"Holding on" or "coming to terms" with educational underachievement: a longitudinal study of ambition and attainment

Given mounting aspirations to graduate from college and pervasive difficulties in obtaining a four-year degree, growing numbers of young people in the United States have become "underachievers." Using data from the ongoing Youth Development Study, the authors examine the prevalence of "holding on" and "letting go" of high aspirations and the precursors of these states as youth move from high school through their mid-twenties. They find that advantage stemming from the family of origin and changing occupational circumstances engender persistence or reappraisal of earlier educational goals.     

A preliminary study of medial temporal lobe function in youths with a history of caregiver deprivation and emotional neglect

Previous research findings have linked caregiver deprivation and emotional neglect with sensitivity to threatening cues. The present preliminary study investigated whether dysfunctions of the medial temporal lobe could underlie these associations. Using fMRI, we measured medial temporal lobe responses to emotional faces (angry, fearful, happy, neutral) among 30 youths. Eleven of the youths had a history of caregiver deprivation and emotional neglect. Attention states (i.e., attention to anger, fear, or physical attributes, or passive viewing) were systematically manipulated. Relative to comparison youths, youths with a history of caregiver deprivation and emotional neglect showed significantly greater left amygdala and left anterior hippocampus activation during the processing of threatening information. To our knowledge, these findings are the first to demonstrate altered medial temporal lobe function during the processing of threat cues in youths with a history of caregiver deprivation and emotional neglect.     

Using Technology to Enhance Adult Learning in the Counselor Education Classroom

The authors present a study that used a conceptual framework of adult learning and differentiated learning styles with graduate students in a counselor education classroom. Students in a hybrid course had higher midterm, group proposal, and posttest scores than did students in a face‐to‐face course taught by the same professor.     

Crossmodal facilitation of masked visual target identification

In the present study, participants identified the location of a visual target presented in a rapidly masked, changing sequence of visual distractors. In Experiment 1, we examined performance when a high tone, embedded in a sequence of low tones, was presented in synchrony with the visual target and observed that the high tone improved visual target identification, relative to a condition in which a low tone was synchronized with the visual target, thus replicating Vroomen and de Gelder's (2000, Experiment 1) findings. In subsequent experiments, we presented a single visual, auditory, vibrotactile, or combined audiotactile cue with the visual target and found similar improvements in participants' performance regardless of cue type. These results suggest that crossmodal perceptual organization may account for only a part of the improvement in participants' visual target identification performance reported in Vroomen and de Gelder's original study. Moreover, in contrast with many previous crossmodal cuing studies, our results also suggest that visual cues can enhance visual target identification performance. Alternative accounts for these results are discussed in terms of enhanced saliency, the presence of a temporal marker, and attentional capture by oddball stimuli as potential explanations for the observed performance benefits.     

Caring for students: Pedagogy and professionalism in an age of anxiety

University teachers are strongly motivated by the care they feel for their students. Yet today, many are frustrated. On the one hand, it is becoming harder to teach well, as more diverse student populations, new media, and new educational priorities challenge conventional pedagogical postures and styles. On the other hand, teachers are wary of calls for greater pedagogical professionalism in an increasingly managed and de-motivating professional environment. This essay examines two movements in the United States that attempt to sustain teachers' motivation by rethinking what caring for students requires them to do. The first, a call for a “scholarship of teaching and learning,” directs the professor's attention outward, towards inquiry into their students' learning; the second directs attention inwards, encouraging exploration of “the inner landscape of a teacher's life.” While both movements oppose a narrow view of pedagogy as simply technique, they address the challenge of caring for students in different ways and point to resolutions that appear to have different potential to alter the teaching environment itself. These tensions around teaching inscribe in higher education wider debates about the value of the professions, the nature of expert practice, and how to recover and ensure professionals' capacity for care.     

Executive attention and self-regulation in infancy

This study investigates early executive attention in infancy by studying the relations between infant sequential looking and other behaviors predictive of later self-regulation. One early marker of executive attention development is anticipatory looking, the act of looking to the location of a target prior to its appearance in that location, a process that involves endogenous control of visual orienting. Previous studies have shown that anticipatory looking is positively related to executive attention as assessed by the ability to resolve spatial conflict in 3–4-year-old children. In the current study, anticipatory looking was positively related to cautious behavioral approach in response to non-threatening novel objects in 6- and 7-month-old infants. This finding and previous findings showing the presence of error detection in infancy are consistent with the hypothesis that there is some degree of executive attention in the first year of life. Anticipatory looking was also related to the frequency of distress, to looking away from disturbing stimuli, and to some self-regulatory behaviors. These results may indicate either early attentional regulation of emotion or close relations between early developing fear and later self-regulation. Overall, the results suggest the presence of rudimentary systems of executive attention in infants and support further studies using anticipatory looking as a measure of individual differences in attention in infancy.     

Consumer Masculinity Behavior Among College Students and Its Relationship to Self Esteem and Media Significance

The purpose of the study was to investigate male college students in the southeastern United States to identify factors associated with consumer masculinity behavior. The variables of self-esteem and media significance were tested as possible predictors of consumer masculinity behavior. A total of 219 surveys were used as the sample for this study. Pearson correlation analysis tested relationships among the variables, and linear regression was used to further test the nature of the relationships identified. Results indicated that media significance and appearance-related self-esteem were significant predictors of consumer masculinity behavior. Limitations and implications are discussed.     

Associations between Maternal Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Symptoms and Parenting

Mothers of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are at increased risk for an ADHD diagnosis themselves, which is likely associated with impairments in parenting. The present study utilized a multi-method assessment of maternal ADHD and parenting to examine the extent to which maternal ADHD symptoms are associated with maladaptive parenting. Participants included 70 6–10 year old children with DSM-IV ADHD and their biological mothers. Results suggested that mothers with higher levels of ADHD symptoms reported lower levels of involvement and positive parenting and higher levels of inconsistent discipline. During observed parent–child interactions, maternal ADHD symptoms were negatively associated with positive parenting, and positively associated with negative parenting and repeated commands before giving the child an opportunity to comply. Given prior research suggesting that maladaptive parenting behaviors are risk factors for the later development of conduct problems among children with ADHD, these findings have important clinical implications for family-based assessment and treatment of ADHD.     

The Child Attachment Interview: a psychometric study of reliability and discriminant validity

While well-established attachment measures have been developed for infancy, early childhood, and adulthood, a "measurement gap" has been identified in middle childhood, where behavioral or representational measures are not yet sufficiently robust. This article documents the development of a new measure--the Child Attachment Interview (CAI)--which seeks to bridge this gap. The CAI is a semistructured interview, in which children are invited to describe their relationships with their primary caregivers. The coding system is informed by the Adult Attachment Interview and the Strange Situation Procedure, and produces 4 attachment categories along with a continuous measure of attachment security based on ratings of attachment-related dimensions. The main psychometric properties are presented, including interrater reliability, test-retest reliability, and concurrent and discriminant validities, both for normally developing children and for those referred for mental health treatment. The CAI correlates as expected with other attachment measures and predicts independently collected ratings of social functioning. The findings suggest that the CAI is a reliable, valid, and promising measure of child-parent attachment in middle childhood. Directions for improvements to the coding system are discussed.