize speeches and content analyzed them to determine which values the speakers extolled most frequently. The 10 most frequently mentioned values were peace (in 100% of the speeches), hope (92%), security (86%), justice (85%), responsibility (81%), liberty (80%), tolerance (79%), altruism (75%), God (49%), and truth (38%). The authors discuss the interplay of these values in the modern world and implications regarding the search for universal moral values.