Child-Oriented or Parent-Oriented Focused Intervention: Which is the Better Way to Decrease Children’s Externalizing Behaviors?

Research has tried to identify risk factors that increase the likelihood of difficulties with externalizing behavior. The relations between individual or environmental factors and externalizing behavior have been especially documented. Child-oriented and parent-oriented interventions have been designed in order to decrease externalizing behavior in preschoolers. To date, however, research has largely been compartmentalized. It is therefore not known whether child-oriented or parent-oriented intervention is more effective in reducing externalizing behavior. The aim of the current study was to answer this question by comparing two 8-week child with two 8-week parent-oriented group programs sharing a common experimental design. This was done in a pseudo-randomized trial conducted with 73 3–6-year-old children displaying clinically relevant levels of externalizing behavior who were assigned to one of the four interventions and 20 control participants who were allocated to a waiting list. The results indicate that the four programs focusing on a specific target variable, i.e., social cognition, inhibition, parental self-efficacy beliefs, or parental verbal responsiveness, are all effective in reducing externalizing behavior among preschoolers. Their effectiveness was moderated neither by their orientation toward the child or the parent nor by their content, suggesting that several effective solutions exist to improve behavioral adaptation in preschoolers. A second important highlight of this study is that, thanks to comparable effect sizes, brief focused programs appear to be a reasonable alternative to long multimodal programs, and may be more cost-effective for children and their families.     

Interviewing a Therapist in the Presence of a Couple: A Description of the Therapeutic Process

A therapy research team interviewed a therapist in the presence of a couple. Following each of six consecutive sessions with a couple, an interviewer posed questions to the therapist and couple. While one question was standard to each interview, other questions were generated by team members who tracked the entire process via live observation. These questions were directed first at the therapist, then at the couple, and then focused on therapeutic process and outcome. Findings of this process for the therapy system included decreasing the hierarchy within the client/therapist relationship; increasing the client ownership and energy in the therapy process; discovering the presence of parallel processes between the systems; and informing the direction of future therapy sessions. Practical, clinical implications are discussed for a variety of therapy settings.     

Age-Specific Effects of Lexical–Semantic Networks on Word Production

The lexical–semantic organization of the mental lexicon is bound to change across the lifespan. Nevertheless, the effects of lexical–semantic factors on word processing are usually based on studies enrolling young adult cohorts. The current study aims to investigate to what extent age-specific semantic organization predicts performance in referential word production over the lifespan, from school-age children to older adults. In Study 1, we conducted a free semantic association task with participants from six age-groups (ranging from 10 to 80 years old) to compute measures that capture age-specific properties of the mental lexicon across the lifespan. These measures relate to lifespan changes in the Available Richness of the mental lexicon and in the lexical–semantic Network Prototypicality of concrete words. In Study 2, we used the collected data to predict performance in a picture-naming task on a new group of participants within the same age-groups as for Study 1. The results show that age-specific semantic Available Richness and Network Prototypicality affect word production speed while the semantic variables collected only in young adults do not. A richer and more prototypical semantic network across subjects from a given age-group is associated with faster word production speed. The current results indicate that age-specific semantic organization is crucial to predict lexical–semantic behaviors across the lifespan. Similarly, these results also provide cues to the understanding of the lexical–semantic properties of the mental lexicon and to lexical selection in referential tasks.     

Biased language use in stereotype maintenance: the role of encoding and goals

In 4 studies, the authors investigated the relative impact of biased encoding of information and communication goals on biased language use. A category label (linguistic expectancy bias, Study 1) or a group label (linguistic intergroup bias, Study 2) was presented either before or after a story that participants were asked to communicate. Biased language use only emerged when participants learned about the group membership of the actor or the category label before hearing the story. However, communication goals had an effect on language use at the retrieval stage, independent of encoding (Studies 3 and 4). Although communication goal effects seemed to overwhelm encoding effects, encoding still influenced language use under externally imposed time pressure (Study 3) and self-imposed time constraints (Study 4). This research reaffirms the importance of both cognitive and communicative processes in stereotype maintenance and highlights the conditions under which they each operate.     

The Impact of Personality and Religion on Attitudes toward Alcohol among 16–18 Year Olds in Northern Ireland

Background: Previous research demonstrates a negative relationship between attitude toward alcohol and religiosity. However, what is less apparent is if this relationship may, at least in part, be a function of individual differences in personality, as previous research has demonstrated a relationship between certain measures of personality and both attitude toward alcohol and attitude toward religiosity. The aim of the present study was to explore the impact of personality and the relative efficacy of different markers of religiosity in predicting attitude toward alcohol among a sample of 16–18 year olds in Northern Ireland. Method: The Francis Scale of Attitude toward Alcohol (Francis, 1992c. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 31, 45–50) was administered alongside the Abbreviated Revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (Francis, Brown, & Philipchalk, 1992. Personality and Individual Differences, 13(4), 443–449), the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity (Francis & Stubbs, 1987. Personality and Individual Differences, 8, 741–743) and measures of frequency of personal prayer and church attendance among a sample of 243 16- to 18-year-old sixth-form students in Northern Ireland. Results and conclusion: The data demonstrate that a more prohibitive attitude toward alcohol was correlated with lower psychoticism scores (tendermindedness) and a more positive attitude toward Christianity. Multiple-regression analyses confirm the importance of attitude toward religion in predicting individual differences in attitude toward alcohol.     

Detection of sound rise time by adults with dyslexia

Low sensitivity to amplitude modulated (AM) sounds is reported to be associated with dyslexia. An important aspect of amplitude modulation cycles are the rise and fall times within the sound. In this study, simplified stimuli equivalent to just one cycle were used and sensitivity to varying rise times was explored. Adult participants with dyslexia or compensated dyslexia and a control group performed a detection task with sound pairs of different rise times. Results showed that the participants with dyslexia differed from the control group in rise time detection and a correlation was found between rise time detection and reading and phonological skills. A subgroup of participants with lower sensitivity to rise time detection characterized by low accuracy in syllable-level phonological skills was found within the dyslexic group. Short stimuli containing only one rise time produced associations with phonological skills and reading, even in a language where the perception of rise time contrasts are not crucial for the signaling of phonemic contrast.     

The perception of second language sounds in early bilinguals: new evidence from an implicit measure

Previous studies have suggested that nonnative (L2) linguistic sounds are accommodated to native language (L1) phonemic categories. However, this conclusion may be compromised by the use of explicit discrimination tests. The present study provides an implicit measure of L2 phoneme discrimination in early bilinguals (Catalan and Spanish). Participants classified the 1st syllable of disyllabic stimuli embedded in lists where the 2nd, task-irrelevant, syllable could contain a Catalan contrastive variation (/epsilon/-/e/) or no variation. Catalan dominants responded more slowly in lists where the 2nd syllable could vary from trial to trial, suggesting an indirect effect of the /epsilon/-/e/ discrimination. Spanish dominants did not suffer this interference, performing indistinguishably from Spanish monolinguals. The present findings provide implicit evidence that even proficient bilinguals categorize L2 sounds according to their L1 representations.     

Finger gnosia: a predictor of numerical abilities in children?

This paper aimed to test the specificity of predicting power of finger gnosia on later numerical abilities in school-age children and to contribute to the understanding of this effect. Forty-one children were tested in the beginning of Grade 1 on finger gnosia, left-right orientation (another sign of the Gerstmann "syndrome"), and global development. Fifteen months later, numerical and reading abilities were assessed. Analyses of the results indicated that, contrary to the general measures of cognitive development, performance in the finger gnosia test was a good predictor of numerical skills 1 year later but not of reading skills, which proves the specificity of that predictor. The same conclusion was also true for the left-right orientation. However, finger gnosia could equally predict performance in numerical tasks that do or do not rely heavily on finger representation or on magnitude representation. Results are discussed in terms of the localizationist and the functional hypotheses.     

Effects of backward speech and speaker variability in language discrimination by rats

Human infants use prosodic cues present in speech to extract language regularities, and it has been suggested that this capacity is anchored in more general mechanisms that are shared across mammals. This study explores the extent to which rats can generalize prosodic cues that have been extracted from a training corpus to new sentences and how this discrimination process is affected by the normalization of the sentences when multiple speakers are introduced. Conditions 1 and 2 show rats' abilities to use prosodic cues present in speech, allowing them to discriminate between sentences not previously heard. But this discrimination is not possible when sentences are played backward. Conditions 3 and 4 show that language discrimination by rats is also taxed by the process of speaker normalization. These findings have remarkable parallels with data from human adults, human newborns, and cotton-top tamarins. Implications for speech perception by humans are discussed.