Applying Research Domain Criteria to the study of emotion dysregulation in infancy and early childhood

Emotion regulation is a principal task of early development. The failure to develop effective emotion regulation skills is associated with behavioural, academic, psychological and socioemotional difficulties. Although researchers have studied emotion regulation for decades, work on emotion dysregulation—defined as the inability to maintain emotional control, engage with the environment or recover from distress in a developmentally appropriate manner—is rare and there are discrepancies in its conceptualisation among very young samples. While some scientists refer to emotion dysregulation as if it were a discrete concept, it may be more accurately depicted as a multidimensional system of developmental processes. The National Institute of Mental Health's Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) is a framework that allows researchers to track dysfunction across multiple areas of analysis and may be an ideal system for exploring the multidimensional nature of infant emotion dysregulation. In this paper, we draw on empirical studies to describe how the RDoC framework can be used to support studies of emotion dysregulation in infancy. This proposed model can also serve as a roadmap for future researchers to follow to generate the evidence base for a multidimensional conceptualisation of infant emotion dysregulation and its underlying mechanisms.     

Teaching Students to Recruit Positive Attention: A Review and Recommendations

Positive teacher attention and praise are powerful influences on student performance in the classroom. But the classroom is a very busy place, a place where important efforts by students can easily go unnoticed. In such instances, an existing and potentially effective natural contingency of reinforcement is asleep and needs to be woken up. Teaching students how to recruit positive teacher attention is one way to activate dormant contingencies of reinforcement and help students take a proactive role in their learning. This paper reviews the recruiting research to date, discusses implications for practitioners, proposes a recruitment training package including strategies for promoting generalization of recruiting skills, and offers recommendations for future research.     

Highly Skilled Migrants’ Strong Ties with Their Home Country: Evidence from Filipinos in New Zealand and Australia

This paper provides empirical evidence of the “embedded connectedness” of highly skilled migrants with their home country through the Philippine case in New Zealand and Australia. This challenges the findings in other studies that show the weak connection between them and the home country which is generally explored more in terms of economic remittances. While the majority of the participants in the study are already citizens of the host country, they remain emotionally tied and culturally connected to the Philippines as evidenced by their information-seeking behaviour, feeling of nostalgia, sending of remittances, taking of dual citizenship, attendance in Philippine-related events and the country they perceived as home. One interesting finding in the study is that most of them have taken citizenship for pragmatic reasons, that is, for the benefits and security that it could bring them. It concludes by emphasising the relevance of capitalising on these strong diasporic ties to entice the skilled diaspora to return to their home country and/or be involved in development activities back home.     

Identity-Related Dysfunction: Integrating Clinical and Developmental Perspectives

Recent changes to the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders highlight the importance of identity dysfunction within several psychiatric diagnoses. Despite a long-standing tradition of identity research and theory in the developmental literature, there is limited work establishing intersections between clinical and developmental conceptualizations of identity problems. The relative lack of integration between decades of clinical and developmental work is unfortunate, and likely limits progress in both areas. In this commentary, the authors argue for greater interdisciplinary collaboration and highlight contributions from developmental and clinical theories, which, if integrated, could enhance identity scholarship. The developmental psychopathology perspective is introduced as an ideal framework to promote these goals.     

Correlation between functional mobility and cognitive performance in older adults with cognitive impairment

Association between cognitive impairment and gait performance occurs in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer‘s disease (AD), particularly under “divided attention” conditions, leading to a greater risk of falls. We studied 36 controls, 42 MCI, and 26 mild AD patients, using the Timed Up-and-Go test (TUG) under four conditions: TUG single – TUG1; TUG cognitive – TUG2; TUG manual –TUG3; TUG cognitive and manual – TUG4. Cognition was assessed using the MMSE, SKT, Exit25, and TMT (A and B). We found significant correlations between cognitive scores and TUG2 [r values (MMSE: –0.383, TMT-A: 0.430, TMT-B: 0.386, Exit25: 0.455, SKT: 0.563)] and TUG4 [(MMSE: –0.398, TMT-A: 0.384, TMT-B: 0.352,Exit25: 0.466, SKT: 0.525)] in the AD group, and between all TUG modalities and SKT in MCI and AD. Our results revealed that functional mobility impairment in cognitive dual tasks correlated to cognitive decline in AD patients and to attention and memory impairment in MCI.     

Relationship of Mindfulness to Distress and Cortisol Response in Adolescent Girls At-Risk for Type 2 Diabetes

Altered stress response theoretically contributes to the etiology of cardiometabolic disease. Mindfulness may be a protective buffer against the effects of stress on health outcomes by altering how individuals evaluate and respond to stress. We engaged adolescent girls at risk for developing Type 2 diabetes in a cold-pressor test in order to determine the relationship of dispositional mindfulness to cortisol response and subjective stress, including perceived pain and unpleasantness during the stressor, and negative affect following the stressor. We also evaluated mindfulness as a moderator of psychological distress (depressive/anxiety symptoms) and stress response. Participants were 119 girls age 12–17 years with overweight/obesity, family history of diabetes, and mild-to-moderate depressive symptoms. Greater mindfulness was associated with less perceived pain and negative affect, but was unrelated to cortisol response to the stressor. Regardless of mindfulness, greater depressive/anxiety symptoms related to a more blunted cortisol response. Mindfulness might promote better distress tolerance in adolescents at risk for diabetes by altering how youth perceive and relate to acute stress, rather than through altering the physiological stress response. At all levels of mindfulness, depressive/anxiety symptoms relate to greater blunting of cortisol response. Findings contribute to emerging literature on the role of mindfulness in promoting the mental and physical health and well-being of individuals at risk for Type 2 diabetes.     

Stigma Towards Homosexuality and AIDS Among Students of a Large Hispanic-Serving University

Homosexuality and AIDS-related stigma lead to failures in testing, disclosure of HIV status, and treatment for HIV. This study explored stigma towards AIDS and homosexuality among students of a large Hispanic-serving university in the southeastern United States (US). An online anonymous survey was emailed to 8000 randomly selected students. Two multiple choice questions about attitudes towards a professor with AIDS and a gay classmate were analyzed using Chi-square tests, simple and multivariable logistic regression to examine the association of stigma with other factors. Most (60%) of the 632 respondents were women. Only 7.8% of study participants reported stigmatizing attitudes of wanting to drop a class, sitting further away from, or feeling less comfortable in a class with a professor diagnosed with AIDS. Similarly, 7.8% of respondents would stigmatize a gay classmate by trying to avoid social contact or feeling uncomfortable talking with him. Males (adjusted odds ratio [AOR] 3.71, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.95, 7.04) and non-Hispanic students (AOR 2.03, 95% CI 1.08, 3.81) had a higher—and those born in the US had a lower (AOR 0.43, 95% CI 0.23, 0.81)—odds of stigmatizing a gay classmate. No variables were significantly associated with stigmatizing attitudes towards a professor with AIDS. Stigmatizing attitudes towards a faculty member with AIDS or a gay classmate do not appear to be a major problem among students at this Hispanic-serving university. Interventions designed to further reduce gay-related stigma might focus on non-Hispanic young men who are born outside of the United States.     

Peers,Social Control,or Guilt? Self-Conscious Emotions as Explanation for Antisocial Behavior

Criminologists rarely include self-conscious emotions like guilt or shame to explain delinquency. Instead, factors external to the individual are often used, such as social institutions, the family, or peers. This study uses a longitudinal sample of 526 youth from two waves of survey data to assess the effects of peer influences, social control, and the self-conscious emotion of guilt on youth problem behaviors. Problem behavior is measured using teacher assessments at Time2. All other variables are baseline youth self-report measures that were collected at Time1. The results show that guilt statistically predicted teacher-assessed problem behaviors. Further work is needed to develop this measure in criminology.     

Who Thinks Outside the Gender Box? Feminism,Gender Self-Esteem,and Attitudes toward Trans People

Sex Roles - Trans people are targeted with widespread prejudice and discrimination in the United States. In order to better understand this hostility, we examined how different gender beliefs...     

Syntax in pictures

It was hypothesised that pictures drawn to represent active and passive sentences would reflect this syntactic difference. Specifically, it was predicted that the reversal of the order in which the logical subject (LS) and the logical object (LO) occur in the change from active to passive form of sentence will affect the order in which they occur in their pictorial representations. A significant directional preference was found for placing the LO to the left of the LS in the pictorial representations of passive but not active sentences. This was discussed in terms of the marked status of the passive in relation to the active. In the case of sentences differing only in lexical marking there was no asymmetric directionality effect corresponding to that found for actives and passives. A significant tendency to match the surface order of the sentences in the pictures was found for both lexically marked and unmarked sentences. The possibility that other spatial or physical dimensions might be used to express syntactic and semantic factors in the pictorial representation of sentences is considered.