Do children think that inheritance determines height and weight?

Three studies were conducted to investigate if children think that physical growth is determined by inheritance. All three studies employed the “switched‐at‐birth” task. Study 1 investigated if children and adults thought that height and weight were determined by parentage. Study 2 examined preschoolers and elementary school children's and adults' understanding of the role of parentage and nutrition in determining weight. Study 2a examined children's and adults' understanding of the role of parentage and nutrition in determining height. Results indicate that overall, preschoolers and third graders have more of an inheritance bias for height than for weight. However, when nutrition was introduced, apart from third graders, all other grades reasoned that nutrition played a greater role in determining weight. Overall, these results indicate that even young children have a rudimentary but differentiated theory of the role of inheritance in determining height and weight.

Highlights

• Participants were presented with switched‐at‐birth tasks to determine if they thought that parentage and/or nutrition influences height and weight.
• Young children viewed height as determined more by parentage than weight, suggesting that they have a differentiated and autonomous theory for the determination of height.

     

Developing skills in counselling and psychotherapy: a scoping review of Interpersonal Process Recall and Reflecting Team methods in initial therapist training

The authors conducted a scoping review of the peer-reviewed literature associated with Interpersonal Process Recall (IPR) and Reflecting Team (RT) methods in order to find evidence for their use within skills development in therapist trainings. Inclusion criteria were: empirical research, reviews of empirical research, and responses to these; RT or IPR for skills development in counsellors/psychotherapists undertaking initial training. Six papers were identified (four IPR, two RT), all from the USA. Of the four IPR papers, three were themselves reviews, the fourth empirical paper being of poor methodological quality. There was some evidence that IPR is more valuable in developing reflective practice than in initial skills training. The small number of RT studies, of varying methodological quality, made it difficult to draw any conclusions about the appropriateness of this method for initial skills training. However, the method appeared to have been broadly welcomed by students for its potential to be inclusive and collaborative. The limitations of this current review are acknowledged, and research recommendations made.     

Development of norms for executive functions in typically-developing Indian urban preschool children and its association with nutritional status

Executive functions (EFs) are essential and important for achieving success in children’s everyday lives and play a fundamental role in children’s cognitive, academic, social, emotional and behavioral functioning. A cross-sectional study was carried out to develop age- and sex-specific norms for EFs using the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function – Preschool Version (BRIEF-P) among 2- to 5-year-olds from urban Bangalore, India. In addition, the association between EFs and anthropometric measures, a marker of nutritional status, is also examined. Primary caregivers of 412 children, equally distributed by age and sex, participated. Raw scores for each domain and indices were converted to standard t-scores and percentiles were computed. A t-score at or above 63 corresponding to the 90th percentile was considered as the cutoff for executive dysfunction in this sample. The prevalence of executive dysfunction is 10% based on the Global Executive Composite score of the BRIEF-P. The cutoff score for identifying executive dysfunction using existing United States (US) norms is higher compared to the cutoff score obtained in the current study. Therefore, using US norms for Indian children could result in the prevalence of executive dysfunction been underestimated. Multiple linear regression analysis revealed that stunted and underweight children have significantly elevated EF scores after adjusting for age, sex and socioeconomic status (SES; p < .01). A greater understanding of EFs in preschool children is important for the early identification of executive dysfunction and implementing interventions to improve their future prospects. This study also shows that undernourished children are more likely to have executive dysfunction.     

How do Children Associate Food Type to Illustrated Height and Obesity?

The following three studies examined young children’s and adults’ recognition of the impact of healthy and unhealthy foods on height and weight. Study 1 examined the impact of foods on height and weight. Study 2 examined the role of foods on characters of different ethnicities. Study 3 controlled for participants’ prior knowledge about the impact of food by presenting fictitious alien characters. The results indicated that preschoolers recognized that healthy foods promoted an increase in height but only for African-American images. Adults recognized the impact of nutrition on both height and weight with a greater emphasis of nutrition for weight than height. These results demonstrate that preschoolers’ biological model is more sophisticated and differentiated than previously reported.     

FOOD: ITS MANY ASPECTS IN SCIENCE,RELIGION, AND CULTURE

Food is a sine qua non for life on Earth. It has more significance than nutrition and sustenance, more variety than many aspects of human culture. Food has religious as well as historical dimensions. The complexity of the food chain and of the related ecological balance is one of the wonders of the biological world. In the human context, food has found countless expressions and regional richness. Food has provoked feasts, as its lack and maldistribution have caused famines. While being a source of physical satisfaction food has also had environmental impacts. Some of these matters are explored in these reflections.     

Children's Judgments of Certainty and Uncertainty on a Problem Where the Possible Solutions Differ in Likelihood

In this study the author examined why children and adults think they need to eat. Preschoolers through adults were provided with physiological, social, psychological, and routine causes for eating breakfast, lunch, snack, and dinner, and were asked to either agree or disagree with the causal responses provided. A 4 Reason × 4 Meal repeated measures analysis of variance revealed significant main effects for meals and reasons, as well as significant Meal × Reason and Meal × Reason × Grade interactions. The effect sizes ranged from 0.1 to 0.7. Across all age groups, participants acknowledged physiological needs and desires (fulfilling hunger and needs to stay healthy) and routine (e.g., it is dinner time) as the primary causes for eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner. However, for snack physiological needs were the primary reason. Second-grade students onward spontaneously produced biological justifications such as the need for energy and nutrition as important reasons for food consumption. These results lend support to the developmental model that children's and adults’ understanding of eating changes in middle childhood.     

Selective sparing of memory functioning in a patient with amnesia following herpes encephalitis

A patient with amnesia subsequent to herpes encephalitis was assessed on a series of tasks which have been shown to result in normal or near normal performance by amnesic subjects. On a pursuit rotor learning task, our patient performed normally, and continued to show evidence of memory for the skill after a period of 30 days. On a perceptual learning task, which involved the identification of line drawings, he also displayed evidence of learning and long-term retention, but his performance remained below that of control subjects. In two priming experiments, which employed a "case-control" paradigm, performance on homonym-spelling and category item-generation tasks was preceded by exposure to a selected list of words. There was no evidence of differential facilitation in respect of those words used in the initial priming task. The findings point to some degree of selectivity of preserved learning capabilities in amnesia. It is hypothesized that this selectivity may be determined by several variables, including the type of task, the etiology and site of pathology, and the severity of amnesia.     

Syndromes of retrograde amnesia: a conceptual and empirical synthesis

This article attempts a synthesis of the range of disorders that have been subsumed under the rubric of retrograde amnesia. At a functional level, it is possible to make distinctions between various forms of retrograde amnesia, including a distinction between episodic amnesia for personally experienced events and semantic retrograde amnesia for components of knowledge, such as those relating to people and events. At an anatomical level, discrete lesions to limbic-diencephalic structures usually result in a limited degree of retrograde amnesia. Marked episodic or marked semantic retrograde amnesia is usually associated with significant involvement of cortical and neocortical structures. Retrograde amnesia is a functionally heterogeneous rather than a unitary phenomenon. Discontinuities and dissociations found in published studies point to the potential fractionation of retrograde amnesia into component disorders, each with its own neural profile.