Ethnicity,culture, and social resources

Assessed social integration (existence or quantity of relationships) and social (specifically, emotional) support in Mexican Americans (MAs) and non-Hispanic whites (NHWs). Ethnic differences were seen as arising from (a) demographic differences between ethnic groups that account for ethnic differences; (b) demographic attributes that have different associations with social resources for each ethnic group; (c) ethnic differences independent of these explanations. Study participants were 538 U.S.-born MA, 706 Mexico-born MA, and 1,149 NHW randomly selected community residents. Immigrants were more often married, and MAs and immigrants reported fewer friends and less emotional support, regardless of demographic attributes. Ethnic differences in demographic attributes accounted for MAs' and immigrants' smaller kin networks. Ethnic differences in demographic correlates of working accounted for MAs' lower employment rates.     

Selective attention to the color and direction of moving stimuli: Electrophysiological correlates of hierarchical feature selection

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from subjects who attended to pairs of adjacent colored squares that were flashed sequentially to produce a perception of movement. The task was to attend selectively to stimuli in one visual field and to detect slower moving targets that contained the critical value of the attended feature, be it color or movement direction. Attention to location was reflected by a modulation of the early P1 and N1 components of the ERP, whereas selection of the relevant stimulus feature was associated with later selection negativity components. ERP indices of feature selection were elicited only by stimuli at the attended location and had distinctive scalp distributions for features mediated by “ventral” (color) and “dorsal” (motion) cortical areas. ERP indices of target selection were also contingent on the prior selection of location but initially did not depend on the selection of the relevant feature. These ERP data reveal the timing of sequential, parallel, and contingent stages of visual processing and support early-selection theories of attention that stipulate attentional control over the initial processing of stimulus features.     

Racial and cultural in-betweenness meet in the consulting room: the case of ‘Anna’

An upper-middle-class black woman, who grew up adapting to a white-dominated environment, entered the consulting room of a multicultural ‘white-passing’ analyst, and here unique emotional experiences were reflected in dream images of racial disorganization, internal racism, and identity confusion. While sorting through the analysand’s internal dynamics, the external world erupted in May 2020 with the murder of George Floyd, catapulting both analysand and analyst (and the nation) into a transformative confrontation with their mutual, deep-seated woundings of American racial and cultural inequities. The analysand’s racial complexity directly impacted the analyst’s ‘white-passing’ privilege, bringing into question established classifications of American whiteness. Overlapping dynamics and experiences as ‘in-betweeners’ and ‘outsiders’ – a black woman subsumed by a white-dominated society and an immigrant refugee acculturated to American life – provided a common exilic ground for mutual understanding and mirroring. The analyst explores the racial and multicultural straddling that served as a lens into the analysand’s fragmented racial identity during the eruption of American racial unrest.     

Parental Psychopathology Levels as a Moderator of Temperament and Oppositional Defiant Disorder Symptoms in Preschoolers

Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) is among the most prevalent disorders in preschoolers. It has been linked to temperament, since characteristics such as elevated surgency and negative affect, as well as low levels of effortful control, contribute to the development of this disorder. Evidence also indicates that parental psychopathology can accentuate temperamental traits. Our aim was to assess whether the levels of psychopathology of mothers and fathers acts as a moderator of the relationship between temperament and ODD symptoms in preschoolers, both cross-sectionally at ages 3, 4 and 5, and longitudinally between ages 3 and 5. The sample included 550 children evaluated at ages 3, 4 and 5 through questionnaires and a semi-structured diagnostic interview with parents. Parents also answered a questionnaire about their own psychopathology. The results indicated that negative affect and effortful control are associated with higher levels of ODD symptoms in preschoolers. At child age 5, higher levels of paternal depression and anxiety increased the effect of low effortful control on ODD. High levels of negative affect and low levels of effortful control at age 3 were statistical predictors of ODD levels at age 5, and this relationship was also moderated by paternal anxiety and depression. The results have important clinical implications for the proper orientation of interventions, suggesting that interventions should integrate the paternal caregiver in the treatment.     

Early adversity in rural India impacts the brain networks underlying visual working memory

There is a growing need to understand the global impact of poverty on early brain and behavioural development, particularly with regard to key cognitive processes that emerge in early development. Although the impact of adversity on brain development can trap children in an intergenerational cycle of poverty, the massive potential for brain plasticity is also a source of hope: reliable, accessible, culturally agnostic methods to assess early brain development in low resource settings might be used to measure the impact of early adversity, identify infants for timely intervention and guide the development and monitor the effectiveness of early interventions. Visual working memory (VWM) is an early marker of cognitive capacity that has been assessed reliably in early infancy and is predictive of later academic achievement in Western countries. Here, we localized the functional brain networks that underlie VWM in early development in rural India using a portable neuroimaging system, and we assessed the impact of adversity on these brain networks. We recorded functional brain activity as young children aged 4–48 months performed a VWM task. Brain imaging results revealed localized activation in the frontal cortex, replicating findings from a Midwestern US sample. Critically, children from families with low maternal education and income showed weaker brain activity and poorer distractor suppression in canonical working memory areas in the left frontal cortex. Implications of this work are far‐reaching: it is now cost‐effective to localize functional brain networks in early development in low‐resource settings, paving the way for novel intervention and assessment methods.     

Clarifying The Links Between Perceived Emotional Intelligence and Well-Being in Older People: Pathways Through Perceived Social Support from Family and Friends

Applied Research in Quality of Life - Although emotional intelligence (EI) and social support are important predictors of well-being in adolescents and adults, there has been little research on...     

Emergent verbal behavior and analogy: skinnerian and linguistic approaches

The production of verbal operants not previously taught is an important aspect of language productivity. For Skinner, new mands, tacts, and autoclitics result from the recombination of verbal operants. The relation between these mands, tacts, and autoclitics is what linguists call analogy, a grammatical pattern that serves as a foundation on which a speaker might emit new linguistic forms. Analogy appears in linguistics as a regularity principle that characterizes language and has been related to how languages change and also to creativity. The approaches of neogrammarians like Hermann Paul, as well as those of Jespersen and Bloomfield, appear to have influenced Skinner's understanding of verbal creativity. Generalization and stimulus equivalence are behavioral processes related to the generative grammatical behavior described in the analogy model. Linguistic forms and grammatical patterns described in analogy are part of the contingencies of reinforcement that produce generalization and stimulus equivalence. The analysis of verbal behavior needs linguistic analyses of the constituents of linguistic forms and their combination patterns.     

Trajectories of Oppositional Defiant Disorder Irritability Symptoms in Preschool Children

This study traces the developmental course of irritability symptoms in oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) from ages 3–5 and examines the psychopathological outcomes of the different trajectories at age 6. Method. A sample of 622 3-year-old preschoolers (311 were boys), followed up until age 6, was assessed yearly with a semi-structured diagnostic interview with parents and at age 6 with questionnaires answered by parents, teachers and children. Results. Growth-Mixture-Modeling yielded five trajectories of irritability levels for the whole sample (high-persistent 3.5 %, decreasing 3.8 %, increasing 2.6 %, low-persistent 44.1 % and null 46.0 %). Among the children who presented with ODD during preschool age, three trajectories of irritability symptoms resulted (high-persistent 31.9 %, decreasing 34.9 % and increasing 33.2 %). Null, low-persistent and decreasing irritability courses in the sample as a whole gave very similar discriminative capacity for children’s psychopathological state at age 6, while the increasing and high-persistent categories involved poorer clinical outcomes than the null course. For ODD children, the high-persistent and increasing trajectories of irritability predicted disruptive behavior disorders, comorbidity, high level of functional impairment, internalizing and externalizing problems and low anger control at age 6. Conclusions. Irritability identifies a subset of ODD children at high risk of poorer longitudinal psychopathological and functional outcomes. It might be clinically relevant to identify this subset of ODD children with a high number of irritability symptoms throughout development with a view to preventing comorbid and future adverse longitudinal outcomes.     

Social Competence and Child-to-Parent Violence: Analyzing the Role of the Emotional Intelligence,Social Attitudes,and Personal Values

This study examined some variables of the so-called social competence, such as the emotional intelligence, social attitudes, and personal values in adolescents who had committed a parent-abuse offense, analyzing whether there were some differences with respect to non-offender adolescents. The sample included 60 participants. From them, 30 were adolescents who had been charged with committing a parent-abuse offense and 30 were non-offender adolescents. Results revealed that parent-abuse offenders showed lower levels of emotional intelligence, more antisocial and less prosocial attitudes than non-offender adolescents, as well as higher scores in hedonism and power values.