A Review of: “The Fundamentals of Brain Development: Integrating Nature and Nurture. By Joan Stiles.”

Reviews the book The Fundamentals of Brain Development: Integrating Nature and Nurture by Joan Stiles. This volume examines the complex interactions between inheritance and experience by detailing the hows and whys of brain development from conception through adolescence. Weaving together evidence from neuroscience, embryology, genetics, physiology, and psychology, Stiles presents a tour-de-force guide of the metamorphoses that take place in the creation of the mammalian brain—metamorphoses that are often overlooked or misunderstood by an analysis of behavior alone. Throughout, many surprising and counterintuitive findings are set forth. The volume provides a stunning, in-depth, biologically based way of thinking about innateness, learning, and experience for a broader psychology audience.     

Assigning Integration: A Framework for Intellectual,Personal, and Professional Development in Seminary Courses

This article explores assignments as a core teaching practice essential to integrating the cognitive, personal, and professional identities of seminary students. These core practices emerge in seminary curricula where there is a strong focus on the teaching of canonical texts and a goal of achieving textual mastery. We propose that carefully chosen and constructive assignments achieve the kind of integration necessary for building content knowledge and the professional, spiritual, and religious identities of our students. While the difference between the educational goals of clergy‐training in a seminary and training graduate students in the academy can be sharp, we argue here for ways to make that contrast both productive and generative.     

Parallel Group Treatment of Pre-School Children and Their Mothers

Object relations concepts are applicable in children's group psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The author attempts to explore and delineate areas in which developmental conflicts in object relations, emotional deprivations, traumas, and family pathologies are recapitulated in the group, and how the manifestations of pathologies can be rectified by the process and formation of the group and the role of the therapist as a “new object” in the management of individual and group transferences. Clinical examples are presented.     

Neuromuscular Control of Posture in the Infant and Child

This study explored the effects of vision and maturation on the characteristics of neuromuscular responses underlying balance control in both seated and standing children of five age groups (3½–5 months, 8–14 months, 2–3 years, 4–6 years, and 7–10 years). A platform was used to unexpectedly disturb the child’s balance in the anterior or posterior direction. Responses of the leg, trunk, and neck muscles were recorded using surface electromyograms.

Vision was not required for the activation of these responses in any of the age groups tested. However, comparison of muscle response latencies of standing children to posterior platform translation in the two visual conditions showed a significant reduction in latency for neck flexors in the 2- to 3-year-olds with vision removed and an increase in the total number of monosynaptic reflexes. No reduction in latency was found in the older age groups. The hypothesis of a shift from an early long latency visual dominance to a shorter latency proprioceptive one during childhood is discussed.

Postural control showed a cephalo-caudal developmental gradient with postural responses appearing first in the neck, then trunk, and finally, legs, as children developed from 3 to 14 months of age. A wide variety of response patterns was seen in the 3- to 5-month-olds, indicating that postural responses are not functional prior to experience with stabilizing the center of mass.     

Correlation of the Response Potentials of the Skin with “Exciting” and Non-“Exciting” Stimuli

The relationship between psychological test performance and adult judgments of children's intelligence was explored in Guatemala and the U. S. A. In Guatemala, 15 male and 15 female children, age eight, were studied in each of two rural villages. In one village, 48 adult community members ranked the children on intelligence; in the other, 29 adults did the rankings. Male and female children were ranked separately. In the U. S., nine male children in a small New Jersey town were ranked by 25 adults. In a second U. S. community. a small California town, eight male children were ranked by 14 adults. In general, adult judgments were found to be congruent with children's test performance. In Guatemala, a simple family socioeconomic index was also related to both adult judgment and children's test performance. The implications of the results and the utility of these types of judgment techniques in cross-cultural research are discussed.     

Preschool Ontology: The Role of Beliefs About Category Boundaries in Early Categorization

These studies examined the role of ontological beliefs about category boundaries in early categorization. Study 1 found that preschool-age children (N = 48, aged 3–4 years old) have domain-specific beliefs about the meaning of category boundaries; children judged the boundaries of natural kind categories (animal species, human gender) as discrete and strict, but they judged the boundaries of other categories (artifact categories, human race) as more flexible. Study 2 demonstrated that these domain-specific ontological intuitions guide children's learning of new categories; children (N = 28, 3-year-olds) assumed that the boundaries of novel animal categories would be narrower and more strictly defined than novel artifact categories. These data demonstrate that abstract beliefs about the meaning of category boundaries shape early conceptual development.     

“It is Sometimes Soul-Destroying”: Doctors’ Reflections on Unemployment and Health in Thatcher’s Britain

Journal of Medical Humanities - Through an analysis of two sets of writing in the British Medical Journal from the 1980s, this article explores relationships between unemployment and health....