Fundamentalism, Gender and Family Therapy

Adherence to religiously and culturally defined communities is a complex affair, likely to be misconstrued by those perceiving such communities from the 'outside'. This is a major reason why multiculturalism has failed to deal with the threat posed by religious fundamentalism. In particular, dissenting voices within these communities are marginalized. Fundamentalism is understood here as a specific anti-modern movement, a response to the crisis of rationality that draws on the same emotional forces as do postmodernism and feminism but to different ends. It is characterized by acceptance of the existence of absolute authority, militancy and anti-humanism. It casts women as both 'ideal' (as mothers and bearers of the culture) and 'other' (as sexual subjects). It embodies a failure of the imaginative capacity to tolerate difference and otherness, linking it with other narcissistic responses to the tensions of modernity. Challenging fundamentalism, in therapy and in politics, requires a more subtle understanding of the dynamics of dissent within cultural and religious communities too conveniently characterized by outsiders as homogeneous.     

The effects of polydrug use with and without cocaine on mother-infant interaction at 3 and 6 months

The face-to-face interactions of 43 polydrug-with-cocaine-using mothers and their infants at 3 and 6 months were compared to 17 non-cocaine-but other-drug-using mothers and 21 mothers who used no drugs during their pregnancy. Coders blind to mothers' drug use status scored 3 min of face-to-face interactions for 16 measures of maternal and infant interactive behaviors. A principal component of 7 behaviors formed a measure of maternal attentiveness; a principal component of 5 behaviors formed a measure of mother-infant dyadic organization; and a principal component of 4 behaviors formed a measure of infant readiness to interact. A measure of maternal interruption was computed as the mean standard score of 3 additional interruptive behaviors. At 3 and 6 months, polydrug-with-cocaine-using mothers were less attentive to interactions, and polydrug-with-cocaine-using mothers and their infants engaged in fewer dyadic interactions than either non-cocaine or non-drug-using mothers. Compared to 3 months, polydrug-with-cocaine-using mothers at 6 months were less attentive to interactions and more frequently interrupted interactions by looking away, redirecting the infant, or withdrawing, whereas non-cocaine-using and non-drug- using mothers showed no change or an improvement in attentiveness to interactions and a decrease in interruptions. No differences emerged in the interactive behaviors of the infants of polydrug- with-cocaine-using, non-cocaine-using, or non-drug-using mothers. Cocaine use represents a significant risk for diminished parental attentiveness and responsiveness to infants and for diminished interactiveness in infants.     

Children’s memory for counting-out rhymes: A cross-language comparison

In English, counting-out rhymes, such as “Eenie Meenie,” vary little over retellings. Recall is not rote but is sensitive to the structure of the genre. To test the generality of this finding, a sample of Romanian rhymes was collected. Although there was no overlap with the English rhymes, the corpus of rhymes collected had similar structure in terms of number of lines, repeating words, rhyme, alliteration, and the inclusion of nonsense words. Variation within rhymes preserved the poetic structure of the genre. The results suggest that verbatim recall can be schema driven if there is sufficient structure.     

Computational and reasoning abilities in arithmetic: Cross-generational change in China and the United States

A Chinese advantage over Americans was found for economically relevant computational and reasoning abilities in arithmetic for groups of 6th- and 12th-grade students matched or equated on general intelligence. No cross-national difference for computational or reasoning abilities was found for samples of older (60- to 80-year-old) Chinese and American adults equated on general intelligence. The pattern of change in arithmetical competencies across cohorts suggests that the Chinese advantage in 6th and 12th grade is due to a cross-generational decline in competencies in the United States and a cross-generational improvement in China.     

Pediatric Psychology: Child Psychological Health in the Next Century

The future of pediatric psychology is reviewed and placed in brief historical context in relation to children's psychological health care. Contemporary trends affecting the delivery of psychological services, research, and clinical training are highlighted, with suggestions for future development. Pediatric psychology is a child-based, developmentally-focused multidisciplinary practice directed toward psychosocial and neuropsychological issues of health and illness in children and youth. Pediatric psychologists need to develop strong professional identities as health care psychologists combined with a collegial and collaborative arrangement with physicians to ensure the future growth and development of pediatric psychology in the next century as a major vehicle to promote children's health care.     

Chicks Injected with Antisera to either S-100α or S-100β Protein Develop Amnesia for a Passive Avoidance Task

The cellular expression of S-100β protein is upregulated in Alzheimer's disease and in Down's syndrome, and this protein has been implicated in memory-related processes in laboratory animals. However, the possibility that the α subunit of S-100 is also involved in memory has not yet been examined. In the present study, day-old black Australorp white Leghorn cockerel chicks (Gallus domesticus) received injections of monoclonal antisera to S-100α (1:50) or S-100β (1:500) into each hemisphere immediately after training on a one-trial passive avoidance task. The chicks displayed significantly lower retention levels than control birds that had been injected with antisera to carbonic anhydrase, or with saline (p< .01). S-100α antisera had an amnestic effect when injected between 0 and 20 min after training, with memory deficits occurring from 30 min postlearning, at the point of transition between the A and the B phases of the Gibbs-Ng intermediate memory stage. By contrast, the S-100β antisera needed to be injected either 5 min before or immediately after training and produced amnesia 10 min earlier, at the start of the A phase of the intermediate memory stage. We conclude that the two subunits of the S-100 protein are required at different points in the sequence of events leading to the consolidation of passive avoidance memory.     

Language-specific listening

Languages differ in their phonological structure and physcholinguists have begun to explore the conseqence, of this fact for speech perception. We review research documenting that listeners attune their perceptual processes finaly to exploit the phonological regularities of their nativ language. As a consequence, these perceptual process are fill-adapted to listening to languages that do not display such, regularities. Thus, not only do late language-learners have trouble speaking a second language, also they do not hear it as native speakers do; worse, they apply their native language listening prosedures which may actually interfere with successful processing of the non-native input. We also present data from studies on infants showing that the initial attuning occurs early in life; very yong infants are sensitive to the relevant phonological regularities which distinguish different languages, and quickly distinguish the native language of their environment from languages with different regularities.     

Auditory grouping

Although our subjective experience of the world is one of discrete sound sources, the individual frequency components that make up these separate sources are spread across the frequency spectrum. Listeners. use various simple cues, including common onset time and harmonicity, to help them achieve this perceptual separation. Our ability to use harmonicity to segregate two simultaneous sound sources is constrained by the frequency resolution of the auditory system, and is much more effective for low-numbered, resolved harmonics than for higher-numbered, unresolved ones. Our ability to use interaural time-differences (ITDs) in perceptual segregation poses a paradox. Although ITDs are the dominant cue for the localization of complex sounds, listeners cannot use ITDs alone to segregate the speech of a single talker from similar simultaneous sounds. Listeners are, however, very good at using ITD to track a particular sound source across time. This difference might reflect two different levels of auditory processing, indicating that listeners attend to grouped auditory objects rather than to those frequencies that share a common ITD.