“I'm Having a Little Struggle With This,Can You Help Me Out?”: Examining Impacts and Processes of a Social Capital Intervention for First‐Generation College Students

Social capital plays a key role in college and career success, and research indicates that a dearth of on‐campus connections contributes to challenges first‐generation college students face in effectively navigating the college environment. This study investigates a novel intervention that focuses on the development of skills and attitudes to empower first‐generation college students to cultivate social capital and on‐campus connections during the transition to college. A mixed methods, explanatory design was used to evaluate impacts and processes of the intervention among first‐generation college students (n = 164) in the context of an ethnically diverse, urban, public university in the Northeast. Results indicated that students who participated in the intervention demonstrated improved attitudes and behaviors around seeking support in college, closer relationships with instructors, and higher GPAs at the end of their first year in college. These results suggest the potential benefits of a relatively scalable approach to supporting the needs of first‐generation college students.     

A Response to <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion</Emphasis> from two Perspectives

This review considers the The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion (Rambo and Farhadian 2014) from the perspective of Western counseling practice and its applicability to Eastern religious traditions. The Handbook presents a nuanced approach to conversion that emphasizes its complex and dynamic qualities, providing counselors/pastors with practical perspectives to enhance their understanding of people in various stages of a conversion career. By addressing non-Abrahamic traditions, The Handbook also looks at “conversion” from a wider perspective, raising issues about whether it can legitimately be applied to traditions that do not share Western religious assumptions (such as exclusivity) and religious identity. From both perspectives, The Handbook challenges readers to expand their perspectives and rethink their preconceived notions of religious conversion, especially those assumptions based on Western Protestant interpretation of the story of Paul’s conversion.     

Explaining Math: Gesturing Lightens the Load

Why is it that people cannot keep their hands still when they talk? One reason may be that gesturing actually lightens cognitive load while a person is thinking of what to say. We asked adults and children to remember a list of letters or words while explaining how they solved a math problem. Both groups remembered significantly more items when they gestured during their math explanations than when they did not gesture. Gesturing appeared to save the speakers' cognitive resources on the explanation task, permitting the speakers to allocate more resources to the memory task. It is widely accepted that gesturing reflects a speaker's cognitive state, but our observations suggest that, by reducing cognitive load, gesturing may also play a role in shaping that state.     

Maternal Sensitivity and the Visual Attentiveness of Children Who Are Deaf

Maternal sensitivity may be even more important for the development of deaf infants' social and cognitive competence than previous research has shown it to be for hearing children. We report ratings of mothers' sensitivity and infants' time in coordinated joint attention (CJA) during play interactions video-taped in a laboratory at 9,12 and 18 months. Participants include 80 dyads in four groups: two matched for hearing status (Deaf or Hearing mothers with deaf or hearing babies), two unmatched for hearing status (Deaf mothers/hearing babies and Hearing mothers/deaf babies). Mothers in matched dyads were rated more sensitive than mothers in unmatched dyads. Deaf infants with Deaf mothers showed more time in CJA compared to infants in unmatched dyads. However, significant correlations of sensitivity and attention were found only for the two unmatched hearing status groups at 18 months. These results are discussed in terms of dyadic hearing status differences, intuitive parenting and developmental stage. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An intentional stance modulates the integration of gesture and speech during comprehension

The present study investigates whether knowledge about the intentional relationship between gesture and speech influences controlled processes when integrating the two modalities at comprehension. Thirty-five adults watched short videos of gesture and speech that conveyed semantically congruous and incongruous information. In half of the videos, participants were told that the two modalities were intentionally coupled (i.e., produced by the same communicator), and in the other half, they were told that the two modalities were not intentionally coupled (i.e., produced by different communicators). When participants knew that the same communicator produced the speech and gesture, there was a larger bi-lateral frontal and central N400 effect to words that were semantically incongruous versus congruous with gesture. However, when participants knew that different communicators produced the speech and gesture--that is, when gesture and speech were not intentionally meant to go together--the N400 effect was present only in right-hemisphere frontal regions. The results demonstrate that pragmatic knowledge about the intentional relationship between gesture and speech modulates controlled neural processes during the integration of the two modalities.     

Carving up space at imaginary joints: can people mentally impose arbitrary spatial category boundaries?

Empirical attempts to understand connections between abstract cognition and sensori-motor processes have pointed toward an embodied view of cognition, where cognitive activity is strongly tied to sensori-motor activity. Here the authors test the ability of the cognitive system to impose structure on the world using a well-established phenomenon in spatial cognition--biases near spatial category boundaries. Results from 5 experiments suggest that participants were unable to mentally impose a spatial category boundary without perceptual support, even when explicitly instructed to do so. The authors conclude by considering the implications of these findings for abstraction within other domains of cognition.     

End-point focus manipulations to determine what information is used during observational learning

We required two groups of participants to observe an end-point model (ENDPT) while another two groups viewed a full-body, point-light model (FULL) to determine the role of relative motion information in acquisition of a multi-limb, whole-body action. One ENDPT and one FULL group also bowled a ball. Following retention, all groups observed the FULL model. The participants' movements were compared to the model and outcome attainment was quantified. There was no difference in shoulder-elbow coordination between groups in acquisition or retention. The FULL groups replicated hip-knee coordination more accurately than did ENDPT groups in early acquisition only, with no significant differences in late acquisition or retention. Both bowling groups became more accurate at the task across acquisition, but the ENDPT group was more accurate and consistent in retention. Providing intra-limb relative motion in re-acquisition did not improve coordination for the ENDPT groups, but it did facilitate movement control (peak wrist velocity) and outcome attainment (target accuracy). The acquisition of coordination during observational learning is not only a result of copying relative motion information, but also involves copying of end-point trajectory information from the primary effector.     

Fusion or Internalized Homophobia? A Pilot Study of Bowen's Differentiation of Self Hypothesis With Lesbian Couples

Bowen, using the concept of differentiation, hypothesized that the way individuals learn to deal with their relationships with families of origin will influence the way they manage their relationships with their partners. This study surveyed a group of 53 lesbian couples on differentiation of self, internalized homophobia, and relationship satisfaction. We found that lesbian couples were not significantly different in their level of differentiation than random pairs. We also found that there was a positive relationship between differentiation of self and relationship satisfaction and that when considered together, internalized homophobia had the more significant connection to relationship satisfaction than did differentiation of self Implications for therapy are drawn from these findings.