Varieties of Resilience in MIDUS

Population‐based studies of health typically focus on psychosocial contributors to illness and disease. We examine findings from a national longitudinal study of American adults, known as MIDUS (Midlife in the U.S.) to examine the role of psychosocial factors in promoting resilience, defined as the maintenance, recovery, or improvement in health following challenge. Classic studies of resilience are briefly noted, followed by a look at three categories of resilience in MIDUS. The first pertains to having good health and well‐being in the face of low socioeconomic standing. The second pertains to maintaining good health and well‐being despite the challenges that accompany aging. The third pertains to resilience in the face of targeted life challenges such as abuse in childhood, loss of spouse in adulthood, or having cancer. Across each area, we summarize evidence of positive health, and where possible, highlight protective influences that account for such salubrious outcomes. We conclude with opportunities for future research in MIDUS such as examining cultural and genetic influences on resilience as well as utilizing laboratory challenge data to illuminate underlying mechanisms.     

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.     

Frequency and recency effects on response biasing in a pseudo-perceptual task

The pseudo-recognition technique provides an ingenious method of evaluating the influence of response biasing variables. This study tests the effects of recency on low and medium frequency words using the pseudo-recognition procedure. It was found that under short recency conditions the thresholds of medium and low frequency words did not differ, while under longer recency conditions the low frequency words had significantly lower thresholds than medium frequency words.     

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.     

Helping students acquire belief-inconsistent and belief-consistent science facts: Comparisons between individual and dyad study using elaborative interrogatin,self-selected study and repetitious-reading

One hundred and eighty four grade 6 and 7 students processed 32 factual statements in one of two studies reported here. Half the statements were consistent with the students' prior knowledge, whereas the remaining facts were inconsistent with it. Students studied the facts alone, or with a partner, by: (1) answering 'why' questions; (2) reading the information for understanding; or (3) selecting their own method of study. Recall (free and cued) and recognition measures (immediate, 30-day, and 60-day) were used to assess learning (immediate, 30-day, and 60-day). Instructions to use elaborative interrogation produced superior learning gains relative to instructing students to read information for understanding or to select their own study strategy. Overall, there were no performance differneces as a function of individual versus dyad study. The quality of the elaborative interrogation study response affected learning. When students generated or listened to a partner's response that clarified the target facts, learning of that information was superior to when students generated or listened to other types of study responses.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.