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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Constructing a New Theory From Old Ideas and New Evidence

A central tenet of constructivist models of conceptual development is that children's initial conceptual level constrains how they make sense of new evidence and thus whether exposure to evidence will prompt conceptual change. Yet little experimental evidence directly examines this claim for the case of sustained, fundamental conceptual achievements. The present study combined scaling and experimental microgenetic methods to examine the processes underlying conceptual change in the context of an important conceptual achievement of early childhood—the development of a representational theory of mind. Results from 47 children (M age = 3.7 years) indicate that only children who were conceptually close to understanding false belief at the beginning of the study, and who were experimentally exposed to evidence of people acting on false beliefs, reliably developed representational theories of minds. Combined scaling and microgenetic data revealed how prior conceptual level interacts with experience, thereby providing critical experimental evidence for how conceptual change results from the interplay between conceptions and evidence.     

Postural muscle responses following changing balance threats in young, stable older, and unstable older adults

The authors determined the postural muscle response to support surface perturbations, in relation to aging and level of stability of 16 young adults and 32 older adults who were classified into stable (SOA) and unstable (UOA) groups on the basis of their functional balance abilities. Forward and backward support surface translations of various amplitudes and velocities were used so that postural responses of the standing adults could be elicited. The thigh and leg postural muscle responses were recorded with surface electromyography (EMG). The older groups had significantly longer onset latency in the anterior postural muscles, smaller integrated EMG in the posterior muscles, and greater extent of integrated EMG attenuation over time. The UOA showed longer onset latency in the gastrocnemius following slow backward perturbation and used a greater percentage of the functional capacity of the gastrocnemius muscle than the SOA did. Those findings indicate that the SOA and UOA had limited ability to adapt to changing balance threats; the UOA were more limited than the SOA. When designing balance training programs, therefore, therapists should consider the adult's level of functional stability.     

Making human research safe: Why we cannot afford to fail

This paper was given as a keynote address at the international conference on Ethics of Intellectual Property Rights and Patents held in Warsaw, Poland on April 23–24, 2004. The address was the introductory presentation to the important topic of protecting individuals who participate in research as research subjects.