Assessment of mothers' concerns about infants,toddlers, and preschoolers

Only recently has determining the child-rearing concerns of parents been considered an important research objective. Existing efforts have, for the most part, either employed small sample sizes or surveyed parents already in the process of seeking help or advice. It was, therefore, felt that additional, more representative data were needed. In the present study, 583 mothers with children aged 59 months or younger were surveyed regarding their concerns about their children's development. On the „Specific Needs Assessment Report”︁ (SNAR) (copyright © 1975, by Karl F. Riem, J. Jeffrey Crisco, and Kathy Willms), mothers rated their concerns for 60 developmental-behavioral items about their children's health, attending skills, problem behaviors, communication skills, motor skills, cognitive skills, self-help skills, and social skills. Mothers were most frequently concerned to a moderate or major degree about at least one item of the problem behavior category. For this category, parent-child management, crying-whining, and temper tantrums were the individual items of greatest concern. Mothers of girls more frequently indicated health concerns than mothers of boys. These results support those of previous investigations, which suggested the need for parent education programs to help parents manage their children.     

Victimization of Individuals with Legal Blindness: Nature and Forms of Victimization

This article reports the results of a study of the forms of victimization experienced by individuals with legal blindness. Semi-structured interviews with 58 legally-blind persons were conducted. Results reveal that individuals with legal blindness generally experience criminal victimization at rates consistent with the sighted population but, in some cases, experience certain forms of victimization at rates higher than the sighted population.     

Toward law–gospel harmony in Lutheran theology and ethics

Lutheran antipathy toward the law is harmful to Christian ethics. This antipathy arises from the false notion that law and gospel are opposed. However, the Lutheran Confessions show that law–gospel distinction does not necessarily imply law–gospel opposition. When law and gospel are properly defined, they interrelate harmoniously within a multiperspectival model of Christian ethics. Moreover, the third use of the law then emerges as the basic and primary use.     

Treating a Chronically Depressed Adolescent Female Using the Cognitive Behavioral Analysis System of Psychotherapy: A Case Study

A case is presented of an adolescent female with double depression who was treated using the Cognitive Behavioral Analysis System of Psychotherapy (CBASP). CBASP is designed to teach a social problem-solving procedure called Situational Analysis (SA). Generalized treatment effects were measured through monitoring of diagnostic status, two administrations of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-Adolescent, weekly administrations of the Child Depression Inventory, and acquisition performance ratings on the SA task. The results showed that CBASP appeared to be an effective treatment. The double depressive disorder remitted, and the patient learned to identify behavioral consequences as well as target and attain her interpersonal goals. CBASP can be effective for adolescents, although modifications of the adult form of the therapy may be necessary.     

Targets' Awareness of Expectations and Behavioral Confirmation in Ongoing Interactions

Participants engaged in a getting-acquainted interaction over an intercom after one participant (the perceiver) was provided with a positive (extraverted) or relatively negative (introverted) expectation about the other participant (the target). After completing evaluations of each other and the interaction, participants interacted for a second time. Prior to this second interaction, however, targets were made aware of the perceivers' initial expectation, told that it had been confirmed by their own behavior, and given a randomly assigned attribution (either dispositional or situational) about the perceived cause of their confirmatory behavior. Results demonstrated that targets made aware of dispositionally attributed and relatively negative expectations were more likely to increase in expectation-disconfirming behavior, compared to targets made aware of situationally attributed and relatively negative expectations, who were themselves more likely to continue to confirm the expectations. Implications for the study of behavioral confirmation of expectations and other interpersonal processes are discussed.     

Learning directions of objects specified by vision,spatial audition,or auditory spatial language

The modality by which object azimuths (directions) are presented affects learning of multiple locations. In Experiment 1, participants learned sets of three and five object azimuths specified by a visual virtual environment, spatial audition (3D sound), or auditory spatial language. Five azimuths were learned faster when specified by spatial modalities (vision, audition) than by language. Experiment 2 equated the modalities for proprioceptive cues and eliminated spatial cues unique to vision (optic flow) and audition (differential binaural signals). There remained a learning disadvantage for spatial language. We attribute this result to the cost of indirect processing from words to spatial representations.     

Postmodernism Versus Modernism: Rethinking Theoretical Tensions in Social Gerontology

The interconnection of social theory to social aspects of aging has grown in recent years. The theoretical movement entitled structured dependency, couched in social class analysis, has tended to ignore an understanding of aging identity, the body, cultural representations of aging, and positive images of aging, all of which are central features of an emerging postmodern paradigm in gerontological theory. This article argues that the concept of gender can form a useful bridge, a continuity, between structured dependency and postmodernism in theoretical gerontology. Unfortunately, the compartmentalization of these two conceptual approaches has made their links difficult to forge. This article attempts to take a first step in this direction by highlighting the way postmodern ideas can be used to understand a modernist issue—gender in a gerontological context. Also, focusing on the aging body as a primary form of analysis generates some novel insights into the importance of both the theoretical understanding and cultural representations of the body.     

Infants' and adults' use of duration and intensity cues in the segmentation of tone patterns

Adults and 8-month-olds were presented with sequences in which every third complex tone was either longer or more intense. Segmentation was measured by comparing the detection of silent gaps inserted into three possible locations in each pattern: Silent gaps inserted at perceived segmentation boundaries are harder to detect than gaps within perceived phrases or groups. A go/no-go conditioned head-turn (hand-raising for adults) procedure was used. In Experiment 1, detection was worse for the gaps following the longer complex tones than for the gaps at the other locations, suggesting that the longer tones marked the ends of perceived groups for both infants and adults. Experiment 2 showed that an increase in intensity did not result in any systematic grouping at either age.     

Psychosocial Treatment Strategies in the MTA Study: Rationale, Methods, and Critical Issues in Design and Implementation

The Collaborative Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), the MTA, is the first multisite, cooperative agreement treatment study of children, and the largest psychiatric/psychological treatment trial ever conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health. It examines the effectiveness of Medication vs. Psychosocial treatment vs. their combination for treatment of ADHD and compares these experimental arms to each other and to routine community care. In a parallel group design, 579 (male and female) ADHD children, aged 7–9 years, 11 months, were randomly assigned to one of the four experimental arms, and then received 14 months of prescribed treatment (or community care) with periodic reassessments. After delineating the theoretical and empirical rationales for Psychosocial treatment of ADHD, we describe the MTA's Psychosocial Treatment strategy applied to all children in two of the four experimental arms (Psychosocial treatment alone; Combined treatment). Psychosocial treatment consisted of three major components: a Parent Training component, a two-part School Intervention component, and a child treatment component anchored in an intensive Summer Treatment Program. Components were selected based on evidence of treatment efficacy and because they address comprehensive symptom targets, settings, comorbidities, and functional domains. We delineate key conceptual and logistical issues faced by clinical researchers in design and implementation of Psychosocial research with examples of how these issues were addressed in the MTA study.Deceased     

Parenting and Family Stress Treatment Outcomes in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): An Empirical Analysis in the MTA Study

Parenting and family stress treatment outcomes in the MTA study were examined. Male and female (579), 7–9-year-old children with combined type Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), were recruited at six sites around the United States and Canada, and randomly assigned to one of four groups: intensive, multi-faceted behavior therapy program alone (Beh); carefully titrated and monitored medication management strategy alone (MedMgt); a well-integrated combination of the two (Comb); or a community comparison group (CC). Treatment occurred over 14 months, and assessments were taken at baseline, 3, 9, and 14 months. Parenting behavior and family stress were assessed using parent-report and child-report inventories. Results showed that Beh alone, MedMgt alone, and Comb produced significantly greater decreases in a parent-rated measure of negative parenting, Negative/Ineffective Discipline, than did standard community treatment. The three MTA treatments did not differ significantly from each other on this domain. No differences were noted among the four groups on positive parenting or on family stress variables. Results are discussed in terms of the theoretical and empirically documented importance of negative parenting in the symptoms, comorbidities and long-term outcomes of ADHD.