Mindfulness Training for Parents and Their Children With ADHD Increases the Children’s Compliance

Children with ADHD are often non-compliant with parental instructions. Various methods have been used to reduce problem behaviors in these children, with medication and manipulation of behavioral contingencies being the most prevalent. An objection often raised by parents is that these management strategies require them to impose external control on the children which not only results in the children not learning self-control strategies, but also does not enhance positive interactions between them and their parents. Studies have shown that providing mindfulness training to parents, without a focus on reducing problem behaviors, can enhance positive interactions with their children and increase their satisfaction with parenting. We were interested to see what effects giving mindfulness training to two mothers, and subsequently to their children, would have on compliance by the children. Using a multiple baseline across mothers and children design, we found that giving a mother mindfulness training enhanced compliance by her child. When the children were subsequently given similar training, compliance increased even more markedly, and was maintained during follow-up. The mothers reported associated increases in satisfaction with the interactions with their children and happiness with parenting. We suspect that the mindfulness training produces personal transformations, both in parents and children, rather than teaching strategies for changing behavior.     

Monolingual but not bilingual infants demonstrate racial bias in social cue use

Bilingualism exerts early and pervasive effects on cognition, observable in infancy. Thus far, investigations of infant bilingual cognition have focused on sensitivity to visual memory, executive function, and linguistic sensitivity. Much less research has focused on how bilingualism impacts processing of social cues. The present study sought to investigate whether bilingualism modulates the expression of one aspect of social processing: early racial bias. Using a gaze‐following paradigm, we investigated whether 18‐ to 20‐month‐old monolingual and bilingual infants favored their own race. Results demonstrated that monolingual infants favored their own race in following a model whose direction of gaze signaled an event. In contrast, bilingual infants demonstrated race‐neutral gaze‐following patterns, relying more heavily on the reliability of the behavior of the model over race. Findings suggest that bilingualism may have protective effects against the early emergence of racial bias.     

Influences of high and low variability on infant word recognition

Although infants begin to encode and track novel words in fluent speech by 7.5 months, their ability to recognize words is somewhat limited at this stage. In particular, when the surface form of a word is altered, by changing the gender or affective prosody of the speaker, infants begin to falter at spoken word recognition. Given that natural speech is replete with variability, only some of which determines the meaning of a word, it remains unclear how infants might ever overcome the effects of surface variability without appealing to meaning. In the current set of experiments, consequences of high and low variability are examined in preverbal infants. The source of variability, vocal affect, is a common property of infant-directed speech with which young learners have to contend. Across a series of four experiments, infants' abilities to recognize repeated encounters of words, as well as to reject similar-sounding words, are investigated in the context of high and low affective variation. Results point to positive consequences of affective variation, both in creating generalizable memory representations for words, but also in establishing phonologically precise memories for words. Conversely, low variability appears to degrade word recognition on both fronts, compromising infants' abilities to generalize across different affective forms of a word and to detect similar-sounding items. Findings are discussed in the context of principles of categorization that may potentiate the early growth of a lexicon.     

The development of articulatory signatures in children

The ability to perceive and produce sounds at multiple time scales is a skill necessary for the acquisition of language. Unlike speech perception, which develops early in life, the production of speech sounds starts at a few months and continues into late childhood with the development of speech-motor skills. Though there is detailed information available on early phonological development, there is very little information on when various articulatory features achieve adult-like maturity. We use modern spectral analysis to investigate the development of three language features associated with three different timescales in vocal utterances from typically developing children between 4 and 8 years. We make comparisons with adult speech and find age dependence in the appearance of these features. Results suggest that as children get older they exhibit increasingly more power in features associated with shorter time scales, thereby indicating the maturation of fine motor control in speech. Such data from typically developing children could provide milestones of speech production at different timescales. Since impairments in spoken language often provide the first warning signs of a language disorder we suggest that speech production could also be used to probe language disorders.     

Promoting step responses of children with multiple disabilities through a walker device and microswitches with contingent stimuli

Children with severe or profound intellectual and motor disabilities often present problems of balance and locomotion and spend much of their time sitting or lying, with negative consequences for their development and social image. This study provides a replication of recent (pilot) studies using a walker (support) device and microswitches with preferred stimuli to promote locomotion in two children with multiple disabilities. One child used an ABAB design; the other only an AB sequence. Both succeeded in increasing their frequencies of step responses during the B (intervention) phase(s). These findings support the positive evidence already available on the effectiveness of this intervention in motivating and promoting children's locomotion.     

Psychological Acculturation of Ethnic Minorities Into White Anglo American Culture: Consequences and Predictors1

The United States is comprised of a patchwork of ethnic groups. To varying degrees, such groups have become acculturated into the White Anglo American culture. Our study is an attempt to examine the consequences and predictors of psychological acculturation. The data were taken from 320 students attending a large state university on the West Coast of the United States. Our results show that grade point average (GPA) and income earned were positively related to psychological acculturation. Religion, ethnicity, age of entry to the United States, enrollment in a graduate program, and self‐esteem affected psychological acculturation. The implications of the results are discussed.     

Concurrent Validity Studies of the Facial Discrimination Task

We examined the concurrent validity properties of the Facial Discrimination Task (FDT), an instrument for the assessment of facial emotion recognition by comparing it with the widely used Pictures of Facial Affect (PFA). In Study 1, 100 adults with heterogeneous psychiatric diagnoses were administered items of the FDT Emotion Task, the FDT Age Task, and PFA. In Study 2, 25 normally developing preschool children were instructed to label happy, sad, or neutral facial expressions from the FDT and the PFA. Despite methodological differences between the two studies, very similar and high correlations were found between the FDT and the PFA overall correct scores (r = .79 and r = .77, respectively). The data suggest that the FDT and the PFA measure similar competencies in preschoolers and in adults with psychiatric disorders. This finding is important because it establishes the concurrent validity of the FDT in child and adult populations.