The children of Mexican-American migrant workers: A population at risk?

The present study assessed intellectual, academic, and emotional strengths and weaknesses for a group of Mexican-American children of migrant farm workers. In order to test the vulnerability hypothesis, the test profiles of these children were contrasted with those of two groups of black children with similar demographic makeup. The children of one group (Clinical Black) had been referred previously for a psychological consultation while the children of the other (Nonreferred Black) had not. Across dependent measures, between-groups contrasts tended to describe the scores of the Migrant children as similar to those of the Clinical Black children and significantly below those of the Nonreferred Black children. The findings suggested specific intellectual, academic, and emotional vulnerabilities of the Migrant children and demonstrated the need to develop ameliorative programs for these children.The authors wish to thank the staff of C & Y, University of Virginia Hospital, especially Ms. Deborah Johnson and Ms. Suzanne Canale, whose cooperation and assistance made this project possible.     

On the structure of motor recognition memory

Two experiments determined the influence of the range and number of auditory sensory consequences, associated with a rapid timing task, on the development of motor recognition. Experiment 1 observed no beneficial effect upon subsequent movement-transfer performance from experience with the criterion-movement-time sound compared to experience with either a narrow or a wide range of sounds that bracketed the criterion sound (not including the criterion); 60 sound trials prior to transfer did not produce better transfer than did six sounds. The second experiment examined transfer outside of the range of previous listening experience by having subjects transfer to one of two possible criterion movement times after having received either constant, or one of two types of variable, listening experience. Transfer performance was influenced by the amount of variability in listening experience. These results were seen as support for a schematic representation for motor recognition memory (Schmidt, 1975)     

Help Seeking: Effects of Visibility of Task Performance and Seeking Help

This study manipulated independently whether help seeking and task performance were public or private, since in public settings persons may lose esteem by seeking help or by demonstrating unsuccessful performance. Subjects were given false feedback that they were doing poorly on a task involving judging levels of neuroticism in others, and were given all opportunity to seek help by consulting a set of guidelines. The main result was an interaction with help seeking most likely when task performance was public and help seeking was private.     

Linguistic negation in autistic and normal children

Young, severely maladaptive autistic children with some speech competence were compared to normally developing 3-year-old children of lower and middle class and 5-year-olds of lower class on negation tasks. All subjects were shown 12 sets of cards depicting negative contrasts designed to elicit semantic categories of nonexistence, denial, and rejection and were tested for production, imitation, and comprehension. Syntactic and semantic analysis revealed that autistic children were superior imitators and poor producers but showed skills in comprehension comparable to a 4-year-old's level of functioning. While retarded in some functions, the experimental group produced syntactic structures that were more rigid, suggesting the significantly greater use of imitation as a major strategy in linguistic coding.This work was done at the NYU-Bellevue Medical Center with partial support by NIMH Grant No. MH 07331 to R. K.     

Ambivalence in play and ritual

Life is not breath, but action; to live is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, every part of ourselves which gives us the feeling of our own existence. Rousseau Emile     

A longitudinal analysis of personality structure and adolescent substance use

Within the context of a prospective longitudinal research design, the structure of personality and initial levels of drug use were used to predict, multivariately, later drug use among male and female adolescents. The findings indicated that personality and belief measures of nonconventionality provide a significant increment in the prediction of later drug use beyond a level achieved by knowing initial usage rates. In addition, other personality and belief measures yield further increments in the prediction of subsequent drug use. Developmentally, the results revealed a differentiation of drug use patterns across the year's time, with one pattern primarily reflecting alcohol use, and a second pattern primarily reflecting use of marijuana and ‘hard’ drugs. While both patterns were related to measures of nonconventionality, certain personality features distinguished between them. Emergent use of marijuana and ‘hard’ drugs was related to depression, mistrust and attractiveness, while emergent alcohol use was related to generosity, ambition, agility and cheerfulness. These results were cross-validated in two samples of subjects. Implications of the findings for adolescent psychosocial development are discussed.     

Selective migration— Still a viable hypothesis

Kamin (1980) has contended that arguments presented in Wolff (1979) are too weak to justify “resuscitating the selective migration debate.” Although Kamin's (1980) critique points up the need for closer scrutiny of the cumulative-deficit phenomenon, it fails to refute Wolff's (1979) conclusion that selective migration is partly responsible for the North-South black IQ differential.