Do brief personalized feedback interventions work for mandated students or is it just getting caught that works?

Studies evaluating the efficacy of brief interventions with mandated college students have reported declines in drinking from baseline to short-term follow-up regardless of intervention condition. A key question is whether these observed changes are due to the intervention or to the incident and/or reprimand. This study evaluates a brief personalized feedback intervention (PFI) for students (N = 230) who were referred to a student assistance program because of infractions of university rules regarding substance use to determine whether observed changes in substance use are attributable to the intervention. Half the students received immediate feedback (at baseline and after the 2-month follow-up), and half received delayed feedback (only after the 2-month follow-up). Students in both conditions generally reduced their drinking and alcohol-related problems from baseline to the 2-month follow-up and from the 2-month to the 7-month follow-up; however, there were no significant between-group differences at either follow-up. Therefore, it appears that the incident and/or reprimand are important instigators of mandated student change and that written PFIs do not enhance these effects on a short-term basis but may on a longer term basis.     

The onset and mastery of spatial language in children acquiring British Sign Language

In the course of language development children must solve arbitrary form-to-meaning mappings, in which semantic components are encoded onto linguistic labels. Because sign languages describe motion and location of entities through iconic movements and placement of the hands in space, child signers may find spatial semantics-to-language mapping easier to learn than child speakers. This hypothesis was tested in two studies: a longitudinal analysis of a native signing child's use of British Sign Language to describe motion and location events between the ages 1–10 and 3–0, and performance of 18 native signing children between the ages of 3–0 and 4–11 on a motion and location sentence comprehension task. The results from both studies argue against a developmental advantage for sign language learners for the acquisition of motion and location forms. Early forms point towards gesture and embodied actions followed by protracted mastery of the use of signs in representational space. The understanding of relative spatial relations continues to be difficult, despite the iconicity of these forms in the language, beyond 5 years of age.     

Longitudinal causal impacts of preschool teacher training on Ghanaian children’s school readiness: Evidence for persistence and fade‐out

Preschool programs have expanded rapidly in low‐ and middle‐income countries, but there are widespread concerns about whether they are of sufficient quality to promote children's learning and development. We conducted a large school‐randomized control trial (‘Quality Preschool for Ghana’ – QP4G) of a one‐year teacher training and coaching program, with and without parental‐awareness meetings, designed to improve preschool quality and child development. We followed 3,435 children in 240 schools in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana, a country with universal pre‐primary education. A previous study reported positive impacts of teacher training (but not teacher training plus parental‐awareness meetings) at the end of the implementation year on some dimensions of classroom quality, teacher well‐being, and children's school readiness (Wolf et al., [2019] Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 12, 10–37). The present study analyzed a new round of data collected 1 year after the end of implementation to assess (a) the extent of persistence in impacts on child development and (b) whether such impacts vary by select child, household, and school characteristics. We found impacts of the teacher training intervention on children's overall school readiness were sustained (d = 0.13), but were only marginally statistically significant. When broken down by domain, impacts on social–emotional skills specifically persisted. Persistent negative effects of teacher training plus parental‐awareness meetings varied by the literacy status of the male parent such that negative impacts were concentrated in children in households with non‐literate male heads.     

Effect of symptom information and intelligence in dissimulation: an examination of faking response styles by inmates on the Basic Personality Inventory

This study employed the Basic Personality Inventory (BPI) to differentiate various types of dis-simulation, including malingered psychopathology and faking good, by inmates. In particular, the role of intelligence in utilizing symptom information to successfully malinger was examined. On admission to a correctional facility, 161 inmates completed the BPI under standard instructions and then again under instructions to fake good (n = 55) or to malinger psychotic (n = 35), posttraumatic stress disorder (n = 36), or somatoform (n = 35) psychopathology. Unlike symptom information, intelligence evidenced some support for increasing inmates' effectiveness in malingering, although there was no relationship between higher intelligence and using symptom information to successfully evade detection. Overall, the BPI was more effective in detecting malingered psychopathology than faking good. Implications for the detection of dissimulation in correctional and forensic settings are discussed.     

Nonspecific verbal cues alleviate forgetting by young children

Verbal reminders play a pervasive role in memory retrieval by human adults. In fact, relatively nonspecific verbal information (e.g. ‘Remember the last time we ate at that restaurant?’) will often cue vivid recollections of a past event even when presented outside the original encoding context. Although research has shown that memory retrieval by young children can be initiated by physical cues and by highly specific verbal cues, the effect of less specific verbal cues is not known. Using a Visual Recognition Memory (VRM) procedure, we examined the effect of nonspecific verbal cues on memory retrieval by 4‐year‐old children. Our findings showed that nonspecific verbal cues were as effective as highly specific nonverbal cues in facilitating memory retrieval after a 2‐week delay. We conclude that, at least by 4 years of age, children are able to use nonspecific verbal reminders to cue memory retrieval, and that the VRM paradigm may be particularly valuable in examining the age at which this initially occurs.     

Twenty-two-month-olds discriminate fluent from disfluent adult-directed speech

Deviation of real speech from grammatical ideals due to disfluency and other speech errors presents potentially serious problems for the language learner. While infants may initially benefit from attending primarily or solely to infant-directed speech, which contains few grammatical errors, older infants may listen more to adult-directed speech. In a first experiment, Post-verbal infants preferred fluent speech to disfluent speech, while Pre-verbal infants showed no preference. In a second experiment, Post-verbal infants discriminated disfluent and fluent speech even when lexical information was removed, showing that they make use of prosodic properties of the speech stream to detect disfluency. Because disfluencies are highly correlated with grammatical errors, this sensitivity provides infants with a means of filtering ungrammaticality from their input.     

The relationship between search efficiency and crowding

The role of target salience in crowding has remained controversial largely because salience usually escapes objective measurement. Here we address this problem using search efficiency as a measure of target salience. In separate experiments observers determined whether parafoveal arrays of vertical Gabor patterns contained targets having a unique colour, a unique direction of motion, and a unique temporal frequency. We analysed search efficiency in the conventional manner using reaction-time gradients (in seconds per item). We also considered accuracy gradients (in percent-correct per item). Crowding is typically quantified by comparing the acuity for a target within an array to the acuity for a target presented alone. We measured orientation acuity for determining whether a slightly tilted target was clockwise or anticlockwise of vertical. Targets with a unique colour or direction of motion were found to pop out, ie (with one exception) reaction-time and accuracy gradients were insignificantly different from zero. Acuity for these targets was significantly greater than acuity for targets whose neighbours had the same colour and direction of motion. Manipulation of temporal frequency produced a wide range of search efficiencies. For three of four observers we found a linear relationship between acuity and the accuracy gradient, shallow gradients being associated with high acuity. In general, we find that crowding is weakened when observers can find a parafoveally presented target quickly and accurately.     

Spirituality and sexuality: The healthy connection

This article offers an appraisal of the relationship between the spiritual and sexual dimensions of our health. It is argued that the essential ingredient of connectedness is at the core of each of these two dimensions. A framework of seven dimensions of health is presented as a paradigm for discussing this relationship. Finally, the personal and professional implications of expanding and promoting the spiritual and sexual aspects of our health, and the striking connection between them, are discussed.