Oral behavioral patterns in facial pain, headache and non-headache populations

Patterns of oral behavior have been suggested as factors leading to head and facial pain. The present study evaluated the frequency with which certain oral habits were self-reported by five groups of Ss: Facial Pain. Tension Headache, Migraine Headache, Combined Migraine and Tension Headache and No Pain. Four oral behavior patterns were found to be significantly different among groups. These were diurnal bruxism. thrusting the jaw forward, cupping the chin in the hand and resting the hand on the side of the face. When Ss were reclassified into those reporting no facial pain, temporomandibular joint (TMJ) pain, or a combination of TMJ and jaw muscle pain, the variables of diurnal bruxism and resting the hand on the side of the face were found to predict significantly both pain groups. However, the resting the hand factor was negatively weighted for the TMJ Pain group only. One other factor, nocturnal bruxism. was found to be self-reported at a significantly higher frequency in the Combined Facial Pain group compared to the No Facial Pain and TMJ Pain groups. Discussion focuses on the implications of the present findings on research in the facial pain and headache areas.     

Touch by Intrusive and Withdrawn Mothers with Depressive Symptoms

Interaction behaviours of 88 adolescent mothers with depressive symptoms and their 3-month-old infants were videotaped and coded for different types of touch. The ‘depressed’ mothers were classified as intrusive, withdrawm or good by one observer and another observer coded rough tickling, poking, tugging and pulling as negative touch behaviours and gentle stroking and rubbing as positive touch behaviours. The mothers with depressive symptoms were more likely to touch their infants in a negative way and more likely to be classified as intrusive.     

Measuring Associative Strength: Category-Item Associations and Their Activation from Memory

Three measures of the strength of association between a category and members of the category were investigated: (a) a naming measure, in which the participants (93 undergraduates) were asked to list the members of a category and the listing order was assumed to reflect associative strength; (b) a latency measure, which assessed the latency to correctly identify specific items as members or nonmembers of a given category; and (c) a facilitation measure, in which the spontaneous activation of an item upon presentation of a category label as a prime was assessed by considering the extent to which the prime facilitated recognition of an initially degraded (visually obscured) item. The three measures correlated substantially, thus validating the naming and latency measures as reasonable approximations of the likelihood that a given item will receive activation in memory when the category is presented. Many of the constructs of interest to survey researchers can be viewed similarly as associations in memory, and the naming and latency measures can be fruitfully used in surveys; research attesting to the utility of namingand latency data is reviewed.     

Parent engagement in an original and culturally adapted evidence-based parenting program,Legacy for Children™

Legacy for Children™ (Legacy) is an evidence-based program focused on promoting sensitive, responsive parenting for socioeconomically disadvantaged families. Legacy has recently been culturally and linguistically adapted for Spanish-monolingual Latino families and is being piloted in partnership with an early childhood education program. We conducted a mixed methods study to identify barriers and facilitators to engagement, using program monitoring data sources from both participant and group leader perspectives. We conducted qualitative analyses of open-ended data to identify distinct barriers (e.g., employment challenges, health-related challenges and appointments) and facilitators (e.g., other mothers in group, interest in program topics) to engagement that emerged across English and Spanish language curriculum versions; curriculum-specific barriers and facilitators were also documented. We interpret these findings in light of quantitative data on measures of engagement, showing that participants in the Spanish curriculum evidenced comparable levels of parent–group leader relationship quality relative to the English group, and higher levels of parent's group support/connectedness and overall satisfaction. These results offer promising considerations for optimizing families’ engagement in parenting programs in the context of early care and education settings.     

Reducing the Biological and Psychological Toxicity of Poverty-related Stress: Initial Efficacy of the BaSICS Intervention for Early Adolescents

This proof-of-concept study tests the initial efficacy of the Building a Strong Identity and Coping Skills (BaSICS) intervention, a selective prevention of internalizing problems program for early adolescents exposed to high levels of poverty-related stress. Eighty-four early adolescents (M_age = 11.36 years) residing in very low-income neighborhoods were randomized to receive the 16-session intervention (n = 44) or to an assessment-only control condition (n = 40). BaSICS teaches coping skills, social identity development, and collective social action to empower youth with the ability to connect with members of their communities and cope with poverty-related stress in positive and collaborative ways. Pretest–posttest analyses showed that intervention adolescents acquired problem-solving and cognitive-restructuring skills and reduced their reliance on avoidant coping. In addition, HPA reactivity was significantly reduced in the intervention youth, but not controls. Finally, intervention youth's internalizing and somatic symptoms as reported by both youth and their parents, showed significant reductions over time, whereas control youth had no such changes. Results provide strong support for this approach to strength-building and symptom reduction in a population of early adolescents exposed to poverty-related stress.     

Inefficient conjunction search made efficient by concurrent spoken delivery of target identity

Visual search based on a conjunction of two features typically elicits reaction times that increase linearly as a function of the number of distractors, whereas search based on a single feature is essentially unaffected by set size. These and related findings have often been interpreted as evidence of a serial search stage that follows a parallel search stage. However, a wide range of studies has been showing a form of blending of these two processes. For example, when a spoken instruction identifies the conjunction target concurrently with the visual display, the effect of set size is significantly reduced, suggesting that incremental linguistic processing of the first feature adjective and then the second feature adjective may facilitate something approximating a parallel extraction of objects during search for the target. Here, we extend these results to a variety of experimental designs. First, we replicate the result with a mixed-trials design (ruling out potential strategies associated with the blocked design of the original study). Second, in a mixed-trials experiment, the order of adjective types in the spoken query varies randomly across conditions. In a third experiment, we extend the effect to a triple-conjunction search task. A fourth (control) experiment demonstrates that these effects are not due to an efficient odd-one-out search that ignores the linguistic input. This series of experiments, along with attractor-network simulations of the phenomena, provide further evidence toward understanding linguistically mediated influences in real-time visual search processing.     

Review of three tests of motor proficiency in children

The present purpose is to provide clinicians, occupational and physical therapists, and educators with a comparative analysis of three tests of motor proficiency. The Bruininks-Oseretsky Test of Motor Proficiency, Movement Assessment Battery for Children, and Tufts Assessment of Motor Performance were developed to assess the motor skills of children with developmental delays. The selection criteria, interrater reliability, reproducibility, and recommended use of each test are reported here. Recommendations for use of each test include standardization of the sample population to ensure its appropriateness.     

Profiles of change in self-constructions among early- and later-bereaved widows

The portrayal of the construct self was formulated using the protocols of 12 bereaved widows ranging in age from 56 to 82 years of age at the time of the interview. Each widow was interviewed every two to three weeks using a structured interview together with a self-report scale. They were asked to revisit their expeiences of coping with the death of their husbands in their efforts to adapt to life without their husbands and assess the nature of their coping actions. Using Lazarus and Folkman's 1986 coping scale enabled the delineation of three coping action modes or solutions of "moving away," "moving against," "moving toward," self and others in terms of Horney's early work. Analysis of the profiles using these coping action modes suggested qualities of restructuring of the self among the 12 bereaved widows. Some simple observations were made about the importance of research on self-constructions and the potential for the use of internal dialogues in grief work.     

Eye movements and spoken language comprehension: effects of visual context on syntactic ambiguity resolution

When participants follow spoken instructions to pick up and move objects in a visual workspace, their eye movements to the objects are closely time-locked to referential expressions in the instructions. Two experiments used this methodology to investigate the processing of the temporary ambiguities that arise because spoken language unfolds over time. Experiment 1 examined the processing of sentences with a temporarily ambiguous prepositional phrase (e.g., "Put the apple on the towel in the box") using visual contexts that supported either the normally preferred initial interpretation (the apple should be put on the towel) or the less-preferred interpretation (the apple is already on the towel and should be put in the box). Eye movement patterns clearly established that the initial interpretation of the ambiguous phrase was the one consistent with the context. Experiment 2 replicated these results using prerecorded digitized speech to eliminate any possibility of prosodic differences across conditions or experimenter demand. Overall, the findings are consistent with a broad theoretical framework in which real-time language comprehension immediately takes into account a rich array of relevant nonlinguistic context.