Reading skill and language skill

To learn to read is to acquire a visual language skill which systematically maps onto extant spoken language skills. Some children perform this task quite adeptly while others encounter much difficulty, and it has become a question of both scientific and practical merit to ask why there exists such a range of success in learning to read. Obviously, learning to read places a complex burden on many emerging capacities, and in principle, at least, reading disability could arise at any level from visual perception to general cognition. Yet since reading is parasitic on spoken language, the possibility also exists that reading disability is derived from some subtle difficulty in the language domain. This article reviews some of the many studies which have explored the association between early reading skills and spoken language skills. The focus will be on findings which reveal that when the linguistic short-term memory skills of good and poor beginning readers are critically examined, considerably many, though perhaps not all, poor readers prove to possess subtle deficiencies which correlate with their problems in learning to read.     

Domain-Based and Overall Life Satisfaction for Youth with Chronic Conditions: The Role of Personal,Interpersonal, and Environmental Factors Over a One-Year Period

This paper examined the differential influences of personal, interpersonal, and environmental level factors on domain-based and overall life satisfaction over one year for youth with chronic health conditions. Baseline and Time 2 follow-up data were used from a study examining quality of life for a sample of 439 youth with chronic conditions, aged 11 to 17 years. The Brief Multidimensional Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale measured youths’ life satisfaction in five domains (i.e., satisfaction with self, family life, friendships, school experiences, where one lives) and in overall life. Six multivariate linear regression analyses were performed, each exploring relations of the hypothesized correlates at baseline with one aspect of life satisfaction at follow-up controlling for youth gender, age, household income, and the corresponding aspect of life satisfaction at baseline. Factors at all three levels were found to be important to some aspect of life satisfaction. Emotional well-being played a notable role in life satisfaction across multiple domains and in overall life satisfaction. Family-related factors were also significantly related to life satisfaction across several domains. Social support from close friends and teachers and the school environment were important to specific domains of life satisfaction. Classmate social support emerged as a key factor related to overall life satisfaction. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.     

Training in clinical ethics: launching the clinical ethics immersion course at the Center for Ethics at the Washington Hospital Center

In May 2011, the clinical ethics group of the Center for Ethics at Washington Hospital Center launched a 40-hour, three and one-half day Clinical Ethics Immersion Course. Created to address gaps in training in the practice of clinical ethics, the course is for those who now practice clinical ethics and for those who teach bioethics but who do not, or who rarely, have the opportunity to be in a clinical setting. "Immersion" refers to a high-intensity clinical ethics experience in a busy, urban, acute care hospital. During the Immersion Course, participants join clinical ethicists on working rounds in intensive care units and trauma service. Participants engage in a videotaped role-play conversation with an actor. Each simulated session reflects a practical, realistic clinical ethics case consultation scenario. Participants also review patients' charts, and have small group discussions on selected clinical ethics topics. As ethics consultation requests come into the center, Immersion Course participants accompany clinical ethicists on consultations. Specific to this pilot, because participants' evaluations and course faculty impressions were positive, the Center for Ethics will conduct the course twice each year. We look forward to improving the pilot and establishing the Immersion Course as one step towards addressing the gap in training opportunities in clinical ethics.     

Do young infants respond socially to human hands?

This study revealed that 4- and 6-month-old infants produced social-communicative behaviours only in response to faces, and not in response to hands. However, infants’ spontaneous responses to hands were unique in that they scanned the space above the hands, perhaps searching for a face.     

Writing About Upsetting Family Events: A Therapy Analog Study

This therapy analog study investigated whether a writing intervention based on contextual therapy would have positive effects on physical, mental, and relational health. One-hundred-and-three college students were randomly assigned to write about either an upsetting family event/issue from childhood or a trivial event during a four-day period. As anticipated, relative to the control participants, those in the experimental condition reported an increase in negative mood and physical symptoms immediately after writing each day. Also as anticipated, the experimental participants also reported feeling better about themselves and their topics at post-test. Unexpectedly, there were either no significant differences or differences in the unpredicted direction between the control and experimental groups in physical, psychological, and relational functioning at posttest and follow-up. However, post-hoc analyses revealed differential changes within the experimental group as a function of the personal relevance and the degree of previous disclosure of the topics. Limitations of written expression as a therapeutic tool are discussed.     

Men's and Women's Perceptions of the Gender Typing of Management Subroles

The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which subroles inherent in managerial positions are gender-typed and whether men or women engage in relatively more gender typing of managerial roles. We obtained perceptions of 19 management subroles from 263 business students in the United States Results confirmed predictions that some subroles are viewed as more feminine in nature whereas other subroles are perceived as more masculine. Male respondents saw most subroles as more masculine in nature than did female respondents. Results are discussed in terms of implications for researchers studying management, as well as for managers in the workplace.     

Self-Reported Differences in the Experience and Expression of Anger Between Girls and Boys

Gender differences with regard to the emotion of anger were studied using elementary school-aged children in an urban, a suburban, and a rural school district. Both the suburban and rural samples were predominantly white (88% and 82%, respectively) while the urban sample was predominantly black (57%). Five hundred and fifty seven 4th and 5th grade children (287 boys and 270 girls) were given a self-report anger questionnaire. No significant differences were found between boys and girls in the self-reported total anger level However, item analysis indicated that some of the specific hypothetical situations that elicited anger differed in boys and girls. In addition, there were significant differences in the expression of anger between boys and girls. Consistent with previous research, boys reported significantly higher levels of aggressive responses. The location in which the children attended school emerged as an important variable with regard to the experience and expression of anger. As a group, urban youngsters reported significantly higher levels of anger than children who attended school in rural or suburban settings.     

Decrements in children's responses to big and tall: A reconsideration of the potential Cognitive and Semantic causes

The potential causes of decrements in children's understanding of big and tall (Maratsos, 1973, Maratsos, 1974, 10, 367–375) are reconsidered. On the basis of data from English-speaking children, two of these hypotheses, the Strong Cognitive Hypothesis and the Strong Semantic Hypothesis, offer equally plausible explanations for those decrements. However, data from Arabic-speaking children between 2;9 and 6;3, who do not show a similar decrement in their understanding of kabiir, support the Strong Semantic Hypothesis that decrements in English-speaking children's understanding of big and tall are due to their positing semantic features such as [+ Vertical] for one word and overgeneralizing them to related words. This, in turn, supports Carey's (M. Halle, J. Bresnan, & G. Miller (Eds.), Linguistic theory and psychological reality. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978. Pp. 264–293) theory that features are abstracted out for words after children are able to use those words correctly on the basis of stored haphazard examples. Further, the results support the view that children at least sometimes posit features for a word on the basis of its individual privileges of occurrence, rather than on the basis of what that word contrasts with.