Event-Related Potential Findings in Healthy Extremely Pre-Term (< Week 29) Children at Age 10

Ten healthy extremely pre-term (EPT) children, born before gestational week 29, were tested at age 10 using mismatch negativity (MMN) and a three-tone odd-ball task; the results were then compared to age-matched full-term controls. We found no difference in MMN. By contrast, EPT children had generally shorter N1 latencies and larger P2 amplitudes, possibly indicating a more stimulus-driven response mode. However, P300 parameters, indicative of controlled attention, were unaffected.     

Culturally Competent Family Interventions: Review and Case Illustrations

Family therapy is often the treatment of choice for culturally diverse clients. This article provides a critical review of culturally competent assessment and intervention strategies for use with ethnic minority families in the U.S. A culturally informed view of the definition of family health and dysfunction is presented, basic structure and goals of family therapy are delineated, and family therapy process and techniques are addressed. Clinical vignettes are provided to illustrate critical points.     

Parent predictors of changes in child behavior problems

The present study examined whether ineffective discipline, single parent status, social support, parent involvement, and parent depression predicted changes in preschoolers' (N = 129) behavior problems. This study also evaluated whether child sex and ethnicity moderated the relations between these variables and changes in problem behavior. Parents completed questionnaires at the beginning of the study, and parent, teacher, and observational ratings of children's behavior problems were collected twice during the school year. Parents' own social support predicted improvement for boys and parent depression was associated with worsening symptoms for girls. Single parenthood and parent involvement predicted changes in behavior problems for the sample as a whole. Several significant ethnic differences emerged, highlighting the importance of considering cultural context in studies of parenting and child externalizing behavior.     

Power increases performance in a social evaluation situation as a result of decreased stress responses

We tested whether power reduces responses related to social stress and thus increases performance evaluation in social evaluation situations. We hypothesized and found that thinking about having power reduced fear of negative evaluation and physiological arousal during a self‐presentation task (Studies 1 and 2). In Study 2, we also showed that simply thinking about having power made individuals perform better in a social evaluation situation. Our results confirmed our hypotheses that the mechanism explaining this power–performance link was that high power participants felt less fear of negative evaluation. The reduced fear of negative evaluation generated fewer signs of behavioral nervousness, which caused their performance to be evaluated more positively (serial mediation). Simply thinking of having power can therefore have important positive consequences for a person in an evaluation situation in terms of how he or she feels and how he or she is evaluated. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Psychosocial Adaptation and School Success of Italian,Portuguese and Albanian Students in Switzerland: Disentangling Migration Background,Acculturation and the School Context

The Swiss Mutual Intercultural Relations in Plural Societies (MIRIPS) study (n?=?1,488) examined the impact of migrant students’ acculturation strategies on their psychosocial adaptation and educational success. The study focused on the comparison of students with an Italian, Portuguese and Albanian migration background, because these three groups differ in their socioeconomic living conditions, educational resources and opportunities in Switzerland according to official statistics. With respect to acculturation strategies, the results partially confirm the integration hypothesis: immigrant students who are oriented towards the heritage culture and students who align with both the heritage culture and the majority culture (integration) and who are interested in their multicultural environment have a better psychosocial adaptation than students who align with no culture (marginalisation). In relation to educational success, a multicultural orientation and a combination of a minority and multicultural orientation turned out to be the strategies of the higher-performing students. Unexpectedly, the three groups of migrants examined in this study did not differ in their life satisfaction, an indicator for psychological adaptation or in their educational success in terms of educational aspirations and German reading skills. Rather than the migration background of the students, other demographic variables such as educational resources of the family as well as factors related to school quality (type of school, quality of social relationships, achievement expectancy of teachers, multicultural education at school) turned out to be crucial for psychosocial adaptation and educational success.     

Relationships between declarative pointing and theory of mind abilities in 3- to 4-year-olds

The current study explored the relationships between declarative pointing and theory of mind abilities in 30 children between 3 and 4 years of age. Measures used to examine theory of mind (ToM) included a parental questionnaire and the Scaling of Theory of Mind Tasks. Results showed a dissociation between expressive and informative pointing, which have been regarded as two subcategories of the declarative function. ToM abilities were significantly related to the production of informative pointing, but not to the production of expressive pointing. This distinction might be explained by special features associated with informative pointing, such as early signs of cooperation abilities. Our results might have key implications for psychologists, as they may help improve evaluation and intervention programs for the development of social skills in preschoolers.     

Hand preference for pointing gestures and bimanual manipulation around the vocabulary spurt period

This study investigated the development of hand preference for bimanual manipulative activities and pointing gestures in toddlers observed longitudinally over a 5-month period, in relation to language acquisition. The lexical spurt was found to be accompanied by an increase in the right-sided bias for pointing but not for manipulation. Moreover, results revealed a significant correlation between hand preference for imperative pointing gestures and manipulative activities in children who did not experience the lexical spurt during the observational period. By contrast, measures of handedness for declarative pointing were never correlated with those of handedness for manipulation. This study illustrates the complex relationship between handedness and language development and emphasizes the need to take the different functions of pointing gestures into account.     

Cytokines and memory across the mature life span of women

Increasing evidence suggests a role of the immune system in modulation of cognition, but details on affected memory systems are largely lacking. We therefore aimed to study the relation between selected cytokines and subsets of memory, and the impact of age in these relations. From a random population-based sample (the Betula Prospective Cohort Study), 298 women (age 45-90) were studied in terms of episodic recall and recognition, semantic fluency and knowledge, and prospective memory. Circulating cytokines of relevance for cognition and aging were measured with ELISA. Levels of interleukin (IL)-6 and sIL-2R were significantly and negatively associated with most cognitive variables, while the opposite was true for IL-1β. Age shared substantial variance with both cytokines and memory, and turned most correlations non-significant when controlled for together with education, BMI and presence of disease. Interactions between age and cytokines were further analyzed in multiple regressions. For IL-6, significant negative interactions with age were found for semantic fluency (p<0.05) and prospective memory (p<0.01), and for sIL-2R in predicting semantic knowledge (p<0.05), indicating an increased negative impact of these cytokines on memory with increasing age. In conclusion, the study indicates a relation between cytokines and memory that appears to be largely mediated by age, and supports the suggestion that cytokine dysregulation with higher age may interact with cognitive aging.     

Proprioceptive impairment and postural orientation control in Parkinson's disease

Impairment of postural control is a common consequence of Parkinson’s disease (PD). Increasing evidences demonstrate that the pathophysiology of postural disorders in PD includes deficits in proprioceptive processing and integration. However, the nature of these deficits has not been thoroughly examined. We propose to establish a link between proprioceptive impairments and postural deficits in PD using two different experimental approaches manipulating proprioceptive information. In the first one, the subjects stood on a platform that tilted slowly with oscillatory angular movements in the frontal or sagittal planes. The amplitude and frequency of these movements were kept below the semicircular canal perception threshold. Subjects were asked to maintain vertical body posture with and without vision. The orientations of body segments were analyzed. In the second one, the postural control was tested using the tendon-vibration method, which is known to generate illusory movement sensations and postural reactions. Vibrations were applied to ankle muscles. The subject’s whole-body motor responses were analyzed from center of pressure displacements.In the first experiment, the parkinsonian patients (PP) were unable to maintain the vertical trunk orientation without vision. Their performances with vision improved, without fully reaching the level of control subjects (CS). In the second experiment, the postural reactions of the PP were similar to those of the CS at the beginning of the perturbation and increased drastically at the end of the perturbation’s period as compared to those of CS and could induce fall.These results will bring new concepts to the sensorimotor postural control, to the physiopathology of posture, equilibrium and falls in PD and to the role of basal ganglia pathways in proprioception integration. Nevertheless, in order to assess precisely the role played by sensorimotor integration deficits in postural impairments in PD, further studies establishing the links between clinical features and abnormalities are now required.