Trajectories of Peer-Nominated Aggression: Risk Status,Predictors and Outcomes

Developmental trajectories of peer-nominated aggression, risk factors at baseline, and outcomes were studied. Peer nominations of aggression were obtained annually from grades 1 to 3. Three developmental trajectories were identified: an early-onset/increasers trajectory with high levels of peer-nominated aggression at elementary school entry and increasing levels throughout follow-up; a moderate-persistent trajectory of aggression in which children were characterized by moderate levels of physical aggression at baseline; and a third trajectory with stable low levels of aggression. Children following the early-onset/increasers trajectory showed physical forms of aggression at baseline. Male gender and comorbid attention deficit/hyperactivity problems, oppositional defiant problems and poor prosocial behavior plus negative life events predicted which children would follow the early-onset/increasers trajectory of aggression. The outcomes associated with the early-onset/increaser children suggest high risk for chronically high levels of aggressive behavior.     

Idiom comprehension deficits in relation to corpus callosum agenesis and hypoplasia in children with spina bifida meningomyelocele

Idioms are phrases with figurative meanings that are not directly derived from the literal meanings of the words in the phrase. Idiom comprehension varies with: literality, whether the idiom is literally plausible; compositionality, whether individual words contribute to a figurative meaning; and contextual bias. We studied idiom comprehension in children with spina bifida meningomyelocele (SBM), a neurodevelopmental disorder associated with problems in discourse comprehension and agenesis and hypoplasia of the corpus callosum. Compared to age peers, children with SBM understood decomposable idioms (which are processed more like literal language) but not non-decomposable idioms (which require contextual analyses for acquisition). The impairment in non-decomposable idioms was related to congenital agenesis of the corpus callosum, which suggests that the consequences of impaired interhemispheric communication, whether congenital or acquired in adulthood, are borne more by configurational than by compositional language.     

小学一～三年级儿童加减法策略选择的发展特点研究

随机选取90名小学一～三年级的儿童为被试,采用实验法和访谈法对儿童解决加减法算术题的策略发展特点进行了探讨。结果发现:1儿童能运用多种策略解决加减法算术题,在解决两个数的算术题时用到了13种策略,在解决三个数的算术题时用到了8种策略。2儿童在解决同一道题时大多能同时运用两种或两种以上的策略。3随着年龄的增长,儿童使用策略的总目呈简约化发展的趋势。4在解决两个数的算术题时,不同年级的儿童在使用出声策略、拆十策略、手势策略、逆算策略、数数策略的次数上差异显著,随着年级的增长其使用频率逐渐降低。5儿童在解决三个数的算术题时,各年级儿童使用出声策略、手势策略、对位策略差异显著,随着年级的增长其使用频率逐渐增高。     

A Meta-Analysis of Cognitive Deficits in Adults with a Diagnosis of Schizophrenia

This review identified 1275 studies examining cognitive deficits in people with schizophrenia, published between 1990 and 2003. Data from 113 studies (4365 patients and 3429 controls) were combined in a meta-analysis carried out on the five cognitive domains of IQ, memory, language, executive function, and attention. Studies were excluded where they lacked a suitable control group or failed to present complete information. In all five cognitive domains, analysis indicated a consistent trend for patients to perform more poorly than healthy controls, with significant heterogeneity across studies. Sources of heterogeneity were analyzed and a need to ensure more appropriate composition of patient and control groups and to adopt a more refined and methodologically correct, hypothesis-driven approach was identified.     

Classification of Antisocial Behaviors Along Severity and Frequency Parameters

Antisocial behaviors were systematically classified along a hierarchy of seriousness or severity that also accounted for frequency of occurrence and heterogeneity of behaviors. Items from the CD and ODD schedules of the NIMH DISC-IV and from the Elliot Delinquency Scales were listed at specified frequencies. Nine mental health clinicians rated the level of seriousness of each alternative on a scale from 0 (trivial) to 5 (very serious). Reliability of the ratings was assessed. Over two thirds of the items showed excellent agreement among the raters, 8% showed poor agreement and 21% showed fair to moderate agreement. The overall reliability of a single rater’s score was 0.56 and the reliability of the average was 0.84. The classification meets high psychometric standards for reliability and has face validity. The final output provides a classification along a spectrum that takes into account severity, frequency of occurrence during the previous year, and presence of multiple behaviors. It is useful for classification purposes and for longitudinal tracking of antisocial behavior.     

Analysis of precurrent skills in solving mathematics story problems

We conducted an analysis of precurrent skills (responses that increase the effectiveness of a subsequent or "current" behavior in obtaining a reinforcer) to facilitate the solution of arithmetic word (story) problems. Two students with developmental disabilities were taught four precurrent responses (identifying the initial value, change value, operation, and resulting value) in a sequential manner. Results of a multiple baseline design across behaviors showed that the teaching procedures were effective in increasing correct performance of each of the precurrent behaviors with untaught problems during probes and that once the precurrent behaviors were established, the number of correct problem solutions increased.     

The nature and treatment of stuttering as revealed by fMRI A within- and between-group comparison

This article reviews some of our recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of stuttering. Using event-related fMRI experiments, we investigated brain activation during speech production. Results of three studies comparing persons who stutter (PWS) and persons who do not stutter (PWNS) are outlined. Their findings point to a region in the right frontal operculum (RFO) that was consistently implicated in stuttering. During overt reading and before fluency shaping therapy, PWS showed higher and more distributed neuronal activation than PWNS. Immediately after therapy differential activations were even more distributed and left sided. They extended to frontal, temporal, and parietal regions, anterior cingulate, insula, and putamen. These over-activations were slightly reduced and again more right sided two years after therapy. Left frontal deactivations remained stable over two years of observation, and therefore possibly indicate a dysfunction. After therapy, we noted higher activations in persons who stutter moderately than in those who stutter severely. These activations might reflect patterns of compensation. We discuss why these findings suggest that fluency-inducing techniques might synchronize a disturbed signal transmission between auditory, speech motor planning, and motor areas.

Educational objectives: The reader will learn about and be able to: (1) identify regions of brain activations and deactivations specific for PWS; (2) describe brain activation changes induced by fluency shaping therapy; and (3) discuss the correlation between stuttering severity and brain activation.     

Fixed-time schedule effects as a function of baseline reinforcement rate

Using an arbitrary response, we evaluated fixed-time (FT) schedules that were either similar or dissimilar to a baseline (response-dependent) reinforcement schedule and extinction. Results suggested that both FT schedules and extinction resulted in decreased responding. However, FT schedules were more effective in reducing response rates if the FT reinforcer rate was dissimilar to baseline reinforcer rates. Possible reasons for this difference were evaluated with data analysis methods designed to identify adventitious response-reinforcer relations.     

The import of infancy for individual, family, and societal development: commentary on the special section: does infancy matter?

Across their life spans humans actualize a rich potential for cognitive and behavioral plasticity, a set of developmental changes that require regulation of organism-context relations on the part of both the individual and society. An individual’s action on the context must be started in infancy and maintained in subsequent periods of life for adaptive functioning to occur across ontogeny. The process of the individual acting as an agent of his or her own development is continuous, although the particular ways in which such control is manifested will change in developmentally appropriate ways. As demonstrated by the papers in this special issue, the significance of infancy for the rest of the life-span rests on an integration of this continuity and discontinuity within the person-context developmental system.     

The Ability of Face Viewpoint Transformation Remains Immature at Age of 12: Evidence from Recognition of Faces with Different Familiarity in Children

Children are immature in face recognition, particularly in face configural decoding. This study examines the developmental difference of face recognition in another mechanism: viewpoint transformation processing. Adults and sixth‐grade children were instructed to match a series of one‐tone black face silhouettes to their corresponding front‐view faces. This task involves sophisticated calculation in pictorial information, precise viewpoint transformation, and most probably a 3‐D face representation. The results showed that although the performances were well above chance level in the recognition of familiar faces, for children, they were at chance level in the recognition of unfamiliar faces. The results indicate that children, at least to the age of about 12 years, are still immature in the processing of face viewpoint transformation compared to adults.