Fear Appeals in Political Rhetoric about Terrorism: An Analysis of Speeches by Australian Prime Minister Howard

This paper explores fear-arousing content in Australian former Prime Minister John Howard's political rhetoric about terrorism. We coded 27 speeches delivered between September 2001 and November 2007 for the presence of statements promoting fear-consistent appraisals ( Smith & Lazarus, 1993 ). Fear-arousing content was present in 24 of these speeches, but the amount of fear-arousing content varied markedly. In particular, rhetoric that raised doubts about the capacity of Australia and its allies to cope with terrorism was most strongly present in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq and at times of declining support for government policies. Textual analysis of three key speeches confirmed a marked difference between Howard's speech given immediately after the attacks on September 11, 2001, and the second and third speeches presented prior to and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. These findings indicate that Howard has not consistently employed fear-inducing rhetoric in his speeches about terrorism, but that particular speeches appear to take this form, raising the possibility that fear-arousing rhetoric may have been selectively deployed to support his political purposes at those times.     

Working memory impairment in people with Williams syndrome: Effects of delay, task and stimuli

Williams syndrome (WS) is a neurodevelopmental disorder associated with impaired visuospatial representations subserved by the dorsal stream and relatively strong object recognition abilities subserved by the ventral stream. There is conflicting evidence on whether this uneven pattern in WS extends to working memory (WM). The present studies provide a new perspective, testing WM for a single stimulus using a delayed recognition paradigm in individuals with WS and typically developing children matched for mental age (MA matches). In three experiments, participants judged whether a second stimulus ‘matched’ an initial sample, either in location or identity. We first examined memory for faces, houses and locations using a 5 s delay (Experiment 1) and a 2 s delay (Experiment 2). We then tested memory for human faces, houses, cat faces, and shoes with a 2 s delay using a new set of stimuli that were better controlled for expression, hairline and orientation (Experiment 3). With the 5 s delay (Experiment 1), the WS group was impaired overall compared to MA matches. While participants with WS tended to perform more poorly than MA matches with the 2 s delay, they also exhibited an uneven profile compared to MA matches. Face recognition was relatively preserved in WS with friendly faces (Experiment 2) but not when the faces had a neutral expression and were less natural looking (Experiment 3). Experiment 3 indicated that memory for object identity was relatively stronger than memory for location in WS. These findings reveal an overall WM impairment in WS that can be overcome under some conditions. Abnormalities in the parietal lobe/dorsal stream in WS may damage not only the representation of spatial location but may also impact WM for visual stimuli more generally.     

The development of academic competence among adolescents who bully and who are bullied

Using data from the first three waves (Grades 5, 6, and 7) of the 4-H Study of Positive Youth Development, this study assessed if being a bully or being a victim accounts for an adolescent's academic competence, if selected contextual and individual variables impact an adolescent's academic competence, and if such impact differs in relation to an adolescent's bullying status. The results of random coefficient hierarchical regression analyses indicated that being a bully predicted lower grades across time, and that being a bully was more detrimental for girls than for boys. Being a bully and being a victim negatively predicted self-perceived academic competence, but these predictive effects did not change over time or differ by sex. Teacher support positively predicted grades and greater parent support and teacher support independently predicted higher self-perceive academic competence. Greater educational expectations and school engagement independently predicted higher self-reported grades, while these two predictors positively interacted in explaining self-perceived academic competence. Unexpectedly, peer support negatively predicted self-reported grades for victims, and negatively predicted self-perceived academic competence for bullies. We discuss the importance of addressing the issue of academic competence in bullying interventions, as well as the utility of capitalizing on developmental assets in promoting academic competence among adolescents who bully and who are bullied.     

Measuring lexical diversity in children who stutter: application of vocd

There is growing but equivocal evidence that the language abilities of young children who stutter (CWS) may be depressed when compared to those of their fluent peers. In particular, the lexical skills of CWS have variously been reported to be weaker or stronger than comparison children in a number of recent studies. One source for such disagreement may be the measures used to compute lexical characteristics of these children’s spoken conversations. In this study, we examined the concurrent validity of two measures of lexical diversity in spontaneous language samples, Type-Token Ratio (TTR) and the newly developed utility vocd (Malvern & Richards, 1997), using a standard test of expressive vocabulary as the comparison measure. Findings indicated that vocd values (“D”) correlated well with standardized measures of expressive vocabulary, while TTR values did not. In addition, both the standardized measure and vocd revealed significantly poorer expressive lexical skills of CWS, whereas TTR analyses did not evidence this difference. Results are discussed in relation to the relative strength of vocd over TTR as a method for describing lexical characteristics of the spontaneous language samples of this population.

Educational objectives: The reader will learn about and be able to (1) identify several common measures of conversational vocabulary and the strengths and weaknesses of each, and (2) compare the performance of the young CWS in this study to their normally fluent peers in terms of vocabulary performance on both formal and conversational measures of vocabulary.     

Alimentary epigenetics: A developmental psychobiological systems view of the perception of hunger, thirst and satiety

Hunger, thirst and satiety have an enormous influence on cognition, behavior and development, yet we often take for granted that they are simply inborn or innate. Converging data and theory from both comparative and human domains, however, supports the conclusion that the phenomena hunger, thirst and satiety are not innate but rather emerge probabilistically as a function of experience during individual development. The metatheoretical perspective provided by developmental psychobiological systems theory provides a useful framework for organizing and synthesizing findings related to the development of the perception of hunger, thirst and satiety, or alimentary interoception. It is argued that neither developmental psychology nor the psychology of eating and drinking have adequately dealt with the ontogeny of alimentary interoception and that a more serious consideration of the species-typical developmental system of food and fluid intake and the many modifications that have been made therein is likely necessary for a full understanding of both alimentary and emotional development.     

Adolescent Report of Interparental Conflict: The Role of Threat and Self-blame Appraisal on Adaptive Outcome

Research consistently shows that children exposed to interparental conflict are at-risk for experiencing psychopathology. Establishing a link, however, between interparental conflict and maladjustment is not the same as understanding how specific outcomes manifest. Therefore, we examined the relation of interparental conflict and appraisal with adolescent outcome with 169 high school students (ages 14–19 years). Specifically, threat and self-blame appraisals were hypothesized to mediate the relation between interparental conflict and both adaptive and maladaptive outcomes. Results suggest that threat partially mediated the relation between interparental conflict and externalizing problems, interparental conflict and internalizing problems, and interparental conflict and adaptive behaviors. Additionally, self-blame appears to partially mediate the relation between interparental conflict and internalizing problems. Implications of the current findings are discussed.     

Does gender affect Bayley-III scores and test-taking behavior?

The developmental test Bayley-III is widely used in clinical and research settings, but there are no published gender-specific norms. The purpose of the present study was to investigate gender differences in Bayley-III scores in a sample of 55 typically developing children assessed repeatedly at ages 4, 7, 10, 13, 24 and 36 months, and to investigate gender differences in the test-taking behavior of the children as measured with the BRS at 36 months. The results of the study demonstrated gender differences at 24 and 36 months for the Cognitive Scale, at 10, 13, 24 and 36 months for the Language Scale and at 36 months for the Motor Scale. On a subtest level, gender differences were found for the Receptive Communication subtest at 13, 24 and 36 months and for the Fine Motor subtest at 7 and 36 months. In all cases where significant gender differences were found, girls achieved higher mean scores than boys. No gender differences were found in the children’s test-taking behavior at 36 months on any of the BRS scales, but independently of gender, higher Bayley-III Cognitive and Motor Scale scores were associated with more compliant test-taking behavior.     

Social neuroscience of child and adolescent depression

The social neuroscience of child and adolescent depression is inherently multidisciplinary. Depressive disorders beginning early in life can have serious developmental and functional consequences. Psychopathology research has described depression's defining clinical and contextual features, and intervention research has characterized its response to treatment and prevention programs. Neuroendocrine, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging studies have identified core neurobiological aspects of early-onset mood disorders. These areas are reviewed using a developmental social neuroscience perspective for integrating disparate observations. The paper introduces a dynamic adaptive systems framework, and it discusses hedonic capacity, stress sensitivity, ruminative self-focus, and attentional impairments as fundamental components of mood disorders.     

Developmental dyslexia: the visual attention span deficit hypothesis

The visual attention (VA) span is defined as the amount of distinct visual elements which can be processed in parallel in a multi-element array. Both recent empirical data and theoretical accounts suggest that a VA span deficit might contribute to developmental dyslexia, independently of a phonological disorder. In this study, this hypothesis was assessed in two large samples of French and British dyslexic children whose performance was compared to that of chronological-age matched control children. Results of the French study show that the VA span capacities account for a substantial amount of unique variance in reading, as do phonological skills. The British study replicates this finding and further reveals that the contribution of the VA span to reading performance remains even after controlling IQ, verbal fluency, vocabulary and single letter identification skills, in addition to phoneme awareness. In both studies, most dyslexic children exhibit a selective phonological or VA span disorder. Overall, these findings support a multi-factorial view of developmental dyslexia. In many cases, developmental reading disorders do not seem to be due to phonological disorders. We propose that a VA span deficit is a likely alternative underlying cognitive deficit in dyslexia.