Patients’ Initial Doubts, Reservations and Objections to the ABC’s of REBT and their Application

This exploratory research set out to develop an initial framework and categorization scheme for understanding patients’ initial doubts, reservations and objections to the ABC’s of REBT and their application. 60 patients were asked to write down their doubts following a pre-therapy “Introduction to REBT” session. Subsequently, an emergent content analysis was carried out to identify main themes. The content analysis revealed five general categories, of which the two largest ones concerned theoretical doubts about the ABC model, and doubts about putting the ABC model into practice. Further sub-categorization revealed a variety of concerns that related to these categories. For example, a large proportion of doubts about putting the ABC model into practice were sub-categorized as concerning the perceived difficulty of doing so. In turn, this sub-category contained further sub-categories of difficulty-related beliefs.

Older siblings influence younger siblings' motor development

Evidence exists for two competing theories about the effects of having an older sibling on development. Previous research has found that having an older sibling has both advantages and disadvantages for younger siblings' development. This study examined whether and how older siblings influenced the onset of their own younger siblings' motor milestones, a heretofore unstudied developmental domain in the sibling literature. Parents of 51 sibling pairs reported their children's crawling and walking onset dates. In keeping with imitation theories, in families where younger siblings crawled or walked earlier than their own older sibling, they did so significantly earlier. Moreover, in keeping with limited parental resource theories, in families where older siblings crawled or walked earlier than their own younger sibling, they did so significantly earlier. Older siblings did influence younger siblings' motor development, but how they did so may have depended on unique family characteristics. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Resourceful Dialogues: Eliciting and Mobilizing Client Competencies and Resources

Within the social constructionist (narrative, solution-focused and collaborative language systems) therapies, therapists have increasingly focused on identifying and mobilizing clients’ resources and competencies. How such client resources and competencies are identified and elaborated can be considered empirical matters for analysts of therapeutic discourse. The present paper examines resourceful sequences of dialogue in 12 single session lifestyle consultations for how counsellors conversationally engaged consultees, and for what transpired within these sequences of dialogue. These sequences were micro-analyzed using conversation analysis and retrospective comments from consultees and therapists involved in these sequences were solicited using a videotaped replay procedure known as comprehensive process analysis [Elliott (1989). In M. Packer & R. B. Addison (Eds.), Entering the circle: Hermeneutic investigation in psychology (pp. 165–184). Albany, NY: SUNY Press]. The combined conversation analyses and related comments for three of the 23 videotaped passages analyzed are reported with the aim of enhancing therapists’ conversational practices in hosting resourceful dialogues with clients.

Maternal and child contributions to cortisol response to emotional arousal in young children from low-income, rural communities

Relations of maternal and child characteristics to child cortisol reactivity to and recovery from emotional arousal were examined prospectively at approximately 7 months of age (infancy) and then again at approximately 15 months of age (toddlerhood). The sample was diverse and population based (N = 1,292 mother-infant dyads) and included families from predominantly low-income, rural communities. Maternal behavior, family income-to-need ratio and social advantage, and child temperament, attention, and mental development were assessed, and children's saliva was sampled before and after standardized procedures designed to elicit emotional arousal. Maternal engagement in infancy was associated with greater cortisol reactivity at the infancy assessment and with reduced overall cortisol level at the toddler assessment. Also at the toddler assessment, child attention, mental development, and temperamental distress to novelty were associated with increased cortisol reactivity and regulation, whereas temperamental distress to limitations and African American ethnicity were associated with reduced cortisol reactivity. Findings are consistent with prior work linking early caregiving to the development of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis stress response system and with a conceptual model in which developing temperament is characterized by the interplay of emotional reactivity and the emergence of the ability to effortfully regulate this reactivity using attention.     

Pictorial superiority effects in oldest-old people

We examined memory for pictures and words in middle-age (45-59 years), young-old (60-74 years), old-old (75-89 years), and the oldest-old adults (90-97 years) in the Louisiana Healthy Aging Study. Stimulus items were presented and retention was tested in a blocked order where half of the participants studied 16 simple line drawings and the other half studied matching words during acquisition. Free recall and recognition followed. In the next acquisition/test block a new set of items was used where the stimulus format was changed relative to the first block. Results yielded pictorial superiority effects in both retention measures for all age groups. Follow-up analyses of clustering in free recall revealed that a greater number of categories were accessed (which reflects participants' retrieval plan) and more items were recalled per category (which reflects participants' encoding strategy) when pictures served as stimuli compared to words. Cognitive status and working memory span were correlated with picture and word recall. Regression analyses confirmed that these individual difference variables accounted for significant age-related variance in recall. These data strongly suggest that the oldest-old can utilise nonverbal memory codes to support long-term retention as effectively as do younger adults.     

The effects of a target–stimulus reminder on performance in a novel object recognition task

The effects of original training-stimulus pre-test reminders were examined in a novel object recognition (NOR) task. NOR is a task that examines memory for complex stimuli, and is driven by the rats’ tendency to spend significantly more time exploring novel objects over those previously experienced. In this task, a delay is imposed between a training experience during which the animal is allowed to investigate a set of identical objects, and a later test exposure where the animal encounters one of the original objects and a novel object with which it has had no previous experience. Experiment 1 demonstrated that performance at 24 h is significantly worse than at an immediate delay (1 min). In the second experiment, it was demonstrated that neither a 10-s nor a 30-s reminder treatment, in the absence of training, resulted in a level of preference for novelty, a measure of memory for the original object, that was significantly greater than chance. Experiment 3 illustrated significant performance effects of a 30-s training stimulus reminder administered 15 min prior to test with a 24-h retention interval. The final experiment illustrated that the additional 30-s of object exposure is effective in enhancing performance only if it occurs shortly prior to test. Animals receiving the additional 30-s immediately following training did not experience such beneficial effects. It was concluded, based upon these results, that pre-test training-stimulus reminders in this task produce effects similar to those seen in more traditional tasks of learning and memory.     

Historical change, cultural learning, and cognitive representation in Zinacantec Maya children

Against the background of an unchanging sequence of representational development, we demonstrate that implicit processes of learning and cognition can change from one historical period to another. One generation of Zinacantec Maya children was studied in 1969 and 1970, the next generation in 1991 and 1993. In the intervening two decades, the community, located in Chiapas, Mexico, was involved in a transition from an economy based primarily on subsistence and agriculture to an economy based primarily on money and commerce. A naturalistic study of weaving apprenticeship and an experimental study of visual representation showed that the ecological transition was linked to greater emphasis on independent cultural learning, abstract representation, and innovation, and, correlatively, a movement away from scaffolded guidance, detail-oriented representation, and imitative representational strategies. These changes constituted automatic adaptations with an implicit nature. In addition, historical variability in implicit modes of cultural apprenticeship predicted shifts in implicit processes of child and adolescent cognition. In sum, socialization and development are not fixed but adapt, in a coordinated way, to changing ecological conditions.     

Inadvertent exposure to pornography on the Internet: Implications of peer-to-peer file-sharing networks for child development and families

A request from the National Academies to prepare a presentation for a Workshop on Non-Technical Strategies to Protect Youth from Inappropriate Material on the Internet occurred before much was known about children, youth, and the Internet. The author's strategy was to investigate websites that cater to children and adolescents. The developmental issue of consumer socialization was raised by a visit to the Disney website. In contrast, the developmental issues of sexuality, aggression, and intergroup relations were raised by visits to chat rooms hosted by two different Internet Web portals. Examination of existing research literature, in conjunction with visits to the websites, led to the following conclusions: (1) Many parents are aware of the problems of making children the targets of commerce; however, they are quite unaware of the kind of social and cultural worlds young people are creating online. (2) Children and adolescents are not simply the targets of adult Internet creations; they are active participants in creating their own cybercultures, for example, in teen chat rooms. (3) The nature and norms of these cultures can be very much influenced by adult rules, regulations, and participatory monitoring. (4) The important developmental issues raised by this new medium are not unique to the Internet. For example, each psychosocial phenomenon from consumerism to sexuality to aggression has important manifestations in the culture at large.     

Exploring the rabbit hole of possibilities by myself or with my group: The benefits and liabilities of activating counterfactual mind‐sets for information sharing and group coordination

The current experiment explored the effect of activating a counterfactual mind‐set on the discussion of unique information and group judgment accuracy. Evidence suggests that a counterfactual mind‐set is characterized by a focused, analytic mental state and, when activated at the group level, improves group judgment accuracy in the murder mystery paradigm (a hidden profile task). We hypothesized that the beneficial effect of the counterfactual mind‐set would only help group problem‐solving tasks if the mind‐set had been activated at the group level, allowing the analytical mind‐set to play out in an atmosphere of synergistic coordination. In contrast, if this highly focused mental state is activated at the individual level, it could impair group judgment quality because inwardly focused analytical individuals may fail to coordinate their behavior with other group members. Consistent with our hypothesis, activating a counterfactual mind‐set at the individual level had a debilitating effect on the group judgment task, whereas activating a counterfactual mind‐set at the group level had a facilitative effect, increasing information sharing, synergistic coordination and judgment accuracy. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.