Looking back and looking in: Rethinking adaptation strategies of Ghanaian immigrant women in Canada

Based on research that the author conducted in 1998 this paper re-examines theories of immigrant adaptation by relating Philomena Essed's three-point framework of immigrant adaptation to the settlement of Ghanaian immigrant women in Canada. Essed identifies three phases of the adaptation process that she categorizes as “when are we going back”, “are we going back”, and “here to stay.” This paper examines what it meant for Ghanaian women to “look back” and how “looking back” dictated their adaptation strategies. The paper moves beyond notions of adaptation that stress measurable and quantifiable outcomes to one that stresses the agency of immigrant women. The author argues that Ghanaian immigrant women's seemingly low status in the economy was not a reflection of poor adaptation but rather a measure to help them connect with people in the homeland.     

Recognition,discrimination and categorization of smiling by 5-month-old infants

Perceiving emotions correctly is foundational to the development of interpersonal skills. Five-month-old infants’ abilities to recognize, discriminate and categorize facial expressions of smiling were tested in three coordinated experiments. Infants were habituated to four degrees of smiling modeled by the same or different people; following habituation, infants were presented with a new degree of smile worn by the same and by a new person (Experiment 1), a new degree of smile and a fearful expression worn by the same person (Experiment 2) or a new degree of smile and a fearful expression worn by new people (Experiment 3). Infants showed significant novelty preferences for the new person smiling and for the fearful expressions over the new degree of smiling. These findings indicate that infants at 5 months can categorize the facial expression of smiling in static faces, and yet recognize the same person despite changes in facial expression; this is the youngest age at which these abilities have been demonstrated. The findings are discussed in light of the significance of emotion expression face processing in social interaction and infants’ categorization of faces.     

Attentional Predictors of 5‐month‐olds' Performance on a Looking A‐not‐B Task

In the first year of life, the ability to search for hidden objects is an indicator of object permanence and, when multiple locations are involved, executive function (i.e. inhibition, cognitive flexibility and working memory). The current study was designed to examine attentional predictors of search in 5‐month‐old infants (as measured by the looking A‐not‐B task), and whether levels of maternal education moderated the effect of the predictors. Specifically, in a separate task, the infants were shown a unique puppet, and we measured the percentage of time attending to the puppet, as well as the length of the longest look (i.e., peak fixation) directed towards the puppet. Across the entire sample (N = 390), the percentage of time attending to the puppet was positively related to performance on the visual A‐not‐B task. However, for infants whose mothers had not completed college, having a shorter peak looking time (after controlling for percentage of time) was also a predictor of visual A‐not‐B performance. The role of attention, peak fixation and maternal education in visual search is discussed. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Agential Conversations: Interviewing Postdoctoral Life Scientists and the Politics of Mundane Research Practices

Science and Technology Studies (STS) projects often aim at understanding social problems and epistemic challenges in science and, more generally, in the technoscientific worlds we inhabit. However, it is often unclear if and how these projects can help address the problems they identify. Scholars such as Donna Haraway, John Law, and Karen Barad have argued that STS methods always interfere with the contexts they study. Combining this insight with recent feminist scholarship on the politics of care in technoscience suggests that a better understanding of how our research practices already interfere can help us attune our methods in order to promote care as part our research practices. One avenue to investigate this hypothesis is to return to a completed study and reconstruct how its research methods have created interference effects that promoted or could promote care for the problems the study identified. In the case at hand, the methods investigated are interviews with life scientists in Austria and the USA. The problem they defined is that current career rationales in the life sciences, which foreground individualism, mobility, and competition hinder collaboration, teamwork, and mentoring, strain group cohesion, and tend to exclude certain groups. Reframing the research interviews as ‘agential conversations’ that interfered with the contexts they sought to understand shows how the interviews also created situated moments of reflection, connection, and disruption that could serve as a basis for responding to these problematic conditions affecting researchers in the life sciences and beyond.     

The Contribution of Executive Function to Source Memory Development in Early Childhood

Age-related differences in episodic memory judgments assessing recall of fact information and the source of this information were examined. The role of executive function (EF) in supporting early episodic memory ability was also explored. Four- and 6-year-old children were taught 10 novel facts from two different sources (experimenter or puppet), and memory for both fact and source information was later tested. Measures of working memory, inhibitory control, and set shifting were obtained to produce an indicator of children's EF. Six-year-olds recalled more fact and source information than did 4-year-olds. Regression analyses revealed that age, language ability, and EF accounted for unique variance in children's fact recall and source recall performance. These findings suggest a link between episodic memory and EF, and we propose that developmental investigations should further explore this association.     

The manifestation of transference during early psychotherapy sessions: Exploring an alternate data source for therapist narratives in transference research

Introduction: Previous transference studies have compared in‐session client narratives about significant others to in‐session client narratives about the therapist, limiting data to the information that clients are willing to share with the therapist. Method: The first three sessions of 30 therapies with high‐functioning individuals were examined using the Core Conflictual Relationship Theme (CCRT) method. Client narratives about others were drawn from the psychotherapy sessions and client narratives about the therapist were drawn from a Participant Critical Event (PCE) interview conducted after the third session of therapy. Results: Factor analyses of the CCRT components indicated several relational patterns: a complementary pattern of relating characterised by a devaluation of the therapist and idealisation of others; a concordant relational transfer where clients feel bad with both the therapist and others; and as clients experience control issues with significant others, they wish to adopt a submissive stance toward the therapist. The results suggest that the source of therapist narratives may influence the results of transference research.