Maternal Reports of Play Dates of Clinic Referred and Community Children

Recent interventions have focused upon play dates as a means to improve friendships. However, no measures have been published which quantify play date quality. An important characteristic of play dates in this regard may be the amount of conflict. We present the development of such a measure. We compare maternal reports of play dates for 112 community subjects with 48 subjects referred for peer problems (mean age = 8.7 years). We found that clinic–referred subjects had significantly fewer hosted and invited play dates than the community subjects. The mean conflict on play dates was significantly lower for the community subjects than for the clinic-referred subjects. We obtained significant correlations between conflict on play dates and measures of problem behaviors. Our results support the position that conflict on play dates is an important area to target in social skills training programs. The scale may prove useful to clinicians and researchers by facilitating screening and assessing interventions directed towards improving play dates.     

Evaluating reading and metacognitive deficits in children and adolescents with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

The reading achievement of children and adolescents with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) has scarcely been explored in research conducted in the Spanish language and when it has, the results have been contradictory. The focus of the present research is to analyze participants' reading competency and metacognitive strategies as they carry out reading comprehension tasks. The sample was comprised of 187 Argentine schoolchildren aged 9 to 13 years old. 94 constituted the control group and the clinical group consisted of 93 schoolchildren diagnosed with ADHD. The metacognitive assessment was made up of two metacognitive tests, the Reading Awareness Scale (ESCOLA; acronym in Spanish) and a Spanish adaptation of Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory (MARSI), and one test of reading comprehension, the Evaluation of Reading Processes for Secondary Education Students (PROLEC-SE; acronym in Spanish). Students with ADHD had lower achievement on tests o reading comprehension compared to the control group. Nevertheless, our results suggest their difficulties did not stem from readin comprehension problems, but rather from alterations in their Executive Functions, because when subjects' reading comprehensio was equalized, students with ADHD still exhibited a lower level of Metacognition, particularly when it came to planning.     

Specific Life Events and Chronic Experiences Differentially Associated with Depression and Anxiety in Young Twins

Behavioral genetic analyses indicate that environmental influences associated with depression and anxiety are specific to each symptom type; however, this has not been tested specifically in children. Sixty-one (61) child twin pairs in which at least one twin had a very high anxiety or depression score, and 29 nonanxious, nondepressed pairs were interviewed about life events and chronic stressors in the previous 12 months. Loss events, schoolwork stressors, family relationship problems, and friendship problems were all significantly associated with depression but not anxiety. Threat events were significantly associated with anxiety but not depression. Loss events and schoolwork stressors appeared to act as shared environment influences in that they made twin pairs resemble one another. Threat events, friendship problems, and family relationship problems were individual specific and accounted for differences within the pairs. These results clarify the associations between life events and depressive and anxious symptoms in children and adolescents and reveal specific associations previously unidentified in this age range.     

Qualitative differences between implicit and explicit sequence learning

Four experiments investigate the differences between implicit and explicit sequence learning concerning their resilience to structural and superficial task changes. A superficial change that embedded the SRT task in the context of a selection task, while maintaining the sequence, did selectively hinder the expression of implicit learning. In contrast, a manipulation that maintained the task surface, but decreased the sequence validity, affected the expression of learning specifically when it was explicit. These results are discussed in the context of a dynamic framework (Cleeremans & Jiménez, 2002), which assumes that implicit knowledge is specially affected by contextual factors and that, as knowledge becomes explicit, it allows for the development of relevant metaknowledge that modulates the expression of explicit knowledge.     

Phonemes, rimes, vocabulary, and grammatical skills as foundations of early reading development: evidence from a longitudinal study

The authors present the results of a 2-year longitudinal study of 90 British children beginning at school entry when they were 4 years 9 months old (range = 4 years 2 months to 5 years 2 months). The relationships among early phonological skills, letter knowledge, grammatical skills, and vocabulary knowledge were investigated as predictors of word recognition and reading comprehension. Word recognition skills were consistently predicted by earlier measures of letter knowledge and phoneme sensitivity (but not by vocabulary knowledge, rhyme skills, or grammatical skills). In contrast, reading comprehension was predicted by prior word recognition skills, vocabulary knowledge, and grammatical skills. The results are related to current theories about the role of phonological, grammatical, and vocabulary skills in the development of early reading skills.     

Executive self, self-esteem, and negative affectivity: relations at the phenotypic and genotypic level

Complementary approaches examined the relations among executive self, self-esteem, and negative affectivity. A cross-sectional (N = 4,242) and a longitudinal (N = 158) study established that self-esteem mediated the relation between executive self and negative affectivity. A 3rd study (N = 878 twin pairs) replicated this pattern and examined genetic and environmental influences underlying all 3 phenotypes. Covariation among the 3 phenotypes reflected largely common genetic influences, although unique genetic effects explained variability in both executive self and negative affectivity. Executive self was influenced by shared environmental influences unique from those affecting self-esteem and negative affectivity. Non-shared environmental influences accounted for the majority of variance in each construct and were primarily unique to each. The unique genetic and non-shared environmental influences support the proposition that the executive self, self-esteem, and negative affectivity capture distinct and important differences between people.     

Gender recognition from point-light walkers

Point-light displays of human gait provide information sufficient to recognize the gender of a walker and are taken as evidence of the exquisite tuning of the visual system to biological motion. The authors revisit this topic with the goals of quantifying human efficiency at gender recognition. To achieve this, the authors first derive an ideal observer for gender recognition on the basis of center of moment (J. E. Cutting, D. R. Proffitt, & L. T. Kozlowski, 1978) and, with the use of anthropometric data from various populations, show optimal recognition of approximately 79% correct. Next, they perform a meta-analysis of 21 experiments examining gender recognition, obtaining accuracies of 66% correct for a side view and 71% for other views. Finally, results of the meta-analysis and the ideal observer are combined to obtain estimates of human efficiency at gender recognition of 26% for the side view and 47% for other views.     

Pragmatism as a Philosophy of Education in the Hispanic World: A Response

We concentrate on four questions among the many posed by this special collection of papers on Pragmatism and the Hispanic world. They are, first, what took pragmatism beyond the borders of the United States and into the Hispanic world? Next, what are the ideas of Dewey (or pragmatism) that have had the greatest impact on Hispanic culture? Third, what are the past and present obstacles that has kept the Hispanic world from using pragmatism to deal with many of their educational and social problems? Finally, why does pragmatism still hold great promise and potential for the Hispanic world?