The measurement of shared care and its effects in a sample of non-working mothers with young children

Interview data from a sample of non-working mothers of young children indicated that most of them left their child with one or two other caretakers on a regular basis. Children averaged about five hours per week with non-maternal caretakers. Most mothers rated children as being always well settled with these caretakers. Those caretakers with whom children were noted as not always well settled tended to be those who spent little time jointly with the mother and the child, and this tendency was stronger if in addition they were solely responsible for the child less than once a month. Interview data were also compared with diary data kept over a complete week. This suggested that interview data tended to underestimate the amount of waking time children spent in non-maternal care, but was reasonably accurate regarding the number and identity of non-maternal caretakers.     

Consumer evaluation in practice

Users of a community child and adolescent mental health service were surveyed, 3–4 weeks after their last contact, to determine their satisfaction with the service they received. High levels of overall satisfaction were obtained by general ratings, which tended to mask more specific critical comments to open-ended questions suggesting ways in which the service could be improved. The resulting changes in service provision are identified, the general value of consumer surveys discussed and the need to include open-ended questions in satisfaction surveys emphasized.     

The development of young infants' intuitions about support

Previous research has shown that 3-month-old infants, like adults, expect a box to be stable when it is in full contact with a platform, and to fall when it loses all contact with the platform. Do young infants also have expectations about what should happen when the box is only in partial contact with the platform? The present research was designed to address this question. In Experiment 1, 6.5-month-old infants saw two test events: a full-contact and a partial-contact test event. In both events, the infants watched the extended finger of a gloved hand push a box along the top of a platform. In the full-contact event, the box was pushed until its leading edge reached the end of the platform. In the partial-contact event, the box was pushed until only 15% or 70% of its bottom surface remained on the platform. The infants looked reliably longer at the partial-than at the full-contact event when 15%, but not 70%, of the box rested on the platform. These results suggested that the infants were able to judge how much contact was needed between the box and the platform for the box to be stable. A control condition provided evidence for this interpretation. In Experiment 2, 5.5- to 6-month-old infants were found to look equally at the full- and the partial-contact events, even when only 15% of the box's bottom surface remained on the platform. This result suggested that prior to 6.5 months of age infants perceive any amount of contact between the box and the platform to be sufficient to ensure the box's stability. Interpretations of this developmental sequence are considered in the Conclusion.     

Organizational Conflict and Individual Creativity

A theory of the interaction of perceptions of conflict and dispositional tendencies on individual creativity is presented and tested. It is argued that there are two broad classes of people: those who are primarily socially oriented and those who are primarily instrumentally oriented. Further, on tasks that match their orientation, individuals are proposed to generally adhere to patterns and strategies that experience has taught them are most likely to work. This should mitigate against creativity. On tasks outside of their area of specialization, however, individuals are typically expected to be more random in their thinking, which should promote creativity. Perceived conflict is argued to lead to a reversal of this pattern, however. That is, perceptions of conflict were expected to promote creativity on tasks within, and reduce it on tasks outside of, individuals area of primary interest. These ideas were tested in two studies, one with university employees and one with minority students. The results of both studies generally supported the theory.     

The role of verb argument structure in sentence processing: Distinguishing between syntactic and semantic effects

This paper describes an ongoing research program designed to investigate how syntactic and semantic aspects of lexical information become available to the sentence processing system. The two experiments described here distinguished between syntactic and semantic representations by using cross-modal naming and lexical decision in a new way. The relationship between the main verb and the probe word was varied such that the probe word met either the syntactic criteria to be an argument, the semantic criteria, neither, or both the syntactic and semantic criteria. Lexical decision times were sensitive to both syntactic and semantic congruity, while naming times were sensitive only to syntactic congruity. The two tasks were then used to investigate syntactic and semantic representations when verb argument structure was ambiguous. Subcategorized structures were constructed without regard for biasing context, but the contextually inappropriate thematic frame was ruled out while the inappropriate syntactic frame was still available.     

The trials of childhood: The development,reliability, and validity of the daily life stressors scale

The assessment of daily life stress in youngsters is receiving extensive research attention due to its pertinence to psychological and medical problems. This investigation addressed concerns from previous studies of daily life stress in children and adolescents. These included an integration with ratings of negative affectivity, exploration of developmental changes, and presentation of psychometric data. The Daily Life Stressors Scale (DLSS) is a 30-item measure designed to assess the severity of aversive feelings and everday events for youngsters. Three groups of children and adolescents were evaluated to assess the scale's test-retest reliability and construct and concurrent validity. Developmental changes in a normative group were also examined. Results indicated the DLSS to be moderately reliable and valid for children. Also, male children reported more stress than female children, whereas female adolescents reported more stress than male adolescents. Results were discussed with respect to resilience, gender role stress, therapy implications, and usefulness for determining precursors to physiological problems.     

Changes in Fear of AIDS and Homophobia in a University Population

A survey measuring attitudes toward fear of AIDS and homophobia, taken in the fall of 1985, was repeated in the fall of 1989 on the same university population. The results indicated that whereas fear of AIDS decreased, the degree of homophobia remained essentially unchanged. In addition, although respondents were much more knowledgeable about AIDS in 1989 than in 1985, there was no evidence of any change in the relatively high correlation between the fear of AIDS and homophobia.     

Life Tasks and Daily Life Experience

ABSTRACT This article explores the assumption that the goals on which an individual works structure the experience of daily life. One set of important goals are those consensual tasks that reflect the age-graded expectations of a living environment (e.g., the task of being on one's own at college). Whereas most members of a common age group share these consensual life tasks, individuals in a group differ in the relative importance they place on different tasks and in their appraisals of them. In the present study of 54 women living in a college sorority, the importance of a life task was associated with increased relevance of the task to daily life events, as revealed in experience sampling. The women were more emotionally involved in events that they saw as highly relevant to their life tasks than in less relevant events and, for each person, positive affect and emotional involvement in task-relevant events were related to her initial life task appraisals.