Ongoing postdivorce conflict and child disturbance

This paper reports on the disturbed behavior of children who are subject to entrenched parental disputes over their custody and care after separation and divorce. The 56 children who varied in racial and socioeconomic origin were 4 to 12 years old at entry into the study. They were assessed at two points: at the time of the custody dispute and 2.5 years later. The extent of the child's involvement in the dispute and the amount of role reversal between parent and child predicted total behavior problems and aggression at the time of the legal dispute. These same factors, together with the rate of verbal and physical aggression between parents, predicted total behavior problems, depression, withdrawn/uncommunicative behavior, somatic complaints, and aggression at the 2-year follows-up. There were no main effects for sex and age. However, at the 2-year mark, girls in high-conflict families were more depressed and withdrawn, and older children in high-conflict situations had more somatic complaints and were more aggressive. The findings are considered in the light of a number of etiological mechanisms by which parental conflict affects children. Funds for the clinical work were provided by the Zellerbach Family Fund and the San Francisco Foundation the Van Loben Sels Foundation, and the Morris Stulsaft Foundation. Support for the first author was provided by an NIMH Fellowship in Social Structure, Personality and Mental Illness, Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley.     

The recognition and categorization of upright and inverted emotional expressions by 7-month-old infants

Upright and inverted faces were used to determine whether 7-month-old infants discriminate emotional expressions on the basis of affectively relevant information. In Experiment 1, infants recognized the similarity of happy faces over changing identities and discriminated this expression from fear and anger when the stimuli were presented upright, but not when they were inverted. In Experiment 2, infants were able to discriminate happiness from fear and anger posed by a single model, regardless of the orientation of the stimuli. From these studies it was suggested that categorizing emotional expressions depends upon attending to affectively relevant, orientation-specific information, whereas the discrimination of emotional expressions can be done on a featural basis, something that remains invariant regardless of the orientation of the stimuli. In Experiment 3, infants discriminated toothy happiness posed by several models from nontoothy happiness and nontoothy anger when the stimuli were presented upright and inverted. Thus, when salient features were available, the infants based their discriminations on perceptual aspects rather than on conceptual aspects such as categories of emotions.     

The Shape of Things: The Origin of Young Children’s Knowledge of the Names and Properties of Geometric Forms

How do toddlers learn the names of geometric forms? Previous work suggests that preschoolers have fragmentary knowledge and that defining properties are not understood until well into elementary school. The current study investigated when children first begin to understand shape names and how they apply those labels to unusual instances. We tested 25- and 30-month-old children’s (N = 30 each) understanding of names for canonical shapes (commonly encountered instances, e.g., equilateral triangles), noncanonical shapes (more irregular instances, e.g., scalene triangles), and embedded shapes (shapes within a larger picture, e.g., triangular slices of pizza). At 25 months, children knew very few names, including those for canonical shapes. By 30 months, however, children had acquired more shape names and were beginning to apply them to some of the less typical instances of the shapes. Possible mechanisms driving this initial development of shape knowledge and implications of that development for school readiness are explored.     

Effects of documentary and fictional television formats on children's acquisition of schemata for unfamiliar occupations

Children's acquisition of real-world role schemata from factual and fictional television was tested experimentally in two studies. In study 1, 144 second- and fifth-graders saw a drama and a documentary about a caterer or a film director. In study 2, 125 fifth-graders saw the caterer tapes under conditions of high or low attentional involvement. Role schemata about real caterers or directors were measured by free response, frequency ratings, and multiple choice questions. Children acquired schemata about real occupations from bath documentary and fictional programs. On some measures, their schemata were influenced more by documentary than by fiction, but that difference faded slightly after a month. Level of involvement did not reduce the difference between real and fictional videos. Children learn social role schemata from both fictional and factual television, but they acquire more schema information from real than from fictional TV, at least when fiction is signaled by obvious cues (e.g., comedy) or when it is not percieved as socially realistic.     

Sex differences in the self-concept in adolescence

This paper examines an aspect of the self-concept — salience of the self or self-consciousness — which has generally been neglected in the past. In an empirical study of nearly 2,000 children and adolescents, it was found that striking sex differences emerge during the adolescent period. Girls are considerably more self-conscious than boys, more vulnerable to criticism, and more concerned with promoting interpersonal harmony. Overall, adolescent girls are increasingly “people-oriented” while boys stress achievement and competence. It is suggested that these differences reflect the social definitions of sex roles.     

Semantic interpretation effects on memory for faces

Five experiments investigated the effects of semantically interpreting faces on their recognition. Experiment 1 demonstrated that faces could meaningfully be related to occupational categories. In Experiments 2–5, each of a set of faces was presented with either the label of a congruent occupational category or a noncongruent label. Presenting a face with a congruent occupational label was found to enhance recognition that the face had previously been seen (Experiments 2–4), but congruent labeling also impaired the detection of distractor faces that matched previously seen faces’ categories (Experiments 3 and 4). In a forced-choice recognition test, in which distractors were highly similar to originally seen faces, congruent occupational labeling failed to increase recognition of previously seen faces (Experiment 5). These results indicate that interpreting faces, with respect to stereotyped categories, ratherthan improving a physical codein memory, led to theformation of a semantic code, which increased recognition of old items at the expense of the detection of new items. Another general finding was that faces that were rated more stereotypical were more recognizable, regardless of the accompanying label.     

Voice of a hidden minority: Identification and countertransference in the cross-cultural working alliance

This paper has expanded the psychoanalytical definition of the working alliance to include the influence of culture. The cross-cultural working alliance is a therapeutic dyad that incorporates a psychotherapist and a patient of dissimilar backgrounds. Each participant enters the alliance with cultural introjects--values, attitudes, and ways of behaving that stem from ethnocultural roots. These introjects influence the intrapsychic world, shape the conscious worldview, and the perception of life experience. The influence of cultural predispositions on the psychopathologies of the patients was prominent in two case examples: a black West Indian male and a Korean-American male. The therapist also brought cultural predispositions to her work. A constructive countertransference phenomenon occurred in the working alliance that had a direct connection to its cross-cultural nature. This phenomenon is called associative identification--the conscious identification of therapist with the ego experience of patient. With the use of the associative identification, the therapist uncovered parallel memories that promoted theoretical understanding and informed therapeutic technique. Just as anthropologists claim that cultures share universal institutional patterns, it is proposed that universal cultural conflicts may also be observed in the cross-cultural working alliance. The analyst and patients in this study had two culture-conflicts in common: the longing to be seen, and the pull for disidentification. It is concluded that associative identification enriched the reparative quality of treatment, and encouraged the integration of isolated, split-off parts of the self.     

The significance of here- and-now disclosure in promoting cohesion in group psychotherapy

Here and now disclosure was compared to there- and-then disclosure to determine which type of disclosure has the most significant effect on cohesion. The subjects consisted of 45 male and 43 female patients in group therapy at a mental health clinic affiliated with a psychoanalytic training institute. A series of scales and questionnaires were administered to ascertain the subjects' feelings of cohesiveness and their typical style of disclosure in group. The significance of the type of disclosure was then determined. The most important finding was that after rigorous analysis of the two disclosure variables, only here- and- now disclosure maintained its position as a significant predictor of cohesion.Roberta L. Slavin, Ph. D., is a psychoanalyst in private practice. She is founder and director of the Midlife Center in Spring Valley. This study was presented at the 50th Annual Conference of the American Group Psychotherapy Association, February 20, 1992, in New York City. The author wishes to express her gratitude to Drs. Richard Alperin, Gordon Bear, and Peter Schlachat for their help and encouragement.     

Project KICK: A school‐based drug education health promotion research project

The purpose of this research‐based design was to address drug prevention and health promotion strategies through the combination of: (1) parent education and involvement; (2) community partnership, and (3) positive peer influence. These strategies were implemented using a four‐cornered partnership among Florida State University, an elementary school, a middle school, and a community advisory board. Expected outcomes were improved self‐concept, improved drug knowledge and awareness, improved decision making and drug refusal skills, and improved perceptions of family coping and adaptability. Bimonthly parent education courses and weekly peer role modeling sessions between middle and elementary school students comprised the interventions for this research. Results were encouraging as increases were found in the predicted direction for the experimental group on all of the major variables.     

Vacuuming with my mouth?: Children's ability to comprehend novel extensions of familiar verbs

Can 6- and 8-year-olds (and adults) comprehend common instrument verbs when extended to novel situations? Participants heard eight unusual extensions of common verbs and were asked to paraphrase the verbs’ meanings. Half of the verbs used were specified instrument verbs that include the name of the instrument used to perform the action (e.g., a vacuum is used to vacuum); the other half were open instrument verbs (e.g., write) whose function can be performed with a range of objects. Results suggest that children's ability to interpret verb extensions increases with age, that open instrument verb extensions were more difficult to comprehend than specified instrument verb extensions and that performance on verb extension correlates with scores on a standardized test of language acquisition. Verb knowledge continues to develop well beyond the preschool years.