Cognitive Behavioral Principles Within Group Mentoring: A Randomized Pilot Study

This study evaluated the effectiveness of a group mentoring program that included components of empirically supported mentoring and cognitive behavioral techniques for children served at a community mental health center. Eighty-six 8- to 12-year-old children were randomly assigned to either group mentoring or a wait-list control group. Group mentoring significantly increased children's reported social problem-solving skills and decreased parent-reported child externalizing and internalizing behavior problems after controlling for other concurrent mental health services. Attrition from the group mentoring program was notably low (7%) for children. The integration of a cognitive behavioral group mentoring program into children's existing community mental health services may result in additional reductions in externalizing and internalizing behavior problems.     

The implication of technology in mediatisation and mediation approaches to religious studies

This paper investigates the groundwork upon which the concepts of mediatisation and mediation were erected, focusing on the very definition of what media-technology is. These concepts frame the conversation among scholars in the study of religion and media. However, despite the fact that the two keywords share the same root, media, they are understood as incompatible with one another. On the one hand, mediatisation is broadly defined as a historical shift in which the logic of mass media transforms traditional forms of religion, subsuming them under the imperative of the modern marketplace. On the other hand, scholars studying the mediation of religion affirm that media have always shaped and transformed religious practices. This investigation argues that the controversy between the two modes of analysis does not consist of whether or to what extent media technology affects or transforms religion. Rather, the conflict arises from how media technology is defined.     

Positive School Climate as a Moderator of Violence Exposure for Colombian Adolescents

In Colombia, many adolescents have experienced violence related to the decades‐long armed conflict in the country and have witnessed or been directly victimized by violence in their communities, often related to gang activity or drug trafficking. Exposure to violence, both political and community violence, has detrimental implications for adolescent development. This study used data from 1857 Colombian adolescents in an urban setting. We aim to understand the relations between exposure to violence and adolescent outcomes, both externalizing behaviors and developmental competence, and then to understand whether school climate (i.e., safety, connectedness, services) moderates these relations. Results demonstrate that armed conflict, community violence victimization, and witnessing community violence are positively associated with externalizing behaviors, but only armed conflict is negatively associated with developmental competence. School safety, connectedness, and services moderate the relation between community violence witnessing and externalizing behaviors. School services moderates the relation between community violence victimization and developmental competence. As students perceived more positive school climate, the effects of community violence exposure on outcomes were weakened. This study identifies potential levers for intervention regarding how schools can better support violence‐affected youth through enhancements to school safety, connectedness, and services.     

Case–contrast study about parent–infant interaction in a Brazilian sample of siblings of children with autism spectrum disorders

Siblings of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) present greater susceptibility to developmental problems, in comparison with siblings of typically developing children. The greater prevalence of mental health disorders among parents of children with ASD increases younger siblings’ vulnerability to emotional problems. The aim of this study is to compare the interaction between carers and babies aged 2 to 26 months (M = 11.7, SD = 6.9) who are siblings of children with ASD (ASD dyads) with the interaction of dyads of siblings of typically developing children (TD dyads). The protocol of Clinical Indicators of Risk for Child Development and the Coding Interactive Behaviour measures were used to evaluate interaction. ASD dyads presented higher scores of constriction in their interaction, P = .024, with babies presenting higher scores of withdrawal behavior, P = .003, and carers presenting higher scores of depressive mood, P = .008, when compared to TD dyads. The ASD dyads have interactive impairments more frequently than do the TD dyads.     

Mothers’ Attributions About Child Misbehavior: Can Situational Suggestions Change General Perceptions?

Mothers’ attributions about children’s misbehavior were experimentally manipulated to examine causal relationships among attributions, mood, and behavior and assess whether suggestion can change mothers’ general perceptions. Forty mothers of children aged 33 to 71 months were primed with dysfunctional child-referent (child responsible) or environment-referent (situation caused) attributions before a parent-child interaction. Mothers in the dysfunctional child-referent condition placed greater responsibility on children, reported less positive mood and endorsed more overly reactive discipline, and their children displayed more negative mood and misbehavior. The experimental manipulation also affected mothers’ general child attributions. Understanding how attributions form and change has implications for parenting interventions.     

Resetting the rules of the game: Language preferences and social relations of work between Russian immigrants and veteran professionals in an Israeli organization

Workplace is the main site of the cross-cultural encounter between majority and minority groups in multicultural societies, yet there is paucity of research on workplace language practices and their influence on the social relations of work. The current qualitative study focused on the patterns of language use and their links to social identities, inter-group attitudes and work relations between recent immigrants and veteran employees in a white-collar organization in Central Israel. On-site observations and interviews with the workers—Israeli-born, veteran Soviet immigrants of the 1970s, and recent arrivals—were conducted in Hebrew and in Russian. The findings indicate that language use indeed serves as the key marker of social identity and signifier of work status and group boundaries. The common use of Russian by recent immigrants is a trigger of conflict and mutual antagonism, as Hebrew-speakers perceive it as a sign of their separatism and anti-Israeli outlook.     

Corresponding delay-dependent biases in spatial language and spatial memory

The present study addresses the relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic spatial representations. In three experiments we probe spatial language and spatial memory at the same time points in the task sequence. Experiments 1 and 2 show analogous delay-dependent biases in spatial language and spatial memory. Experiment 3 extends this correspondence, showing that additional perceptual structure along the vertical axis reduces delay-dependent effects in both tasks. These results indicate that linguistic and non-linguistic spatial systems depend on shared underlying representational processes. In addition, we also address how these delay-dependent biases can arise within a single theoretical framework without positing differing prototypes for linguistic and non-linguistic spatial systems.     

Learn locally, think globally. Exemplar variability supports higher-order generalization and word learning

Research suggests that variability of exemplars supports successful object categorization; however, the scope of variability's support at the level of higher-order generalization remains unexplored. Using a longitudinal study, we examined the role of exemplar variability in first- and second-order generalization in the context of nominal-category learning at an early age. Sixteen 18-month-old children were taught 12 categories. Half of the children were taught with sets of highly similar exemplars; the other half were taught with sets of dissimilar, variable exemplars. Participants' learning and generalization of trained labels and their development of more general word-learning biases were tested. All children were found to have learned labels for trained exemplars, but children trained with variable exemplars generalized to novel exemplars of these categories, developed a discriminating word-learning bias generalizing labels of novel solid objects by shape and labels of nonsolid objects by material, and accelerated in vocabulary acquisition. These findings demonstrate that object variability leads to better abstraction of individual and global category organization, which increases learning outside the laboratory.     

Confronting complexity: insights from the details of behavior over multiple timescales

Young children tend to generalize novel names for novel solid objects by similarity in shape, a phenomenon dubbed 'the shape bias'. We believe that the critical insights needed to explain the shape bias in particular, and cognitive development more generally, come from Dynamic Systems Theory. We present two examples of recent work focusing on the real-time decision processes that underlie performance in the tasks used to measure the shape bias. We show how this work, and the dynamic systems perspective, sheds light on the controversy over the origins and development of the shape bias. In addition, we suggest that this dynamic systems perspective provides the right level for explanations of development because it requires a focus on the details of behavior over multiple timescales.     

Processing variant forms in spoken word recognition: the role of variant frequency

Recognition of a spoken word phonological variant--schwa vowel deletion (e.g., corporate --> corp'rate)--was investigated in vowel detection (absent/present) and syllable number judgment (two or three syllables) tasks. Variant frequency corpus analyses (Patterson, LoCasto, & Connine, 2003) were used to select words with either high or low schwa vowel deletion rates. Speech continua were created for each word in which schwa vowel length was manipulated (unambiguous schwa-present and schwa-absent endpoints, along with intermediate ambiguous tokens). Matched control nonwords were created with identical schwa vowel continua and surrounding segments. The low-deletion-rate words showed more three-syllable judgments than did the high-deletion-rate words. Matched control nonwords did not differ as a function of deletion rate. Experiments 2 and 3 showed a lexical decision reaction time advantage for more frequent surface forms, as compared with infrequent ones, for schwa-deleted (Experiment 2) and schwa-present (Experiment 3) stimuli. The results are discussed in terms of representations of variant forms of words based on variant frequency.