Measuring neighborhood context for young children in an urban area

Awareness of worsening conditions in urban areas has led to a growing interest in how neighborhood context affects children. Although the ecological perspective within child development has acknowledged the relevance of community factors, methods of measuring the neighborhood context for children have been quite limited. An approach to measuring neighborhood environments was tested using the average perceptions of caregivers of young children sampled from high- and low-risk block groups. Individual- and aggregate-level reliabilities and discriminant validity were acceptable for dimensions of neighborhood quality and change, participation in block organizations, disorder and incivilities, service usage and quality, and retaliation against adults. However, for measures of neighborhood interaction and the tendency of adults to intervene with children, there was virtually no agreement among respondents within block groups, resulting in poor aggregate reliability. A model of variability may be a more promising way of characterizing neighborhoods along these dimensions. This research was supported primarily by a grant from The Foundation for Child Development, as well as support from the Cleveland Foundation.     

Results of intensive stuttering therapy with adults who clutter and stutter

The purpose of this investigation was to report on the identification of adult clients who clutter and stutter, evaluate their response to a stuttering therapy program, and determine if speech measures typically used in evaluating therapy outcome are sufficiently sensitive indicators of change for clients who clutter and stutter. Results suggest that cluttering-stuttering subjects had a very positive response to stuttering therapy, but greater improvements may have been achieved with additional therapy time and expanded therapy goals. Results also indicate that pretreatment and posttreatment measures of articulatory rate may be a more sensitive measure of change for cluttering-stuttering clients.     

Teacher practices associated with students' sense of the classroom as a community

Data from observations of 232 elementary classrooms and from student questionnaires were used to test a model linking teacher classroom practices to students' sense of the classroom as a community (assessed by questionnaire) through intermediate effects on students' classroom behavior. The model was generally confirmed and showed that teacher practices (emphasis on prosocial values, elicitation of student thinking and expression of ideas, encouragement of cooperation, warmth and supportiveness, andreduced use of extrinsic control) were related to student classroom behaviors (engagement, influence, andpositive behavior), which, in turn, were related to students'sense of community. Teachers' encouragement of cooperative activities appeared to be particularly important in this sequence. The appropriateness of the model was tested for schools serving populations that were both high and low in level of poverty, and all estimates of path coefficients were found to be invariant across these groups. Developmental Studies Center This research is part of a larger project that is being funded by grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; the San Francisco Foundation; the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; the Danforth Foundation; the Stuart Foundations; the Pew Charitable Trusts; the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; the Annenberg Foundation; Spunk Fund, Inc.; the DeWitt Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, Inc.; Louise and Claude Rosenberg; and the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The views expressed in the paper are those of the authors and not necessarily of the funders. We are grateful to the many educators, students, and colleagues who cooperated with us on this project and to several anonymous reviewers who provided helpful suggestions.     

Monoptic and dichoptic metacontrasf

Metacontrast suppression was compared under conditions of monoptic and dichoptic presentation. It was found that interference was greater with dichoptic than with monoptic presentation, and that the point of maximum interference differed in the two conditions. The interference curve generated as a function of inter-stimulus interval (ISI) was also different; monoptically a “U”-shaped curve was found, whereas dichoptically the curve appeared to be more “J”-shaped. Theoretical implications are discussed, and it is suggested that binocular rivalry may play a role in dichoptic interference.     

Chaining and secondary reinforcement based on escape from shock

Three white rats were trained to press a bar while being shocked. This produced a white noise. After 30 sec they were allowed to terminate both the shock and the noise by nosing a pigeon key. Comparison of the rates of pressing before and after the onset of the noise indicated that the noise itself was the immediate reinforcing agent for pressing. Furthermore, control tests showed that pressing was maintained only if it produced the noise: either omission of the noise or elimination of the dependency of the noise on the occurrence of the response led to a gradual abolition of pressing. When automatic termination of the shock was substituted for the key nosing requirement, however, only the key nosing extinguished. This indicated that the effectiveness of the noise as a reinforcer did not depend on its status as a discriminative stimulus for some other form of operant behavior.     

Expected endings and judged duration

In four experiments, the predictions of an expectancy/contrast model (Jones & Boltz, 1989) for judged duration were evaluated. In Experiments 1 and 2, listeners estimated the relative durations of auditory pattern pairs that varied in contextual phrasing and temporal contrast. The results showed that when the second pattern of a pair either seems to (Experiments 1 and 2) or actually does (Experiment 2) end earlier (later)than the first, subjects judge it as being relatively shorter (longer). In Experiment 3, listeners heard single patterns in which notes immediately preceding the final one were omitted. Timing of the final (target) tone was varied such that it was one beat early, on time, or one beat late. Listeners’ ratings of target tones revealed systematic effects of phrasing and target timing. In Experiment 4, listeners temporally completed (extrapolated) sequences of Experiment 3 that were modified to exclude the target tone. The results again showed that phrase context systematically influenced expectancies about “when” sequences should end. As a set, these studies demonstrate the effects of event structure and anticipatory attending upon experienced duration and are discussed in terms of the expectancy/contrast model.     

The generation of temporal and melodic expectancies during musical listening

When listening to a melody, we are often able to anticipate not onlywhat tonal intervals will occur next but alsowhen in time these will appear. The experiments reported here were carried out to investigate what types of structural relations support the generation of temporal expectancies in the context of a melody recognition task. The strategy was to present subjects with a set of folk tunes in which temporal accents (i.e., notes with a prolonged duration) always occurred in the first half of a melody, so that expectancies, if generated, could carry over to an isochronous sequence of notes in the latter half ofthe melody. The ability to detect deviant pitch changes in the final variation as a function of rhythmic context was then evaluated. Accuracy and reaction time data from Experiment 1 indicated that expectancy formation jointly depends on an invariant periodicity of temporal accentuation and the attentional highlighting ofcertain melodic relations (i.e., phrase ending points). In Experiment 2, once these joint expectancies were generated, the temporal dimension had a greater facilitating effectupon melody recognition than did the melodic one. These results are discussed in terms of their implications for the perceptual processing of musical events.     

The business of ivory tower research: Paradigms for university-corporate partnerships

A university research team in a department of Counseling Psychology initiated three university/industry collaborative projects. While studying quality of work life in the hotel industry, nurse job satisfaction in the health care industry and assertive behavior in the banking industry the research team contributed its academic objectivity and research skills to these clients. At the same time the university received the benefit of a laboratory work environment, as well as the opportunity to apply academic theory. Both parties in the three partnerships benefitted from the collaboration.     

Teachers' selections of boys and girls as prominent pupils

Over 300 teachers and student-teachers were asked to nominate their most noticeable pupils regarding ability, achievement, behavior, and teacher's preoccupation with them, as defined in eight eminently school-relevant categories. Frequencies of male and female names recorded were employed as measures of teachers' perception of saliency of the two sexes. Respondents recalled significantly more boys as prominent in most categories. More boys than girls were perceived as the best students in general and in mathematics in particular, and as possessing high potential. More boys than girls occupied the minds of these teachers after school. Boys appeared to cause the overwhelming majority of discipline problems. On the other hand, more girls were considered very successful in Hebrew and in social skills. Boys received more nominations in each of their five categories of salience then did girls in any of their two categories of salience. No difference was found between sex-related nominations of experienced teachers and student-teachers. Findings indicate that both teachers and future teachers of the elementary grades perceive boys as the majority of salient students. Moreover, the directions of most sex differences found are stereotypical. Such perceptions, unsupported by objective psychometric evidence, may impede sex equity in school practice, and particularly deprive girls of opportunities of full personal development.Part of this study was presented at the Third International Interdisciplinary Congress on Women, Dublin, Ireland, 1987. We would like to thank Hudda Halabi and Tamar Michaeli for their help in coding.     

Characteristics of taste-mediated environmental potentiation in rats

When rats drink a novel flavor in a distinctive environment and are injected with lithium, potentiated aversions are established to the environment as evidenced by the animals' unwillingness to consume a familiar, nonaversive flavor in this environment. Experiment 1 demonstrates that this potentiation is due to the presence of both the distinctive taste and the environmental cues on the conditioning trials, not simply aversive conditioning to each element or to generalization between the two elements. This potentiation phenomenon was shown to be sensitive to the novelty of the potentiating flavor in Experiment 2. Experiment 3 demonstrated that second-order conditioning is difficult to establish using these procedures, although Experiment 4 revealed that postconditioning extinction of the aversive flavor interfered substantially with environmental potentiation. These outcomes are discussed in terms of their implications for adaptive adjustments in feeding behavior as well as for more general conceptions of associative learning.