Rural adolescent loneliness and coping strategies

The extent of loneliness of rural adolescents was investigated in relation to aspects of their self-esteem. The study sample consisted of 387 4-H children from rural Nebraska ranging in age from 8 to 20 years. Data were gathered using the Loneliness Inventory (Woodward, 1967), Bachman's (1970) Self-Esteem Scale, and the Coping Strategies Inventory (Woodward, 1987). It was found that rural adolescents have extremely high loneliness scores and that 10 of 12 self-esteem characteristics were significant at the .05 level in relation to loneliness scores. Resources and coping strategies used by the subjects to combat loneliness are provided and implications of the findings discussed.     

Action experience alters 3-month-old infants' perception of others' actions

An intervention facilitated 3-month-old infants' apprehension of objects either prior to (reach first), or after (watch first) viewing another person grasp similar objects in a visual habituation procedure. Action experience facilitated action perception: reach-first infants focused on the relation between the actor and her goal, but watch-first infants did not. Infants' sensitivity to the actor's goal was correlated with their engagement in object-directed contact with the toys. These findings indicate that infants can rapidly form goal-based action representations and suggest a developmental link between infants' goal directed actions and their ability to detect goals in the actions of others.     

The joint role of trained,untrained, and observed actions at the origins of goal recognition

Recent findings across a variety of domains reveal the benefits of self-produced experience on object exploration, object knowledge, attention, and action perception. The influence of active experience may be particularly important in infancy, when motor development is undergoing great changes. Despite the importance of self-produced experience, we know that infants and young children are eventually able to gain knowledge through purely observational experience. In the current work, three-month-old infants were given experience with object-directed actions in one of three forms and their recognition of the goal of grasping actions was then assessed in a habituation paradigm. All infants were given the chance to manually interact with the toys without assistance (a difficult task for most three-month-olds). Two of the three groups were then given additional experience with object-directed actions, either through active training (in which Velcro mittens helped infants act more efficiently) or observational training. Findings support the conclusion that self-produced experience is uniquely informative for action perception and suggest that individual differences in spontaneous motor activity may interact with observational experience to inform action perception early in life.     

Bivalency is costly: bivalent stimuli elicit cautious responding

When performing tasks in alternation, substantial slowing occurs when the stimuli have features relevant to both tasks (i.e., when stimuli are bivalent as opposed to univalent). One possible source of this slowing, herein called a bivalency cost, is that encountering bivalent stimuli leads to a more cautious response style. To investigate this, we employed a paradigm that required performing three simple tasks, with bivalent stimuli occasionally encountered on one task. The results show that regardless of the feature overlap among the stimuli used for the different tasks, the introduction of bivalent stimuli slowed responding on all tasks and it was accompanied by a decrease in response errors. Overall, it appears that bivalent stimuli recruit a more cautious approach to task-switching performance.