Do not hinder them: educating children with mental disabilities in the church

Developmental disabilities in children can be challenging to the family who desires a spiritual home for their family. Parents may hesitate to bring a special needs child to a church service, uncertain of the outcome. While public schools have amazing support for the differently abled, the Church very rarely has assistance in place for the families of handicapped individuals, let alone theology for the parents of mentally disabled children. This paper will examine possible ways for a local church leader or volunteer to educate children with mental disabilities, drawing on a variety of texts for support. The paper will conclude by offering resources for the teachers of special needs children in church education.     

Trauma Following Termination of Pregnancy for Fetal Abnormality: Is This the Path From Guilt to Grief?

Termination of pregnancy for fetal abnormality (TOPFA) is a potentially traumatic event that may lead to intense grief symptomatology. The present study included 41 couples who were assessed 1–6 months after TOPFA. No gender differences were found regarding the intensity of trauma symptomatology or the prevalence of clinically relevant trauma symptomatology, present in about a third of the sample. Most couples were congruent regarding trauma symptomatology. Women experienced guilt with significantly more frequency than men. For both genders, guilt influenced both trauma and grief symptomatology. For women only, guilt influenced grief symptomatology indirectly, through trauma symptomatology. Clinical implications are discussed.     

PhonItalia: a phonological lexicon for Italian

In this article, we present the first open-access lexical database that provides phonological representations for 120,000 Italian word forms. Each of these also includes syllable boundaries and stress markings and a comprehensive range of lexical statistics. Using data derived from this lexicon, we have also generated a set of derived databases and provided estimates of positional frequency use for Italian phonemes, syllables, syllable onsets and codas, and character and phoneme bigrams. These databases are freely available from phonitalia.org. This article describes the methods, content, and summarizing statistics for these databases. In a first application of this database, we also demonstrate how the distribution of phonological substitution errors made by Italian aphasic patients is related to phoneme frequency.     

Caregiving Burden and Parent–Child Quality of Life Outcomes in Neurodevelopmental Conditions: The Mediating Role of Behavioral Disengagement

The aim of this study was to analyze the direct and indirect effects, via parents’ behavioral disengagement coping, of caregiving burden on the quality of life (QL) of parents and their children with neurodevelopmental conditions. Self-completion questionnaires on the target variables were administered to a sample of 156 parents who had a child with a neurodevelopmental condition, namely epilepsy (n = 65) and cerebral palsy (n = 91). Structural equation modeling was used to test a mediation model and ascertain direct and indirect effects among study variables. Significant direct effects of caregiving burden on parents’ and their children’s QL were found. Additionally, caregiving burden had a significant indirect effect on parents’ QL, via behavioral disengagement, but not on their children’s QL. Finally, this model was found to be invariant across conditions and patients’ age groups. Caregiving burden may be elected as a strategic intervention target to improve parent–child QL outcomes in neuropediatric settings. Parents should be encouraged to avoid or reduce behavioral disengagement coping in relation to their caregiving stress, and alternatively adopt active coping strategies that may positively affect their children’s QL and impede or attenuate the deleterious effects of caregiving burden on their own QL.     

On predicting others’ words: Electrophysiological evidence of prediction in speech production

The present study investigated whether lexical processes that occur when we name objects can also be observed when an interaction partner is naming objects. We compared the behavioral and electrophysiological responses of participants performing a conditional go/no-go picture naming task in two different conditions: individually and jointly with a confederate participant. To obtain an index of lexical processing, we manipulated lexical frequency, so that half of the pictures had corresponding names of high-frequency and the remaining half had names of low-frequency. Color cues determined whether participants should respond, whether their task-partner should respond, or whether nobody should respond. Behavioral and ERP results showed that participants engaged in lexical processing when it was their turn to respond. Crucially, ERP results on no-go trials revealed that participants also engaged in lexical processing when it was their partner’s turn to act. In addition, ERP results showed increased response inhibition selectively when it was the partner’s turn to act. These findings provide evidence for the claim that listeners generate predictions about speakers’ utterances by relying on their own action production system.     

Engagement,Flow, Self-Efficacy,and Eustress of University Students: A Cross-National Comparison Between the Philippines and Argentina

This study examined how self-efficacy, eustress, and flow interact with academic engagement. First, it aimed to test a theoretical model that proposes that self-efficacy and eustress promote both flow and engagement and that, in turn, the state of flow promotes academic engagement in undergraduate student. We hypothesized that the theoretical model would be invariant for two countries: the Philippines and Argentina. Secondly, this research aimed to compare the levels of self-efficacy, eustress, study-flow and academic engagement experiences in students from both countries. One hundred seventy-six Filipinos and 171 Argentinean students participated in the study by completing inventories using the Utrecht Student Engagement Scale (Schaufeli, Martínez, et al., 2002), Optimal Experience Survey (Mesurado, 2008), Self-efficacy Scale (O’Sullivan, 2011), and Eustress Scale (O’Sullivan, 2011). Results show that the theoretical model fits the data well in both countries and is invariant across the Philippines and Argentina. Self-efficacy has a positive effect on flow and engagement, whereas eustress has a significant positive relationship with flow but is not directly associated with engagement. However, eustress has an indirect effect, through flow, on student engagement. On the other hand, there are different levels of engagement, flow, self-efficacy, and eustress. Argentinean students scored higher on absorption, dedication, self-efficacy, and flow. Filipino students, meanwhile, scored higher on eustress.     

Assessment of individual differences in faking

In recent years, change scores obtained under neutral conditions and under faking-inducing conditions have become one of the main alternatives for operationalizing faking. A pending issue regarding these measures is the relevance of individual differences under similar conditions of pressure. This study proposes a simple approach based on the classic test theory that allows the issue to be rigorously assessed. The approach, from which three indices are derived, is based on a pre-test post-test design with a control group, and models the amount of change as an individual parameter. The proposal is applied to an empirical study in personality, and some interesting initial results are obtained.     

Aligning Mars and Venus: The Social Construction and Instability of Gender Differences in Romantic Relationships

An evolutionary approach to gender differences in romantic relationships has pervaded the scientific literature, a trend mirrored in popular culture by Mars-Venus stereotyping. Three studies tested the accuracy of the popular notion that gender differences would emerge for the behaviors women and men want and receive from romantic partners in a sample of 375 students at a southeastern U.S. public university. Across the three studies, only one stable and robust gender difference emerged (desires regarding relationship support), as did several unstable gender differences. However, gender-role identity significantly accounted for nearly half of the variance in this one stable gender difference, challenging the viability of some evolutionary conceptualizations of gender differences and instead providing support for social constructionist and feminist perspectives.