Never quite good enough: The paradox of sticky developmental relationships for elite university graduates

Drawing on the mentoring, education, and social psychology literatures, this longitudinal study examines how the persistence of developmental relationships from an elite graduate school influences subjective career outcomes during early career. Participants (n = 136) were surveyed about their developmental networks—a group of individuals who take an active interest in and action to advance a focal individual’s career—and subjective career outcomes over the 10 years (1996-2006) post graduation. Results show that although receiving mentoring from one’s entire developmental network was positively related to career-related self-efficacy and perceptions of career success, this was not the case for ties retained from graduate school. Continuing to receive mentoring support from developers from graduate school and further, from peers from graduate school, was negatively related to perceptions of career success. These findings offer insight into the dynamics and potentially negative consequences of developmental networks and highlight the significance of social comparison during early career.     

The growth of developmental thought: Implications for a new evolutionary psychology

Evolution has come to be increasingly discussed in terms of changes in developmental processes rather than simply in terms of changes in gene frequencies. This shift is based in large part on the recognition that since all phenotypic traits arise during ontogeny as products of individual development, a primary basis for evolutionary change must be variations in the patterns and processes of development. Further, the products of development are epigenetic, not just genetic, and this is the case even when considering the evolutionary process. These insights have led investigators to reconsider the established notion of genes as the primary cause of development, opening the door to research programs focused on identifying how genetic and non-genetic factors coact to guide and constrain the process of development and its outcomes. I explore this growth of developmental thought and its implications for the achievement of a unified theory of heredity, development, and evolution and consider its implications for the realization of a new, developmentally based evolutionary psychology.     

Taking old ideas seriously: Evolution, development, and human behavior

I argue that the roots of an adequate integration of evolution into psychology are not to be found in evolutionary psychology, but rather in evolutionary developmental biology (evo–devo). To this end, I provide an overview of evo–devo and explore the limited role that behavioral sciences have played in its genesis. I then motivate an evo–devo approach to psychobiology, and sketch desiderata for the success of this enterprise. In particular, I elucidate what it means to take both development and evolution seriously, and argue for the primacy of developmental analysis in the exploration of (human) behavior and its evolution.     

Coming out stories framed as faith narratives, or stories of spiritual growth

The tension between religion and sexuality is particularly pronounced for gay and lesbian people who are often “caught in the middle” between a constitutional sexual orientation and a religious body that rejects it. This paper demonstrates how gay men can be helped in trying to integrate these deeply human and intrinsic parts of themselves, using a developmental approach first articulated by Robert Kegan. It argues that such development is often reflected later in theological language: in this case, in these men's coming out narratives, which are often framed as stories of spiritual growth.     

Is ZF a hack?: Comparing the complexity of some (formalist interpretations of) foundational systems for mathematics

This paper presents Automath encodings (which are also valid in LF/λP) of various kinds of foundations of mathematics. Then it compares these encodings according to their size, to find out which foundation is the simplest.

The systems analyzed in this way are two kinds of set theory (ZFC and NF), two systems based on Church's higher order logic (Isabelle/Pure and HOL), three kinds of type theory (the calculus of constructions, Luo's extended calculus of constructions, and Martin-Löf's predicative type theory) and one foundation based on category theory.

The conclusions of this paper are that the simplest system is type theory (the calculus of constructions), but that type theories that know about serious mathematics are not simple at all. In that case the set theories are the simplest. If one looks at the number of concepts needed to explain such a system, then higher order logic is the simplest, with twenty-five concepts. On the other side of the scale, category theory is relatively complex, as is Martin-Löf's type theory.

(The full Automath sources of the contexts described in this paper are one the web at http://www.cs.ru.nl/~freek/zfc-etc/.)     

Continuity in adolescent career preparation and its effects on adjustment

Career preparation represents a major developmental task of adolescence, which has not received sufficient attention in empirical research on career development. Thus, this study was designed to examine the structure, continuity, and change in adolescent career preparation and its relationships with adjustment. The data were collected from a diverse sample of 389 adolescents on four occasions beginning in Grade 11 in high school and ending 6 months after high school graduation. Using Structural Equations modeling, a four-wave, developmental model of adolescent career preparation indicated by career decidedness, planning, and confidence was shown to fit the empirical data very well. Career preparation was characterized by continuity and a consistent pattern of positive concurrent and prospective associations with various indicators of adjustment. The results of the study provide empirical support for the theoretical propositions about the adaptive role of adolescent career preparation, particularly in terms of its contribution to psychological well-being and social integration.     

Eye movements during spoken word recognition in Russian children

This study explores incremental processing in spoken word recognition in Russian 5- and 6-year-olds and adults using free-viewing eye-tracking. Participants viewed scenes containing pictures of four familiar objects and clicked on a target embedded in a spoken instruction. In the cohort condition, two object names shared identical three-phoneme onsets. In the noncohort condition, all object names had unique onsets. Coarse-grain analyses of eye movements indicated that adults produced looks to the competitor on significantly more cohort trials than on noncohort trials, whereas children surprisingly failed to demonstrate cohort competition due to widespread exploratory eye movements across conditions. Fine-grain analyses, in contrast, showed a similar time course of eye movements across children and adults, but with cohort competition lingering more than 1s longer in children. The dissociation between coarse-grain and fine-grain eye movements indicates a need to consider multiple behavioral measures in making developmental comparisons in language processing.     

Sensation seeking and danger invulnerability: Paths to college student risk-taking

This study examines the roles of sensation seeking and invulnerability as predictors of health compromising behaviors in a multiethnic sample of 1690 emerging adult college students (mean age = 19.8, range 18–25 years) from nine US colleges and universities. Participants completed the Arnett Sensation Seeking Inventory and the Adolescent Invulnerability Scale; and reported how often they had participated in a set of health compromising risk behaviors (i.e., substance use, impaired driving, and sexual behaviors) in the 30 days prior to assessment. Sensation seeking and danger invulnerability scores were moderately correlated (r = .30). Findings from a series of multivariate Poisson regression analyses suggest that when considered simultaneously as predictors, sensation seeking appears to be a general risk factor associated with engagement in a variety of risk behaviors, whereas danger invulnerability is primarily a factor in those risk behaviors that are less common among peers (e.g., hard drug use, casual sex, and driving while intoxicated).     

Inhibitory response capacities of bilateral lower and upper extremities in children with developmental coordination disorder in endogenous and exogenous orienting modes

This study was designed to investigate separately the inhibitory response capacity and the lateralization effect in children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) in the endogenous and exogenous modes of orienting attention. Children with DCD on the lower extremities (DCD-LEs), along with age-matched controls, completed four tasks that involved various applications of asynchronous stimuli to the feet or hands at various intervals. The results demonstrated that children with DCD-LEs had a significantly longer reaction time than the controls for all tasks, and were not alert to the appearance of the target. However, they displayed a deficit in volitional shifts of attention (endogenous mode), but not in automatic dislocation of attention (exogenous mode), whenever they performed the tasks with either their lower or their upper-limbs-even 6 months after the initial study. These findings confirm the deficit in the inhibitory response capacity in terms of volitional movement of attention by children with DCD. Additionally, the negative effect of lateralization on the bilateral extremities was not present in children with DCD-LEs. Significantly differences in response ability were detected only between the dominant and non-dominant sides of upper-limbs, but not between the lower-limbs, suggesting a future avenue for further experimentation on bilateral extremities.     

Mechanisms of deficit of visuospatial attention shift in children with developmental coordination disorder: A neurophysiological measure of the endogenous Posner paradigm

The purpose of this study was to investigate and compare the mechanisms of brain activity, as revealed by a combination of the visuospatial attention shifting paradigm and event-related potentials (ERP) in children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) and typically developing children. Twenty-eight DCD children and 26 typically developing children were recorded with regard to their behavioral performance and ERP measures during a variant of the endogenous Posner paradigm, in which they should react to visual targets preceded by spatial cues or presented uncued. Children with DCD showed longer reaction time and a deficit in inhibitory response capacity when compared to typically developing children. The electrophysiological characteristics also showed distinct modulatory effects upon attentional orienting, anticipatory mechanisms, and cognitive-to-motor transfer in children with DCD: longer cue-P3 and target-N1 latency, smaller target-P3 amplitude, an elongated interval between N2 and the motor response (N2-RT), and small areas on contingent negative variation (CNV). The combined analysis of behavioral performance and ERP data suggested that children with DCD had deficits of slower target identification (N1), less ability in interhemispheric (P3) and cognitive-to-motor transfer speed (N2-RT), as well as a less mature anticipatory and executive process (CNV).