Mothers' beliefs about listening: Implications for children's comprehension and conceptions of listening

Forty-four mothers offered their beliefs about listening and methods for encouraging listening in their 3- to 5-year-old children. Children's comprehension performance and conceptions of listening were also obtained. Mother perceived themselves as the primary agent responsible for children's development of basic listening competencies, such as figuring out the main point of what someone said to them, not interrupting others, and asking a question of the speaker when confused. Children who had strong comprehension skills had mothers who believed that listening is a complex set of activities, emphasized their own responsibility in ensuring that their children develop basic listening competencies, stressed comprehension processes and question asking in their conceptions of listening and in their techniques for enhancing children's listening, and began reading to their children at an early age.     

Retrieval processes in perceptual recognition and cued recall: The influence of category size

The purpose of these experiments was to determine whether nonsemantic category size and other variables would influence perceptual recognition as they influence cued recall. Procedures developed by Jacoby and his associates were replicated with words belonging to either small or large nonsemantic categories and with recognition tested under bright-target/patterned-mask conditions. The results indicated that words belonging to larger nonsemantic sets were more difficult to identify. This finding and the results of other manipulations are discussed in relation to the interactive activation model and to the proposal that perceptual recognition performance is dependent on a retrieval process similar to that involved in recall prompted by nonsemantic cues.     

Guilt assessment after retracted voluntary and coerced-compliant confessions in combination with exculpatory or ambiguous evidence

We investigated how voluntary confessions, coerced-compliant confessions, and no-confessions influenced guilt assessments in combination with other exculpatory or ambiguous evidence. In three experiments (total N = 808), participants studied case information and provided guilt assessments. As expected, in Experiment 1 and 2a, (i) voluntary confessions to protect a family member elicited stronger guilt attributions than no-confessions and (ii) ambiguous evidence led to stronger guilt attributions than exculpatory evidence. In Experiment 2b, voluntary confessions to protect a group-member (but not to protect a family-member) elicited stronger guilt attributions than no-confessions. Exculpatory eyewitness evidence elicited stronger guilt attributions than exculpatory DNA evidence and participants assigned more weight to exculpatory DNA than eyewitness evidence. Participants were able to discount coerced-compliant confessions when they received information about the interrogations (Experiments 2a/b), but did not consistently consider risk factors for (voluntary) false confessions outside the interrogation room when assessing guilt.     

Stories of Life Transition: Subjective Well-Being and Ego Development in Parents of Children with Down Syndrome

Eighty-seven parents of children with Down Syndrome (DS; 63 women, 24 men) wrote narratives about finding out that their child had DS and completed questionnaire measures of subjective well-being (SWB) and stress-related growth and completed the Sentence Completion Test as a measure of ego development. Forty-two of these individuals participated in a follow-up 2 years later. Foreshadowing and happy endings in the stories were related to heightened SWB at both time periods. Evidence of accommodative change—actively experiencing a paradigmatic shift—was related to stress-related growth and ego development at both time periods. A high sense of closure and accommodation in the stories was associated with the highest levels of stress-related growth. Implications for research on well-being and personal growth are discussed.     

Introducing SYPRENE: An International Practice Research Network for Strategic and Systemic Therapists and Researchers

SYPRENE, a new international Systemic Practice Research Network (PRN), has been established to fill the gap in practice-based research on the effectiveness and efficiency of strategic therapies. This article presents the rationale for the creation of SYPRENE and describes data collection methods, and the encoding system implemented within this PRN. More developments are expected in the recruitment of practitioners, the types of data collected, findings, and the implementation of SYPRENE in supervision, trainings, and professional schools.     

Building reciprocity: From safety‐net to social transformation programmes

Topics of societal concern such as mental health and poverty reduction increasingly require action programmes that operate within broad psychosocial and social justice perspectives. Models of practice centred in individual needs, although important, are not powerful enough to bring about social change when they operate in isolation. In this article, we present the findings resulting from the observation of programmes engaged in collaborating with socio‐economically disadvantaged individuals, families, and communities. The programmes selected for study were nationally or internationally recognized for the quality and innovation of their methodologies or for having been subjected to scientific attention; some met both criteria. Altogether, 15 programmes were visited, in North and South America and Europe. Through a grounded theory methodology, the processes of data collection and analysis led to the development of a theoretical framework that identifies a continuum of programmes aimed at supporting the development of individuals, families, and communities and that has at its core the central process of building reciprocity. This article presents and describes the continuum of programmes and how each type relates to the process of building reciprocity and establishes links with other relevant and significant concepts in the framework. Finally, implications for further research are explored.     

A comparison of job performance and disciplinary records of smokers and nonsmokers

The authors compared job performance and receipt of disciplinary action among smoking and nonsmoking hotel employees using organizational records and observation. Although smokers and nonsmokers did not differ on 3 measures of discipline, there were significant differences on a guest relations performance dimension and a summated overall job performance measure. Smokers received higher ratings than did nonsmokers. Implications of these findings for the management of smoking behavior in the workplace are discussed.     

Multisensory exploration and object individuation in infancy

Recent research indicates that by 4.5 months, infants use shape and size information as the basis for individuating objects but that it is not until 11.5 months that they use color information for this purpose. The present experiments investigated the extent to which infants' sensitivity to color information could be increased through select experiences. Five experiments were conducted with 10.5- and 9.5-month-olds. The results revealed that multimodal (visual and tactile), but not unimodal (visual only), exploration of the objects prior to the individuation task increased 10.5-month-olds' sensitivity to color differences. These results suggest that multisensory experience with objects facilitates infants' use of color information when individuating objects. In contrast, 9.5-month-olds did not benefit from the multisensory procedure; possible explanations for this finding are explored. Together, these results reveal how an everyday experience--combined visual and tactile exploration of objects--can promote infants' use of color information as the basis for individuating objects. More broadly, these results shed light on the nature of infants' object representations and the cognitive mechanisms that support infants' changing sensitivity to color differences.     

Direct gaze modulates face recognition in young infants

From birth, infants prefer to look at faces that engage them in direct eye contact. In adults, direct gaze is known to modulate the processing of faces, including the recognition of individuals. In the present study, we investigate whether direction of gaze has any effect on face recognition in four-month-old infants. Four-month infants were shown faces with both direct and averted gaze, and subsequently given a preference test involving the same face and a novel one. A novelty preference during test was only found following initial exposure to a face with direct gaze. Further, face recognition was also generally enhanced for faces with both direct and with averted gaze when the infants started the task with the direct gaze condition. Together, these results indicate that the direction of the gaze modulates face recognition in early infancy.