Effects of parent education on knowledge and attitudes

This study evaluated 42 pregnant and parenting adolescents (aged 13 to 20 years) and adults (who began parenting as adolescents) enrolled in parenting classes. The Parent as a Teacher Inventory and the Adult-Adolescent Parenting Inventory were used to measure change in knowledge and attitudes following participation in the classes. The findings indicated significant improvement as a result of parent education.     

Incarcerated adolescent girls: personality, social competence, and delinquency

The aim of this study was to gain greater insight into the relationship of delinquency to personality and social competence in incarcerated girls. It was hypothesized that agreeableness and conscientiousness would correlate negatively with delinquency, and that the sensation-seeking aspect of extroversion would correlate positively. Two theoretical views were used to predict the relationship between social competence and delinquency: (a) delinquency as an expression of lack of social competence (i.e., social deficit), and (b) delinquency as socially competent and rationally analyzed behavior. The first view implies a negative correlation between delinquency and social competence, while the second indicates a positive one. The participants were thirty-three 12- to 18-year-old incarcerated girls. An adaptation of the Self-Reported Delinquency Scale was used for measuring delinquency; personality was measured using the Five-Factor Personality Inventory; and the Scale for Interpersonal Behavior was used to measure social competence. Agreeableness was not found to correlate with the overall delinquency score or with any specific type of delinquency or crime. The more crimes the girls reported, the less conscientious they were, and the more neurotic and open they were. The correlation between delinquency and extroversion was not statistically significant. A higher level of delinquency was accompanied by higher social competence when negative self-assertion was required (i.e., a low level of tension was felt in expressing negative feelings that were appropriate to the situation). In other social situations, however, the girls reported more situation-inappropriate feelings of tension. It was concluded that some personality factors and aspects of social competence can predict delinquency.     

Dialogue games: Conventions of human interaction

Natural dialogue does not proceed haphazardly; it has an easily recognized episodic structure and coherence which conform to a well developed set of conventions. This paper represents these conventions formally in terms related to speech act theory and to a theory of action.The major formal unit, the dialogue game, specifies aspects of the communication of both participants in a dialogue. We define the formal notion of dialogue games, and describe some of the important games of English. Dialogue games are conventions of interactive goal pursuit. Using them, each participant pursues his own goals in a way which sometimes serves the goals of the other. The idea of dialogue games can thus be seen as a part of a broader theoretical perspective which characterizes virtually all communication as goal pursuit activity.We also define and exemplify the property of Motivational Coherence of dialogues. Motivational Coherence can be used as an interpretive principle in explaining language comprehension.Actual dialogue games have a kind of causal connectedness which is not a consequence of their formal properties. This is explained in terms of a theory of action, which is also seen to explain a similar attribute of speech acts.     

Mice: the initiation and maintenance of pregnancy-induced aggression following thelectomy

Two experiments were conducted in order to assess the effects of thelectomy (i.e., nipple removal) on the display of pregnancy-induced aggression in Rockland-Swiss (R-S) albino mice. Pregnant animals, thelectomized on Gestation Day (GD) 12, exhibit a high incidence and intensity of aggression toward adult R-S male intruders during tests conducted on GDs 14, 16, and 18 (i.e., during the last third of gestation in this species). Since thelectomized dams display levels of aggression (i.e., 63% incidence) equivalent to those of sham-operated and nonoperated animals (53 and 67% incidence, respectively), it would appear that nipple presence is not a critical factor for the maintenance of pregnancy-induced aggression in mice (Experiment 1). To examine the effects of nipple deprivation on the initiation of pregnancy-induced aggression, virgin animals were thelectomized prior to mating, then repeatedly tested for aggression at 2-day intervals of gestation. Unlike nipple-intact dams, pregnant mice, deprived of nipples prior to conception, rarely exhibit (less than 17% incidence) agonistic behaviors toward intruder males (Experiment 2). These findings suggest that the development and self-stimulation of nipples early in pregnancy may be important conditions for the display of heightened aggression with advancing pregnancy in mice.     

Repetition and comprehension of spoken sentences by reading-disabled children

The language problems of reading-disabled elementary school children are not confined to written language alone. These children often exhibit problems of ordered recall of verbal materials that are equally severe whether the materials are presented in printed or in spoken form. Sentences that pose problems of pronoun reference might be expected to place a special burden on short-term memory because close grammatical relationships obtain between words that are distant from one another. With this logic in mind, third-grade children with specific reading disability and classmates matched for age and IQ were tested on five sentence types, each of which poses a problem in assigning pronoun reference. On one occasion the children were tested for comprehension of the sentences by a forced-choice picture verification task. On a later occasion they received the same sentences as a repetition test. Good and poor readers differed significantly in immediate recall of the reflexive sentences, but not in comprehension of them as assessed by picture choice. It was suggested that the pictures provided cues which lightened the memory load, a possibility that could explain why the poor readers were not demonstrably inferior in comprehension of the sentences even though they made significantly more errors than the good readers in recalling them.     

An exploratory study of the relationship between face recognition memory and the volume of medial temporal lobe structures in healthy young males

A rigorous new methodology was applied to the study of structure function relationships in the living human brain. Face recognition memory (FRM) and other cognitive measures were made in 29 healthy young male subjects (mean age = 21.7 years) and related to volumetric measurements of their cerebral hemispheres and of structures in their medial temporal lobes, obtained using the Cavalieri method in combination with high resolution Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI. Greatest proportional variability in volumes was found for the lateral ventricles (57%) for the cerebral hemispheres (8%) in the mean volumes of the hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus, amygdala, caudate nucleus, temporal pole and temporal lobe on the right and left sides of the brain. The volumes of the right and left parahippocampal gyrus, temporal pole, temporal lobe, and left hippocampus were, prior to application of the Bonferroni correction to take account of 12 multiple comparisons, significantly correlated with the volume of the corresponding hemisphere(p < 0.05). The volumes of all structures were highly correlated (p < 0.0002 for all comparisons) between the two cerebral hemispheres. There were no positive relationships between structure volumes and FRM score. However, the volume of the right amygdala was, prior to application of the Bonferroni correction to take account of 38~multiple comparisons, found to be significantly smaller in the five most consistent high scorers compared to the five most consistent low scorers (t = 2.77,p = 0.025). The implications for possible relationships between healthy medial temporal lobe structures and memory are discussed.     

Development of voice recognition: parallels with face recognition.

Encoding and subsequent recognition of unfamiliar voices was examined in children, aged 6 to 16, and in adults. Performance changed markedly with age, improving sharply between ages 6 and 10, with 10-year-olds approaching adult levels. After age 10 accuracy declined significantly but returned to the adult level by age 14. The course of development closely matches that recently documented for the ability to encode and recognize unfamiliar faces. Several parallels between voice recognition and face recognition are discussed.