A commentary on the symposium: The use of history in the social sciences curriculum

The use of history in the social science curriculum leads to a deepened understanding of the respective disciplines of anthropology, education, sociology, political science, psychology, and history of science. The use of history in the social sciences also leads to extradisciplinary interests in history, philosophy, and literature. Some highlights from a symposium and from the recent literature are discussed.     

The relative roles of input and output mechanisms in directed forgetting

Memory & Cognition - When Ss are presented a first set of items (Set A) followed by a second set (Set B), a postinput cue to recall only Set B results in better recall of Set B than does a cue...     

Social Cognition and Social Responsiveness in 10-month-old Infants

In this study, we investigated relations between infants' understanding of intentional actions and measures of social responsiveness during a transitional period, 9- to 11-months. Infants (N = 52) were tested in visual habituation paradigms tapping their understanding of the relation between a person and the object of her attention. Measures of social responsiveness included orienting to the target of another's attention, point production, and supported joint attention in parent---child play. Infants' responses to the habituation events were related to their social responsiveness. Distinct factors for understanding actions and social responsiveness as relational were revealed. Infants who produced object-directed points were more likely to understand pointing as relational, and infants who engaged in high amounts of shared attention were more likely to understand gaze. Infants' tendency to orient in response to an adult's gaze shifts and points was unrelated to their understanding of gaze and pointing. These findings elucidate the ways in which social cognition and social responsiveness, although distinct, are related in development.     

Questioning Our Questions: A Constructivist Technique for Clinical Supervision

Consistent themes in the constructivist supervision of counseling and psychotherapy include the fostering of supervisee reflexivity, perspective taking, and capacity to generate alternative conceptualizations and interventions. In keeping with these objectives, we describe a technique for deepening therapists' reflection on their interchanges with clients through “questioning their questions” and the clients' responses to them. We further illustrate the procedure in the supervision of a therapist in training who (a) analyzed in writing a series of six question-and-answer cycles pertaining to a client, (b) considered the larger implications of the interaction for the therapeutic relationship with this client, (c) received supervisory feedback on his journaling, and (d) offered a final reflexive comment on the procedure. We conclude with a few thoughts about variations on the technique to enhance its relevance in different supervisory settings.     

Mechanisms of Risk and Resilience in Military Families: Theoretical and Empirical Basis of a Family-Focused Resilience Enhancement Program

Recent studies have confirmed that repeated wartime deployment of a parent exacts a toll on military children and families and that the quality and functionality of familial relations is linked to force preservation and readiness. As a result, family-centered care has increasingly become a priority across the military health system. FOCUS (Families OverComing Under Stress), a family-centered, resilience-enhancing program developed by a team at UCLA and Harvard Schools of Medicine, is a primary initiative in this movement. In a large-scale implementation project initiated by the Bureau of Navy Medicine, FOCUS has been delivered to thousands of Navy, Marine, Navy Special Warfare, Army, and Air Force families since 2008. This article describes the theoretical and empirical foundation and rationale for FOCUS, which is rooted in a broad conception of family resilience. We review the literature on family resilience, noting that an important next step in building a clinically useful theory of family resilience is to move beyond developing broad “shopping lists” of risk indicators by proposing specific mechanisms of risk and resilience. Based on the literature, we propose five primary risk mechanisms for military families and common negative “chain reaction” pathways through which they undermine the resilience of families contending with wartime deployments and parental injury. In addition, we propose specific mechanisms that mobilize and enhance resilience in military families and that comprise central features of the FOCUS Program. We describe these resilience-enhancing mechanisms in detail, followed by a discussion of the ways in which evaluation data from the program’s first 2 years of operation supports the proposed model and the specified mechanisms of action.     

Infants generate goal-based action predictions

Predicting the actions of others is critical to smooth social interactions. Prior work suggests that both understanding and anticipation of goal-directed actions appears early in development. In this study, on-line goal prediction was tested explicitly using an adaptation of Woodward's (1998) paradigm for an eye-tracking task. Twenty 11-month-olds were familiarized to movie clips of a hand reaching to grasp one of two objects. Then object locations were swapped, and the hand made an incomplete reach between the objects. Here, infants reliably made their first look from the hand to the familiarized goal object, now in a new location. A separate control condition of 20 infants familiarized to the same movements of an unfamiliar claw revealed the opposite pattern: reliable prediction to the familiarized location, rather than the familiarized object. This study suggests that by 11 months infants actively use goal analysis to generate on-line predictions of an agent's next action.