Variation in hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis activity among bullied and non-bullied children

We examined the relationship between being bullied during childhood and activity of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis as assessed through repeated measures of salivary cortisol. A non-clinical sample of 154 (74 boys) predominantly Caucasian middle-class 12-year-olds each provided detailed information about their experiences with bullying and six saliva samples were standardized across time and day. Children with a history of child maltreatment, diagnosed psychiatric illness, foster care placement, medication use (psychotropic and oral contraception) and aggression directed toward peers and/or family members were excluded. Using multilevel regression and applying orthogonal polynomial contrasts to model the observed circadian pattern in the data, we found that occasional and frequent verbal peer victimization was associated with hyposecretion of cortisol when controlling for sex, pubertal status, age, depression and anxiety. This relation, however, was moderated by sex. For boys, occasional exposure was associated with higher cortisol levels, whereas for girls exposure was associated with lower cortisol levels. The present study highlights the need to consider the plight of peer-victimized children seriously, as it is associated with alterations to the HPA axis that affect males and females differently, and likely diminishes a person's ability to cope with stress, possibly placing them at risk for psychopathology and ill health.     

Infants' visual anticipation of object structure in grasp planning

The coordination between visual and manual domains is a cornerstone of learning in early development. If infants anticipate an object's physical characteristics prior to contact (i.e., from visual inspection), they could learn more about the physical world through visual observation only than if manual exploration is required. In this experiment, infants grasped a series of four round balls quite similar in size and overall shape, but different in structure. Two were composed of solid hard plastic (one transparent, one opaque) in a rigid structure, and two were composed of more flexible plastic in a nonrigid structure. This nonrigid structure afforded grasping using a precision grasp with fingertips extending inside the ball's outer edge. In contrast, the rigid balls could be grasped only by a full-hand power grasp (due to the relative sizes of ball and infants' hands). The infants' manual anticipations were assessed in their first reach for each ball, prior to their first contact with the ball. In addition, grasping and other exploratory behaviors were assessed after contact with the ball. Results from this study suggest that infants from 5 to 15 months of age incorporate visible information about an object's structure into their action on the object. This provides evidence that visuomotor connections are present as soon as infants start reaching for objects, allowing them to select the appropriate grasp for an object's structure, even if they are not always capable of executing a pickup of the object using this grasp. Further research should investigate the discrepancies between infants' grasp planning and their grasp execution.     

The Forgotten Faculty: Challenges for Ph.D.s in Clinical Medical School Departments

The data and discussion contained in this invited paper are based on the opening plenary by the first author whose paper titled “The Status of Ph.D.s in US Medical Schools” was presented at the 3rd national conference of the Association of Psychologists in Academic Health Centers, Minneapolis, MN, May 2007. The significant growth of the number of Ph.D.s in clinical departments is described, as is their distribution. The roles they play; the barriers they face in terms of leadership opportunities, promotion and tenure; and the concerns they voice that are specific to this population are also discussed. Salary differentials between Ph.D.s on main and medical school campuses are provided. Recommendations for future investigation of disparate treatment and for faculty development opportunities specifically aimed at this group are found at the conclusion of the paper.     

Twenty four-month-old infants’ interpretations of novel verbs and nouns in dynamic scenes

The current experiments address several concerns, both empirical and theoretical in nature, that have surfaced within the verb learning literature. They begin to reconcile what, until now, has been a large and largely unexplained gap between infants’ well-documented ability to acquire verbs in the natural course of their lives and their rather surprising failures to do so in many laboratory-based tasks. We presented 24-month-old infants with dynamic scenes (e.g., a man waving a balloon), and asked (a) whether infants could construe these scenes flexibly, noticing the consistent action (e.g., waving) as well as the consistent object (e.g., the balloon) and (b) whether their construals of the scenes were influenced by the grammatical form of a novel word used to describe them (verb or noun). We document that 24-month-olds’ representations of novel words are sufficiently precise to permit them to map novel verbs to event categories (e.g., waving events) and novel nouns to object categories (e.g., balloons). We also document the time-course underlying infants’ mapping of the novel words. These results beckon us to move beyond asking whether or not infants can represent verb meanings, and to consider instead the conditions that support successful verb learning in infants and young children.     

The On-Line Processing of Verb-Phrase Ellipsis in Aphasia

We investigate the on-line processing of verb-phrase ellipsis (VPE) constructions in two brain injured populations: Broca’s and Anomic aphasics. VPE constructions are built from two simple clauses; the first is the antecedent clause and the second is the ellipsis clause. The ellipsis clause is missing its verb and object (i.e., its verb phrase (VP)), which receives its reference from the fully specified VP in the antecedent clause. VPE constructions are unlike other sentence types that require displacement of an argument NP; these latter constructions (e.g., object-relatives, wh-questions) yield either on-time or delayed antecedent reactivation. Our results demonstrate that Anomics, like unimpaired individuals, evince reactivation of the direct object NP (within the VP) at the elided position. Broca’s patients, on the other hand, do not show reactivation of the antecedent. We consider several interpretations for our data, including explanations focusing on the larger ‘grain size’ of the reconstructed material in the ellipsis clause, the properties of the auxiliary that carries tense and agreement features, and the possibility that the cost-free syntactic copy procedure claimed to underlie VPE may be modulated by the functional deficit in Broca’s aphasia.     

Influence of Counselor Spirituality and Training on Treatment Focus and Self‐Perceived Competence

Spirituality is a potential area of concern for counseling clients. This study presents the empirical results of a survey completed by 572 counselors to determine if counselors' spiritual beliefs, experiences, or training had an impact on their focus of therapy or self‐perceived competence. A counselor's personal spirituality, spiritual experience, and spirituality training did significantly influence treatment focus as well as self‐perceived competence to counsel a client with spiritual concerns.     

Moderating variables of the sexual “victim to offender cycle” in males

Most existing research shows that outcomes after sexual abuse (i.e., behavioral, social, and psychological) are similar for men and women. The sexual abuse “victim to offender cycle” is one clear exception, in that it is reported with much greater frequency in men than in women. This comprehensive, critical review examines potential moderator variables of the sexual victim to offender cycle in sexually abused men. A conceptual model is presented, which integrates existing empirically-tested potential moderators of the victim to offender cycle into: (a) victim characteristics, (b) perpetrator characteristics, (c) abuse characteristics, (d) post-abuse factors, and (e) family factors. The literature preliminarily suggests that post-abuse masturbation, fantasy, and pleasure related to the abuse moderate the victim to offender cycle. Additionally, family factors, including parental loss, experiencing multiple forms of abuse, and family support moderate this outcome. Contrary to expectations, existing research does not indicate that the victim's relationship with the offender, perpetrator gender, victim's age at abuse onset, or penetration during abuse moderate the victim to offender cycle.     

Children's understanding of the war in Iraq: views from Britain and Bosnia

Sixty‐one children (aged 9–17) from the United Kingdom (31) and Bosnia (30) were interviewed about the war in Iraq. Significant differences emerged in their views of the war. The Bosnian children were more affected by the Iraq War, more aware of who is involved in it, had different views about its causes, viewed the consequences of the war with greater gravity, and expressed a greater desire to end war and have peace. Two factors which might account for these differences – recent Bosnian history and the nature of media representations of the war in the two countries – are discussed.     

Conceptual combination during sentence comprehension: evidence for compositional processes

This experiment examined the time course of integration of modifier-noun (conceptual) combinations during auditory sentence comprehension using cross-modal lexical priming. The study revealed that during ongoing comprehension, there is initial activation of features of the noun prior to activation of (emergent) features of the entire conceptual combination. These results support compositionality in conceptual combination; that is, they indicate that features of the individual words constituting a conceptual combination are activated prior to combination of the words into a new concept.     

Investigating the roles of phonological and semantic memory in sentence recall

The mechanisms underlying short-term sentence recall have been the subject of recent investigations. While both semantic and phonological information have been found to play a role in sentence recall, this has been established using different paradigms in previous research. As a result, it is not clear whether the contributions of semantic and phonological information are equivalent subject only to specific experimental conditions. The present study used a common paradigm with equally plausible lures to systematically compare the roles of semantic and phonological information in short-term sentence recall. The lure intrusion paradigm was used with three different lures that were all equally plausible in the context of the sentence: semantic, onset, and rhyme. Further, no contextual cues were provided in the sentence to bias the participant. The findings indicate that there were significantly more semantic and onset intrusions compared to rhyme intrusions. This is interpreted in light of models incorporating lexical information during sentence production.