Preschool language development among children of adolescent mothers

This longitudinal study examined a comprehensive set of predictors of preschool language performance in a sample of children of adolescent mothers. Six domains of risk (low maternal verbal ability, intergenerational risk, contextual risk, relational risk, home environmental risk, and child characteristics) for poor preschool language development, measured throughout early childhood, were examined in a sample of 154 children born to adolescent mothers. Logistic regression revealed that having a poor language-learning home environment was associated with children's low language scores even after accounting for mothers' below-average verbal ability. More importantly, however, was the exploration of the 'dual risk' hypothesis that evaluated the effects of combined risk factors. Being reared by a mother with low verbal ability amplified the risk of a poor quality home linguistic environment, whereas having a poor home linguistic environment did not adversely affect the language development of children with mothers of average verbal ability. Implications for intervention are discussed with regard to specificity of intervention efforts within subpopulations of risk identified in this paper.     

Correlation between Changes in Stress-Induced Corticosterone Secretion and GR mRNA Levels

The current study was conducted to determine the potential relationship between stress-induced corticosterone secretion and corticosteroid receptor mRNA levels after 5 days of intermittent stress. In particular, we were interested in the rate at which animals terminate a stress response, and how this termination may be altered by repeated stress. Adult male Sprague-Dawley rats were subjected to either 5 days of restraint stress or 5 days of an unpredictable stress paradigm. Restraint-stress induced corticosterone secretion was measured on Days 1 and 5 in both groups, and animals were killed on Day 6. Glucocorticoid receptor (GR), and mineralocorticoid (MR) mRNA levels were determined using in-situ hybridization techniques. Five days of restraint stress caused an habituation of the plasma corticosterone response to stress measured 60 and 90 min post-stress initiation; this pattern of corticosterone secretion was not observed in the animals subjected to unpredictable stress. Five days of either stress paradigm did not alter MR mRNA levels measured within the hippocampus or GR mRNA levels within the hippocampus or the medial parvocellular division of the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus (mpPVN). However, an individual's GR mRNA levels measured within the CA1/2 region of the hippocampus and the mpPVN were significantly correlated with the degree of habituation of the corticosterone response to stress measured on Day 5. This suggests that an increase in the rate of termination of the stress response and levels of GR within the hippocampus and mpPVN may be functionally related.     

Action and emotion in everyday life

This study of naturally occurring behaviour employed a "beeper technique" to investigate the actions carried out by 152 subjects in eight different groups, viz. adult students, employed students who were also parents, unemployed, art students, doctoral students, alcoholics, retired people and a control group. Actions were sampled for seven subsequent days, five times per day between 8 a.m. and 10 p.m. at randomly selected occasions. Each action was rated on a number of variables, shortly after it was sampled (median delay approximately 10 min). Some of the findings were: Time allocation corresponded well with national estimates. Being under situational control was highly aversive. Instrumental and consummatory orientations correlated positively. The background variables were, on the whole, only rather weakly related to action ratings, but it was found that women and retired persons tended to report a higher level of well-being.     

Documentary Bioethics: Visual Narratives for Generations X and Y

Narrative bioethics is primarily understood to involve storytelling through the use of literature. This article suggests that other forms of media are necessary to convey stories of an ethical nature to an audience broader than one being trained as medical professionals. "Documentary bioethics" is a manner to present and interpret stories of an ethical nature using forms of popular electronic media in a reality-based documentary style to society at large, specifically Generations X and Y.     

Longitudinal assessment of the low-end specificity of maternal reports of depressive symptoms

Recent studies have raised concerns about the specificity of self-report measures of depression with respect to low-end scores. Because of the high face validity of measures such as the Beck Depression Inventory, it is suspected that extremely low scores may reflect individuals who may harbor depressive symptoms or other psychological abnormalities, yet are inclined to 'fake-good', or respond in a socially desirable manner on the BDI. The presence of this phenomenon was tested in a sample of adolescent mothers who were assessed at four time points over 8 years. It was hypothesized that low-scoring mothers (compared with medium- and high-scoring mothers) would have more negative outcomes on a variety of self-report and observational measures of parenting, as well as have children with more negative outcomes on adjustment and behavior. This study employed multiple assessments, multiple informants and multiple domains of functioning. The analyses controlled for the possible effects of social desirability and demographic differences between the depression groups. The hypotheses were not supported. The majority of analyses found no differences between the groups; where differences did exist, there were no indications that the low-scoring group was at a disadvantage to the medium or high scoring groups.     

Speech perception deficits in Parkinson's disease: underestimation of time intervals compromises identification of durational phonetic contrasts

Besides motor, vegetative, and cognitive signs, patients suffering from Parkinson's disease (PD) may show distinct perceptual deficits such as underestimation of time intervals extending across several seconds. Assuming this impairment also to affect the domain of tens of milliseconds, disrupted encoding of the acoustic speech signal with respect to segment durations conveying linguistic information must be expected. To test this hypothesis, 10 PD patients and matched controls performed an identification task using a series of 10 stimuli derived from the utterance "Boten" (/bo:tn/, 'messengers'; produced with nasal plosion) by exclusive manipulation of occlusion length (110-20 ms in steps of 10 ms). Under these conditions, word-medial silence cues the voicing category of the respective stop consonant. Seven PD subjects showed normal identification curves, i.e., categorized the shortest and longest stimuli with high probability each as the minimal pair cognates "Boden" and "Boten," respectively. In contrast, the remaining three patients labeled all items across the complete range of occlusion lengths as "Boden." A subsequent experiment found a horizontal shift of the identification curves toward larger signal durations (> 120 ms) in these three subjects. Bilateral cerebellar degeneration has been found to yield a different response pattern, i.e., near-chance level of performance. Considering recent information-processing models of scalar interval timing, striatal disorders seem to slow down an oscillatory pacemaker, whereas cerebellar dysfunctions may impair comparison of measured durations with stored reference memory traces.