The Contributions of Parenting and Postnatal Depression on Emergent Language of Children in Low-Income Families

Children’s emergent language develops in a rich context of varied influences afforded by their familial and social environments. Using data collected during a longitudinal prospective service project, this study examined the direct and indirect contributions of parenting knowledge and practices and maternal postnatal depression on emergent language competencies of 198 very young children in high-risk Latino and African/American families in an urban area. The study used the Knowledge of Infant Development Inventory, a constructed measure of risky parenting practices for child well-health, home-safety, and corporal discipline, a constructed measure for children’s involvement in literacy oriented activities, Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale, and MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories to build and test a structural equation model with AMOS/SPSS 16. The results provide support for a mediated path model. Parenting knowledge and maternal postnatal depressive symptoms interacted directly and indirectly in influencing risky parental practices and children’s exposure in literacy oriented stimulation activities and emergent language. Children’s involvement in stimulation activities mediated the effects of parenting and maternal mental health and directly predicted a robust amount children’s emergent vocabulary. The model produced similar results for boys and girls, although boys had poorer outcomes. These findings provide empirical evidence that clinical practice and policy efforts are needed for reducing maternal postnatal depression in strengthening parenting efforts and in affording meaningful parent–child interactions and for assuring that children receive adequate exposure to activities that promote language development. Methodological limitations and recommendations for future research are addressed.     

Discrepant fluency increases subjective truth

The present experiment tested the hypothesis that perceptual fluency affects truth judgments especially when the fluency has changed. Participants were asked to judge the truth of statements that were printed in different colors. Perceptual fluency was manipulated by color contrast. Change versus no change of fluency was manipulated by using preceding statements that had the same or a different contrast. As expected, highly fluent statements were judged as more probably true than statements with a low fluency but this effect occurred only when the high fluency meant a change from previous fluency. The role of discrepancies in subjective experiences in terms of their informativeness for social judgments is discussed.     

Me against myself: motivational conflicts and emotional development in adulthood

Two studies investigated adult age differences in the frequency and emotional consequences of motivational conflicts (i.e., feeling that one wants to or should do something else in a given situation). Study 1 compared younger and older adults. Study 2 included a more age-heterogeneous sample ranging from 20 to 70 years. Data were obtained using diary and experience-sampling methods. Multilevel regression showed that motivational conflict was associated with lower emotional well-being. With age, the frequency of motivational conflict decreased, while emotional well-being increased. Importantly, the age-related decrease in motivational conflicts partly accounted for the age-related increase in emotional well-being. Findings were consistent across studies and robust after the authors controlled for age differences in a number of control variables including time use. The authors conclude that an age-related decrease in motivational conflicts in daily life may be among the factors underlying the positive development of emotional well-being into older adulthood.     

Studying Children's Intrapersonal Emotion Regulation Strategies from the Process Model of Emotion Regulation

The authors relied on the Process Model of Emotion Regulation (PMER; J. J. Gross, 2007 Gross, J. J. (2007). Handbook of emotion regulation. New York, NY: Guilford Press. [Google Scholar]) to investigate children's abilities to regulate their emotions and to assess how distinct emotion regulation strategies are used by children of different ages. In Study 1, 180 parents of children aged between 3 and 8 years old reported about a situation in which their child had been able to change what she or he was feeling. In Study 2, 126 children 3–8 years old answered 2 questions about how they regulate their own emotions. Results from both studies showed age differences in children's reported emotion regulation abilities and the strategies they used. As expected, strategies such as situation selection, situation modification, and cognitive change were used more frequently by 5–6- and 7–8-year-olds, whereas attention deployment was mainly used by 3–4-year-olds. No age differences were found for response modulation. The present research contributes to the existing body of literature on emotion regulation by adding more information about the developmental patterns for each specific emotion regulation strategy.     

Recognition memory for low- and high-frequency-filtered emotional faces: Low spatial frequencies drive emotional memory enhancement,whereas high spatial frequencies drive the emotion-induced recognition bias

This article deals with two well-documented phenomena regarding emotional stimuli: emotional memory enhancement—that is, better long-term memory for emotional than for neutral stimuli—and the emotion-induced recognition bias—that is, a more liberal response criterion for emotional than for neutral stimuli. Studies on visual emotion perception and attention suggest that emotion-related processes can be modulated by means of spatial-frequency filtering of the presented emotional stimuli. Specifically, low spatial frequencies are assumed to play a primary role for the influence of emotion on attention and judgment. Given this theoretical background, we investigated whether spatial-frequency filtering also impacts (1) the memory advantage for emotional faces and (2) the emotion-induced recognition bias, in a series of old/new recognition experiments. Participants completed incidental-learning tasks with high- (HSF) and low- (LSF) spatial-frequency-filtered emotional and neutral faces. The results of the surprise recognition tests showed a clear memory advantage for emotional stimuli. Most importantly, the emotional memory enhancement was significantly larger for face images containing only low-frequency information (LSF faces) than for HSF faces across all experiments, suggesting that LSF information plays a critical role in this effect, whereas the emotion-induced recognition bias was found only for HSF stimuli. We discuss our findings in terms of both the traditional account of different processing pathways for HSF and LSF information and a stimulus features account. The double dissociation in the results favors the latter account—that is, an explanation in terms of differences in the characteristics of HSF and LSF stimuli.     

Connections between Family Centered Care and Medical Homes of Children with Neurodevelopmental Disabilities: Experiences of Diverse Families

Cultural issues tied to race/ethnicity are important aspects in delivering medical home services to children with neurodevelopmental disabilities and their families. To better understand family satisfaction with family centered care (FCC) in medical homes of children with disabilities, this study investigated whether family race/ethnicity, in addition to parent and child characteristics, significantly influenced family perceptions of FCC in three areas: family-provider partnership, care setting practices and policies, and community coordination and follow-up. Based on the life course theory for optimizing children's developmental trajectories, examining connections between family race/ethnicity and satisfaction with health care allows for identification of strengths and weaknesses in medical home services delivery, and offers opportunities for family support and improvement in outcomes for children with disabilities. This study developed an original empirical survey using a structured questionnaire developed by Family Voices, a national advocacy organization dedicated to promoting the well-being of children with disabilities and their families. The study collected data for 122 families in a large urban area in the northeastern United States. Multivariate analyses revealed that family race/ethnicity significantly contributed to the prediction of parental satisfaction with medical homes of children with disabilities, and to families' perceptions of FCC in care setting practices and policies, and community coordination and followup, but not to family provider partnership. Non-White families reported significantly lower satisfaction. Discussion emphasizes that health care providers need to become more vigilant in providing culturally sensitive care. To enhance FCC practices and policies, the study advances a checklist of ten essential areas that promote culturally sensitive interactions between families of children with disabilities and their medical and non-medical health care providers.     

A comparison of the risk‐taking behaviors of prisoners and non‐prisoners

Do prisoners and non‐prisoners differ in their risk‐taking behavior and the domains where they take risks? Surprisingly little psychological research has addressed these questions, despite the well‐established paradigms and extensive literature on risk taking among non‐prison populations. To fill this gap, we used the Domain‐Specific Risk‐Taking Scale to compare 75 male prisoners' and 75 male non‐prisoners' risk‐taking behavior, risk perception, and risk benefit in five domains (ethical, financial, health, recreational, and social). Our results show that prisoners and non‐prisoners did not differ in their risk‐taking behavior in the ethical, financial, recreational, or social domains. In the health domain, however, prisoners exhibited significantly higher risk‐taking tendencies. With regard to risk perception, prisoners perceived activities as significantly more risky than non‐prisoners, aside from the financial domain where non‐prisoners reported significantly higher risk perception. In all five domains, prisoners perceived risk‐taking activities as offering fewer benefits compared to the non‐prisoner sample. Our results also indicate that risk‐taking activities are better predicted by the expected benefits than by risk perception for both prisoners and non‐prisoners in the recreational, financial, and ethical domains. However, for prisoners, risk taking in the social domain increased with level of perceived benefit. In the health domain, prisoners' risk taking decreased with increasing level of perceived risk, whereas for non‐prisoners, perceived benefits, but not risk perception, predicted risk taking. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Beyond "happy, angry, or sad?": age-of-poser and age-of-rater effects on multi-dimensional emotion perception

Young, middle-aged, and older raters (N=154) evaluated 1,026 prototypical facial poses of neutrality, happiness, anger, disgust, fear, and sadness stemming from 171 young, middle-aged, and older posers. The majority of poses were rated as multi-faceted, that is, to comprise several expressions of varying intensities. Consistent with the notion of age-related increases in negativity-avoidance/positivity effects, crossed-random effects analyses showed an age-related decrease in the attributions of negative, but not positive and neutral, target expressions (that the poser intended to show), and an age-related increase in the attributions of positive and neutral, but not negative, non-target expressions (that the posers did not intend to show). Expressions were more difficult to read the older the posers, particularly for male posers. These age-of-poser effects were independent of the valence of the expression, but partly differed across age groups of raters. The study supports the idea of multi-dimensionality and age-dependency of emotion perception.