An Assessment of Ethnocultural Beliefs Regarding the Causes of Birth Defects and Genetic Disorders

With the expansion of genetic services to various cultural groups, genetic counselors encounter clients who hold diverse beliefs inscribed by their culture about health conditions. Thus, clients may attribute the cause of a birth defect or genetic condition to a culturally-based health belief. This present study was conducted as a pilot study in order to assess the beliefs about the causes of birth defects and genetic disorders held by women of different ethnocultural backgrounds. This study proposed that women who do not have a family history of a disorder will differ in their knowledge about the cause of a birth defect or genetic disorder compared to women who have an affected child. In addition, this study determined to what extent culturally-based health beliefs are attributed to being the cause of a birth defect or genetic disorder in the 1990s.     

Visual attention in infants with perinatal brain damage: Evidence of the importance of anterior lesions

Shifts of visual attention can be studied in adults and infants by cueing responses to a particular spatial location. Earlier studies have shown that by seven months of age normal infants show a similar pattern of facilitation and inhibition to a cued spatial location as adults. In this study we report data from infants with perinatal lesions that include or exclude the left anterior quadrant. Results indicate that infants with left anterior lesions do not show facilitation to a cued spatial location in this task. In contrast, infants with posterior lesions showed the same pattern of performance as healthy subjects. While these findings differ from those obtained with adults, they are consistent with previous studies of children with perinatal lesions, and with findings from ERP studies with normal infants.     

Inhibitory processing in the false belief task: Two conjectures

Although it is well established that four-year-olds outperform three-year-olds on predicting behavior from false beliefs, this is only true when the false belief is coupled with a positive desire. Four-year-olds perform poorly in an otherwise standard false belief task when the protagonist's desire is to avoid rather than to approach a target. We account for this by assuming that the attribution of a false belief involves inhibitory processing. We present two versions of an inhibition model of successful belief-desire reasoning.     

Does Human Facial Attractiveness Honestly Advertise Health? Longitudinal Data on an Evolutionary Question

Inspired by the evolutionary conjecture that sexually selected traits function as indicators of pathogen resistance in animals and humans, we examined the notion that human facial attractiveness provides evidence of health. Using photos of 164 males and 169 females in late adolescence and health data on these individuals in adolescence, middle adulthood, and later adulthood, we found that adolescent facial attractiveness was unrelated to adolescent health for either males or females, and was not predictive of health at the later times. We also asked raters to guess the health of each stimulus person from his or her photo. Relatively attractive stimulus persons were mistakenly rated as healthier than their peers. The correlation between perceived health and medically assessed health increased when attractiveness was statistically controlled, which implies that attractiveness suppressed the accurate recognition of health. These findings may have important implications for evolutionary models.     

Visual searh through word lists as a function of grade level,reading ability,and target repetition

Second-, fourth-, and sixth-grade students of high or low reading ability and college students carried out a visual-search task in which they scanned a list of 10 words, looking for a target word which was changed every trial or remained constant during an entire session. Search time increased linearly with serial position, consistent with a serial self-terminating model of visual search. The search rate increased from 3.3 words/sec in the second grade to 8.4 words/sec in college. Reading ability was not a significant factor in any comparisons. These results on the development of visual-search ability agree with others in showing that with increasing age there is a marked increase in search speed. However, retarded readers are as competent as their age peers on this task, suggesting that reading dysfunction must be traced to other deficiencies.     

Perception and memory loss of item and order information in short-term memory

Recognition probes given before or after a series of letters presented at varying rates were used to evaluate perception and memory loss of order and item information. For both order and item information pre- and postprobe functions converged at fast rates of presentation. Performance decrement at fast rates is attributable to perceptual factors and is greater for order than for item information.     

The minister and the birth of a defective child

Summary There now exists a gap in the humanistic and professional care of the newborn defective child and his family—a gap which is so vital that it further adds to the debilitation of the infant and increases force behind the statement, The family with a handicapped child is a handicapped family. The minister in the community is the logical person by reasons of training, sphere of call, and availability to fill this void and assist parents through this most difficult shock or mourning period.In times of death or severe illness, the family minister does not wait to be called by the family before showing his, and the church's, concern. Neither should he wait in the case of defective birth, for no longer is this a subject to be hidden in closets while parents suffer in agonized self-accusation. The very first days are crucial ones, and the minister that makes himself available to the parents during that time in a supportive, listening post role will produce more positive results than will many sessions of counseling in the later years of that infant's childhood.