Computerized games to study the development of attention in childhood

Children enjoy playing games. We can take advantage of this in the designs of computerized tasks that will engage their interest. These designs also serve to advance the study of chronometric measures, such as manual and saccadic reaction times and event related potentials, with young children. The goals of our method development are (1) to allow for comparable tasks across a wide variety of ages, (2) to make possible comparisons of child performance with data gathered in adult cognitive studies, and (3) to help to support inferences about the development of underlying mechanisms. We have designed a battery of computerized tasks in order to study the development of attention functions of alertness, orienting, and executive control during childhood. Our purpose is to describe each of these tasks in detail and present the results that have been obtained so far. The battery was tested using a sample of 5-year-old children as subjects.     

Individual differences in problem solving via insight

The purpose of the present work was to identify general problem solving skills that underlie the production of insight. One hundred and eighteen participants completed insight problems, analogies, series-completion problems and the Remote Associates Test. Scores on all measures were related to performance on the insight problems (Pearson r's ranged from .31 to .47, p < .008). These findings are consistent with the notion that the abilities to apprehend relations and fluency of thought are involved in insightful problem solving.     

Working With the Sacred: Four Approaches to Religious and Spiritual Issues in Counseling

This article examines the advantages and disadvantages of 4 helping orientations of the counselor to religious and spiritual issues in psychotherapy: rejectionism, exclusivism, constructivism, and pluralism. The constructivist and pluralist approaches are advocated as those orientations best suited to work with diverse clients and religious beliefs, and flexible enough to deal respectfully, ethically, and effectively with a variety of religious and spiritual issues in counseling.     

Coercive family processes: A replication and extension of Patterson’s coercion model

Patterson hypothesized that aggressive behavior develops in families when parents use coercion as the primary mode for controlling their children. The model has been tested with boys and older children. In this paper, through confirmatory factor analysis, we examine how well the coercion model generalizes to 5‐year‐old children (boys and girls). Our results suggest that the model fits the data similarly for boys and girls. Few sex differences in child antisocial behavior were found on observed or parent‐rated measures, nor were differences found in observed parent aversive responses to child behavior. This implies that similar coercion processes apply to both boys and girls. Aggr. Behav. 27:14–25, 2001. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Episodic and semantic memory in accounts of food intolerance

It was hypothesized that accounts of occasions of eating followed by adverse symptoms (i.e. perceived food intolerance) would contain greater detail when based on recall of actual events, using episodic memory. Where accounts lacked detail it was hypothesized that recalled events were based on knowledge about food intolerance, without personal experience of a plausible incident. These hypotheses were tested by categorizing the contents of interviews of respondents to a randomized survey of the electorate in the Birmingham area, who attributed one or more adverse symptoms to one or more foods. The majority of interview records provided evidence for semantic memory rather than recall of actual episodes of food ingestion followed by symptoms(s). Vagueness of recollection correlated negatively with patho‐physiological plausibility of the perceived food intolerance. Greater detail and specificity in accounts of food‐symptom episodes was positively correlated with plausibility. Rareness of food‐symptom(s) contingencies also correlated with detail and specificity in accounts of episodes and with plausibility of food intolerance. Detail and specificity of accounts of the eating of foods followed by symptoms, when coupled with rareness of the contingency of that food being followed by those symptoms, may prove to be a better predictor of physically diagnosed food intolerance than plausibility by patho‐physiological criteria alone. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.