Age and Gender Differences in Adaptation and Subjective Well-being of Older Adults Residing in Monastic Religious Communities

The purpose of this study was to explore age and gender differences in the adaptation and well-being of older adults residing in Catholic monasteries. Participants included 235 members, age 64 and older, from the Order of St. Benedict. 2 (Age) × 2 (Gender) analyses of variance were computed to determine significant differences. Young-old persons reported greater friendship, coping behaviors, and personal growth, however, old-old individuals reported greater engagement in religious coping and greater depression. In addition, women reported greater coping behaviors, life satisfaction, and personal growth, but men reported greater depression. The results have implications on how pastoral care providers and counselors can improve quality of life among older adults living in contemplative religious settings.     

What Causes Specific Language Impairment in Children?

ABSTRACT— Specific language impairment (SLI) is diagnosed when a child's language development is deficient for no obvious reason. For many years, there was a tendency to assume that SLI was caused by factors such as poor parenting, subtle brain damage around the time of birth, or transient hearing loss. Subsequently it became clear that these factors were far less important than genes in determining risk for SLI. A quest to find "the gene for SLI" was undertaken, but it soon became apparent that no single cause could account for all cases. Furthermore, although fascinating cases of SLI caused by a single mutation have been discovered, in most children the disorder has a more complex basis, with several genetic and environmental risk factors interacting. The clearest evidence for genetic effects has come from studies that diagnosed SLI using theoretically motivated measures of underlying cognitive deficits rather than conventional clinical criteria.     

Caregiver involvement in applied behavior-analytic research: A scoping review and discussion

We conducted a scoping review to characterize the role of caregiver involvement in behavior-analytic research. We reviewed eight behavioral-learning journals from 2011–2022 for works that included children or caregivers as participants and characterized caregiver involvement as passive (implications for caregivers, input, social validity) and active (implementation, caregiver behavior, training, caregiver-collected data). The review identified 228 studies, and almost all (96.1%; n = 219) involved caregivers in some capacity; 94.3% (n = 215) had passive involvement (26.8% had only passive involvement; n = 61), 69.3% (n = 158) had active involvement (1.8% had only active involvement; n = 4), and 3.9% (n = 9) had neither passive nor active involvement. Involvement generally increased over publication years. The most common types of involvement were implications for caregivers, implementation, and input; caregiver-collected data were rare. We propose considerations when engaging caregivers in research and suggest new avenues of inquiry related to caregivers' treatment objectives and social validity, treatment implementers, and caregiver-collected data.     

Stripes within words affect reading

In a series of eight studies it is shown that the first peak in the horizontal autocorrelation of the image of a word (which captures the similarity in shape between the neighbouring strokes of letters) determines (i) the appearance of the words as striped; (ii) the speed with which the words are read, both aloud and silently; and (iii) the speed with which a paragraph of text can be searched. By subtly distorting the horizontal dimension of text, and thereby reducing the first peak in the horizontal autocorrelation, it is shown that the speed of word recognition can be increased. The increase in speed is greater in poor readers.     

The role of spatial location in remembering and forgetting peripheral words.

This study examined whether spatial location mediates intentional forgetting of peripherally presented words. Using an item-method directed forgetting paradigm, words were presented in peripheral locations at study. A recognition test presented all words at either the same or a different location relative to study. Results showed that while recognition of Remember words was unaffected by test location, when Forget words were presented in the same location at test as at study, recognition accuracy was significantly greater than when presented in a different location. Experiment 2 showed that the speed to localize a previously studied word was faster when it was presented in the same rather than a different study-test location but that the magnitude of this spatial priming was unaffected by memory instruction. We suggest that the location of peripherally presented words is represented in memory and can aid the retrieval of poorly encoded words.     

Appraisal Underpinnings of Affective Chronometry: The Role of Appraisals in Emotion Habituation

ABSTRACT In light of the lack of studies examining the cognitive components of affective chronometry, this research examined the appraisals associated with emotion habituation, using anger as the emotion of focus. Anger and its appraisals were assessed repeatedly over a day in the participants' naturalistic contexts. The trajectory of decline in anger over time after its first appearance was found to be a function of chronic coping styles. More importantly, the trajectories of anger-related appraisals generally corresponded to that of anger and were also moderated by coping styles in ways consistent with the moderating effects of coping styles on anger. Implications of these results for affective chronometry research and for appraisal research are discussed.     

Toddlers can adaptively change how they categorize: same objects,same session,two different categorical distinctions

Two experiments demonstrate that 14‐ to 18‐month‐old toddlers can adaptively change how they categorize a set of objects within a single session, and that this ability is related to vocabulary size. In both experiments, toddlers were presented with a sequential touching task with objects that could be categorized either according to some perceptually salient dimension corresponding to a taxonomic distinction (e.g. animals vs. vehicles) or to some less obvious dimension (e.g. rigid vs. deformable). In each experiment, children with larger productive vocabularies responded to both dimensions, showing evidence of sensitivity to each way of categorizing the items. Children with smaller productive vocabularies attended only to the taxonomically related categorical grouping. These experiments confirm that toddlers can adaptively shift the basis of their categorization and highlight the dynamic interaction between the child and the current task in early categorization.