Children's Loss of Agency under Extreme Adversity

This study explores the notion of children's agency in situations of extreme adversity. The child participants (n=117) live in the midst of the HIV/AIDS pandemic; extreme poverty; and systemic educational malfunction. Four focus group interviews were conducted with the children to explore their experiences of potential barriers to education. The findings indicated that contextual factors had a profoundly negative impact on the children, with their agentive capacity being severely compromised through their exposure to multiple, complex layers of risk. There was very little evidence to suggest that children retain any sense of their own agency in such adversity. This has implications for their resilience and for the development of policy and intervention strategies that may meet these children's needs.     

The interaction of pronunciation rules and lexical representations in reading aloud

Two experiments examined the role of pronunciation rules and of lexical information in pronouncing letter strings. In Experiment 1, subjects pronounced pseudowords varying in the strength of the rules needed to pronounce them, as well as in the availability of a lexical model. In Experiment 2, the stimuli were words varying in rule strength and in usage frequency. The pronunciation times from both experiments displayed an interaction between rules and lexical information: When the rules necessary were strong, the relative availability of lexical information was less important than when the rules were weak. The results were discussed with respect to both traditional dual-process models of pronunciation and models proposing the use of lexical analogies.     

Gordon Allport, character, and the "culture of personality," 1897-1937

This article examines the cultural context of early American personality psychology through a consideration of the early career of Gordon Allport. Between 1921 and 1937, Allport was among the leading figures in the movement to establish personality as a research category in American psychology. Far from being a strictly scientific concern, Allport's project was deeply embedded in the cultural politics of the age. Of particular importance was the gradual erosion of the language of character and the self-sacrificing, morally grounded self that it supported. Allport's "psychology of personality" helped fuel this trend while simultaneously attempting to resist it. His experience illustrates the elasticity and moral ambiguity of the newly emerging category of personality.