Race,social class,and response bias effects in grammatical processing

Black English and Standard English grammatical sentences were presented to 122 Black and White second graders in a modified cloze task. Both race and social class differences were sampled from within a single primary school, and both Black and White experimenters were utilized. No effects due to social class were found. Black subjects did better on Black English sentences than White subjects and showed fewer errors in the direction of Standard English syntax. An analysis of hit rates and false alarm rates suggested that Black subjects were more likely to emit Black English responses than White subjects but that both groups possessed equivalent sensitivity to grammatical differences. The results are not consistent with a deficit account of Black subjects' performance or with an explanation based on different dialect systems. Rather, it appears that Black and White children may differ only in their willingness to utilize specific response systems and may possess equal comprehension abilities in both dialect systems.This research was supported in part by funds made available to Bowling Green State University by NSF Institutional Grant No. GU-3619. Some of the findings were reported at the 83rd Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, Chicago, 1975.     

Relationship assessment in infant mental health

Infant-caregiver relationships are the crucial context for infant development and psychopathology. Considerable evidence suggests that infants may construct qualitatively different relationships with different caregivers. For these reasons, infant-caregiver relationships should be a centerpiece of assessment in infant mental health. We advocate assessing infant relationships with all important caregivers in both clinic based and naturalistic settings. In this article we describe our approach, which attends both to the external component of the relationship, behavioral interaction, as well as the internal component of the relationship, subjective experience. By integrating results from assessments of these two components, we determine both level of relationship adaptation and the specific domains of strengths and weaknesses. © 1997 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health     

Flavor Fatigue: Cognitive Depletion Influences Consumer Enjoyment of Complex Flavors

Surprisingly, little research has examined how consumer responses to specific flavor characteristics of food are formed or how they may fluctuate situationally. We address this lacuna in the literature on the hedonic appreciation of food by demonstrating that enjoyment along one important gustatory dimension, flavor complexity, varies with the degree to which consumers are mentally depleted. Specifically, showing that gustatory sensations are more cognitively demanding than previously thought, findings from three studies evince that cognitive depletion reduces consumer enjoyment of complex‐flavored (but not simple‐flavored) foods via a reduction in pleasure that otherwise can be derived from complex flavors. We establish this effect across three different food categories and provide preliminary evidence for consumers’ ability to identify flavors as the underlying process. Our findings offer theoretical contributions and avenues for future research.     

Children and Adolescents of Cancer Patients: The Impact of Cancer on the Family

In this article, extant literature was reviewed to examine the impact of parental cancer on the family. Many researchers and scholars have hypothesized that parental illnesses, like cancer, can affect all levels of the family system. However, most psychosocial research to date has focused on how cancer affects the patient and the couple. Consequently, little is known about how parental cancer affects the psychosocial development of children and adolescents. Therefore, research is needed to explore how children and adolescents are negatively impacted or protected from the effects of living with a parent who has cancer. More specifically, longitudinal studies that examine the mechanisms by which the cancer affects children's and adolescents' functioning can help physicians and family therapists clinically intervene in more efficacious ways.     

“Hunting with a knife and … fork”: Examining central coherence in autism,attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder,and typical development with a linguistic task

A local processing bias, referred to as “weak central coherence,” has been postulated to underlie key aspects of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Little research has examined whether individual differences in this cognitive style can be found in typical development, independent of intelligence, and how local processing relates to executive control. We present a brief and easy-to-administer test of coherence requiring global sentence completions. We report results from three studies assessing (a) 176 typically developing (TD) 8- to 25-year-olds, (b) individuals with ASD and matched controls, and (c) matched groups with ASD or attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The results suggest that the Sentence Completion Task can reveal individual differences in cognitive style unrelated to IQ in typical development, that most (but not all) people with ASD show weak coherence on this task, and that performance is not related to inhibitory control. The Sentence Completion Task was found to be a useful test instrument, capable of tapping local processing bias in a range of populations.     

Best Research from the Community Indicators Consortium 2009: Introduction to the Special Issue

This editors’ introduction provides some introductory comments for this special issue of Applied Research on Quality of Life dedicated to best research from the 2009 Community Indicators Consortium conference in Bellevue, Washington. In addition, it includes an edited version of the keynote address presented to this conference by Stephen Bezruchka of the University of Washington School of Public Health on the topic of “What indicators should be presented to Americans so we don’t die so young?”     

Having Our Say: African American Women,Diversity, and Counseling

African American female counseling professionals contribute greatly to the multicultural growth of the counseling profession by spurring the profession's evolution and defining new paradigms and counseling activities. Despite their contributions, they face serious organizational, intrapersonal, and interpersonal challenges to their success in academia. This article seeks to elucidate the challenges to African American female counseling professionals and offers systemic and personal strategies that will facilitate the profession's evolution to culturally competent, ethical, and intentional helping orientations and worldviews.     

The Effect of Therapist–Client Racial Similarity on Client Satisfaction and Therapist Evaluation of Treatment

Client satisfaction with therapy services and therapists' perspectives of treatment evaluation were examined in relation to therapist and client racial similarity. Secondary data from a university marriage and family therapy clinic located in the southeast was used to pair therapists and clients on racial similarity or difference. Statistical analyses revealed no major differences in clients' perceptions of satisfaction based on similarity to therapists' race. Therapists indicated some differences in their perceptions of the success of services provided to clients based on similarity to client's race. Implications for researchers, clinicians, and educators are included.     

Interference From Multi-dimensional Objects During Feature and Conjunction Discriminations

Feature discrimination performance within an attended object and interference from irrelevant, multi-dimensional objects (distractors) were examined in a two-choice, response compatibility paradigm. Results showed that the amount of interference by multi-dimensional distractors was dependent on three factors: (1) the discriminability of the incompatible, task-relevant distractor features; (2) the number of incompatible, task-relevant distractor features; and (3) whether the task-relevant, incompatible features matched the task goals. The most interesting finding was that additive priming effects were found for multiple, task-relevant features that matched the task goals, whether these features were present in the attended object or in the ignored object. Models that assume that each task-relevant feature primes its corresponding decision/response asynchronously and that this priming is combined to meet a decision/response criterion (at least when attended) can account for distractor interference during conjunction discriminations. Implications of these findings for feature integration models, template models, and a response selection model are discussed.