A meta-analysis of support variables and well-being in ethnic minority populations

Aims: The importance of social support as a predictor of well-being has been documented in the literature for decades. The extent to which social support may be uniquely relevant to the well-being of ethnic minority populations has not yet been empirically supported with meta-analytic techniques. The current meta-analytic study attempted to clarify the nuances of the relationship between support and well-being in ethnic minority populations and to identify what moderators may be relevant to understanding such relationships. Method: Data from 111 articles were included in the analyses that examined both the main effects and moderators of the relationship between social support and well-being. Results: Overall findings revealed a greater effect size (ES) between support and positive well-being (r = .38) than between support and negative well-being (r = −.27). Significant moderators included the proportion of females in the sample, age of the participants, and nature of support. Several ES differences were found in support type and ethnic group interactions as well. Conclusions: Implications of these data include the importance of social support enhancement in efforts to increase the positive well-being and attending to gender and other cultural modifiers in future studies of social support with racial and ethnic minorities.     

Context and Complexity in Incremental Sentence Interpretation: An ERP Study on Temporal Quantification

The present event-related potential (ERP) study used picture–sentence verification to investigate the neurolinguistic correlates of the online processing of compositional-semantic information. To this end, we examined context effects on sentences involving temporal adverbial quantification likeJana war jeden Morgen schwimmen an den Arbeitstagen (“Jana went for a swim every morning during the working week”). We tested whether the conceptual complexity associated with quantifying over time intervals leads to delayed predictions regarding the upcoming words in a sentence. The present study replicated previous results relating to quantification over individuals, which are conceptually less complex than time intervals. Analogous to previous studies, false vs. true sentences elicited an N400 whenever contextual cues did not permit a potential revision of a locally assigned truth value. The present results are compatible with an approach under which contextual cues are immediately considered for predicting how a sentence continues. The fact that the contextual complexity did not lead to processing delays indicates that the processing system quickly abstracts away from the conceptual complexity associated with the linguistic input if such an abstraction is possible.     

Impulsive corporal punishment by mothers and antisocial behavior and impulsiveness of children

This study tested the hypothesis that corporal punishment (CP), such as spanking or slapping a child for purposes of correcting misbehavior, is associated with antisocial behavior (ASB) and impulsiveness by the child. The data were obtained through interviews with a probability sample of 933 mothers of children age 2–14 in two small American cities. Analyses of variance found that the more CP experienced by the child, the greater the tendency for the child to engage in ASB and to act impulsively. These relationships hold even after controlling for family socioeconomic status, the age and sex of the child, nurturance by the mother, and the level of non-corporal interventions by the mother. There were also significant interaction effects of CP with impulsiveness by the mother. When CP was carried out impulsively, it was most strongly related to child impulsiveness and ASB; when CP was done when the mother was under control, the relationship to child behavior problems was reduced but still present. ln view of the fact that there is a high risk of losing control when engaged in CP, even by parents who are not usually impulsive, and the fact that impulsive CP is so strongly associated with child behavior problems, the results of this study suggest that CP is an important risk factor for children developing a pattern of impulsive and antisocial behavior which, in turn, may contribute to the level of violence and other crime in society. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Weakly Associative Relation Algebras with Polyadic Composition Operations

In this paper we introduced various classes of weakly associative relation algebras with polyadic composition operations. Among them is the class RWA of representable weakly associative relation algebras with polyadic composition operations. Algebras of this class are relativized representable relation algebras augmented with an infinite set of operations of increasing arity which are generalizations of the binary relative composition. We show that RWA is a canonical variety whose equational theory is decidable.     

The name letter effect: Attachment to self or primacy of own name writing?

Bulgarian students who first learned to write in the Cyrillic alphabet prefer own name letters in the Cyrillic but also in the Roman alphabet, with which they became acquainted only many years later. These findings which are intra-individually correlated, support Nuttin S interpretation of the Name Letter Effect in terms of attachment to self and contradict a ‘primacy of own name writing’ explanation.     

The Role of Sentence Context in Accessing Partial Knowledge of Word Meanings

Two experiments are reported that test the hypothesis that a reader can make use of the size of the semantic domain activated by a sentence context when inferring the meaning of a partially known word. We investigated words at three levels of knowledge: known, frontier, and unknown (e.g., Durso & Shore, 1991). Experiment I demonstrated that participants have knowledge about the meanings of words that they deny are part of the language (the unknown level), and that they make use of relative differences in the size of the semantic domains tapped by two sentences when asked to decide on correct usage of these unknown words. Experiment 2 demonstrated that participants have knowledge about the general semantic constraints operating on their unknown words, even when relative differences in size of semantic domains are controlled. Implications for the role of contextual constraints in vocabulary acquisition are discussed.     

Using elaborative interrogation to facilitate acquisition of factual information in cooperative learning settings: One good strategy deserves another

The primary purpose of this study was to determine whether providing 6th-grade students with cooperative elaborative interrogation instruction would facilitate learning relative to providing them with cooperative learning, elaborative interrogation or reading-for-under-standing instructions. All students were presented with 36 factual statements about six animals. Cooperative elaborative interrogation students were instructed to work collaboratively and use their prior knowledge to state why each fact is true. Cooperative learning students were told to work collaboratively to learn target materials, while elaborative interrogation students were instructed to generate answers to the why questions on their own. Reading-control students were also on their own and instructed to read the animal facts for understanding. For immediate free recall and immediate associative matching tests, students in the experimental conditions outperformed those in the control condition. Cooperative elaborative interrogation and elaborative interrogation students maintained this advantage on a 30-day follow-up associative matching test, with elaborative interrogation students maintaining a significant advantage relative to reading controls on a 60-day associative matching follow-up. (There was also a strong trend favouring the cooperative elaborative interrogation condition on this 60-day measure.) The quality of the ‘why’ answer affected learning: Generating and listening to scientifically correct answers that used relevant prior knowledge to clarify target information was associated with better memory for facts than were other types of study responses. Students in this study learned the most when they were explicitly directed to activate relevant prior knowledge that supports and clarifies new information–processing that occurs following either small-group or individual elaborative interrogation instruction.     

Depressed mothers’ infants show less negative affect during non-contingent interactions

Infants of depressed and non-depressed mothers were videotaped interacting with their mothers in the [Nadel, J., Carchon, I., Kervella, C., Marcelli, D., & Reserbat-Plantey, D. (1999). Report: Expectancies for social contingency in 2-month-olds. Developmental Science, 2, 164–173] paradigm which consists of three segments including: (1) a free play, contingent interaction, (2) a non-contingent replay of the mothers’ behavior that had been videotaped during the first segment, and (3) a return to a free play, contingent interaction. As compared to infants of non-depressed mothers, infants of depressed mothers showed less negative change (less increase in frowning) in their behavior during the non-contingent replay segment. This finding was interpreted as the infants of depressed mothers being more accustomed to non-contingent behavior in their mothers, thus experiencing less violation of expectancy in this situation.     

Poland: Crises in Christian-Jewish Identity

Fifty years after the Holocaust, Jews in various parts of Poland who were raised as Christians are discovering their Jewish identity. Upon disclosing it, they may undergo personal crises. They are required to revise their sense of identity. Support groups conducted by the writer in the United States served as a model for similar groups in Warsaw, Poland. This paper explains the dimensions of this work, provides clinical examples from accounts of the participants, and discusses the problem of Jewish identity from various vantage points.     

Data from eye-tracking corpora as evidence for theories of syntactic processing complexity

We evaluate the predictions of two theories of syntactic processing complexity, dependency locality theory (DLT) and surprisal, against the Dundee Corpus, which contains the eye-tracking record of 10 participants reading 51,000 words of newspaper text. Our results show that DLT integration cost is not a significant predictor of reading times for arbitrary words in the corpus. However, DLT successfully predicts reading times for nouns. We also find evidence for integration cost effects at auxiliaries, not predicted by DLT. For surprisal, we demonstrate that an unlexicalized formulation of surprisal can predict reading times for arbitrary words in the corpus. Comparing DLT integration cost and surprisal, we find that the two measures are uncorrelated, which suggests that a complete theory will need to incorporate both aspects of processing complexity. We conclude that eye-tracking corpora, which provide reading time data for naturally occurring, contextualized sentences, can complement experimental evidence as a basis for theories of processing complexity.