The Early Childhood Irritability-Related Impairment Interview (E-CRI): A Novel Method for Assessing Young Children’s Developmentally Impairing Irritability

Irritability is a substrate of more than one dozen clinical syndromes. Thus, identifying when it is atypical and interfering with functioning is crucial to the prevention of mental disorder in the earliest phase of the clinical sequence. Advances in developmentally based measurement of irritability have enabled differentiation of normative irritable mood and tantrums from indicators of concern, beginning in infancy. However, developmentally sensitive assessments of irritability-related impairment are lacking. We introduce the Early Childhood Irritability-Related Impairment Interview (E-CRI), which assesses impairment associated with irritable mood and tantrums across contexts. Reliability and validity are established across two independent samples varied by developmental period: the Emotional Growth preschool sample (EmoGrow; N = 151, M = 4.82 years) and the When to Worry infant/toddler sample (W2W; N = 330, M = 14 months). We generated a well-fitting two-factor E-CRI model, with tantrum- and irritable mood-related impairment factors. The E-CRI exhibited good interrater, test–retest, and longitudinal reliability. Construct and clinical validity were also demonstrated. In both samples, E-CRI factors showed association to internalizing and externalizing problems, and to caregiver-reported concern in W2W. Tantrum-related impairment demonstrated stronger and more consistent explanatory value across outcomes, while mood-related impairment added explanatory utility for internalizing problems. The E-CRI also showed incremental utility beyond variance explained by the Family Life Impairment Scale (FLIS) survey indicator of developmental impairment. The E-CRI holds promise as an indicator of impairment to inform identification of typical versus atypical patterns reflecting early emerging irritability-related syndromes in the initial phase of the clinical sequence.     

Number Use at Home by Children and Their Parents and Its Relationship to Early Mathematical Performance

The purpose of this research was to measure the frequency and variety of number activities occurring in the homes of pre-school and kindergarten children and to determine if there was a relationship between those activities and the children's mathematical performance. In two studies, parents were interviewed over the telephone and asked how often their child or they and their child had engaged in each of 33 number-related activities over the last week. Both studies found considerable variability in the frequency and type of number activities that children participated in at home. There was a positive correlation between the frequency of number activities that parents reported for their children and parental participation in the same activities. In addition, in study 2, parental reports of children's number activities at home were predictive of children's performance on a standardized test of early mathematical ability.     

Revisiting the learning-without-awareness question in human pavlovian autonomic conditioning: Focus on extinction in a dichotic listening paradigm

Numerous studies have indicated that, consistent with current “cognitive” accounts of information processing, human Pavlovian autonomic discrimination acquisition cannot occur without awareness of the CS-US relationship. However, extinction studies have suggested that awareness is not necessary, findings that, in information-processing terms, have been explained by assuming that the processing by the extinction stage is parallel (automatic) rather than serial (controlled). This explanation was tested in an 80-subject study. The first, acquisition phase was a standard semantic differential conditioning arrangement with a 96-db white noise as US, and a “long” CS-US interval of 8 s, with ten trials each of CS+ (paired with US) and CS− (unpaired) trials. In extinction (USs omitted), in order to obtain non-autonomic indices of processing and thereby test the information-processing account of “unaware” autonomic conditioning during extinction, a dichotic listening task was implemented, with the CSs presented in the unattended channel (ear), while the subject had to perform a semantic differential reaction task in an attended-to channel (other ear). In early extinction, the electrodermal response occurring at an interval of 9–15 s after CS onset (i.e., following placement of the US during acquisition) and the finger-pulse-volume response occurring at an interval of 4–11 s after CS onset both showed reliable conditioning, but reaction-time and subjective-report data for the recognized critical words indicated serial rather than parallel processing of the CSs during extinction.     

幼儿教育名家思想给多元智能教育的启示

首先扼要阐述西方和中国各五位幼儿教育名家的背境,继而指出这些名家有那些关于潜能开展的主张,而这些主张若能得以承传,有望丰富实践多元智能教育关于“因才施教”这理想的内涵。最后从加德纳(Howard Gardner)对元智能的定义,总结学校欲实践多元智能教育所应具备的前提,以及设计教育活动时所遵从的四大教育原理。     

Multidimensional Profiles of Welfare and Work Dynamics: Development, Validation, and Associations with Child Cognitive and Mental Health Outcomes

This prospective longitudinal study addresses the research gap in the literature regarding multidimensional variation in welfare use and employment patterns, and relationships of such variation with parent earnings and child development outcomes. This study also aims to address the limitations of welfare dynamics studies that do not examine how multiple dimensions of welfare receipt and employment co-occur. Cluster analysis was utilized, using monthly welfare and employment data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, to examine variation within the welfare population in their welfare and work patterns across the first 5 years of children's lives. Six cluster profiles of welfare and work dynamics were found: Short-Term, Short-Term Work Exit, Working Cyclers, Nonworking Cyclers, Cycle to Long-Term Exit, and Long-Term. The clusters were validated using mother's 6th-year earnings as the criterion. The clusters' associations with child development outcomes in the cognitive and mental health domains (at ages 6 and 7) were then explored. Work following short-term welfare use was associated with higher child reading scores than that following long-term use (a moderate-size effect). Cycling on and off welfare in the context of high levels of employment was associated with higher child internalizing symptoms than cycling accompanied by low levels of employment (a moderate-size effect). Implications for evaluation of TANF welfare-to-work policies are discussed.     

Mild Head Injury in Children and Adolescents

Although mild head injury is the most prevalent type of head injury in children and adolescents, only a relatively small number of studies on this kind of head injury have been reported. This article summarizes a review of studies examining cognitive, academic, and psychosocial outcomes in children who sustained mild head injuries. Despite earlier claims of mild head injury being a "silent epidemic," the studies, which were published from 1970 to 1998, provide no compelling evidence to support this view.     

The legacy of Guttman and Kalish (1956): Twenty-five years of research on stimulus generalization

This paper is a selective review of the methods, problems, and findings in the area of operant stimulus generalization over the 25 years since the publication of the original paper by Guttman and Kalish (1956) on discriminability and spectral generalization in the pigeon. The paper falls into five main sections, which encompass the main themes and problems stemming from the Guttman and Kalish work and its immediate successors. The first section addresses the relationship between stimulus generalization and stimulus control, as well as the variety of testing procedures and dependent variables used to measure generalization. The next section reviews the limited literature on the effects of early rearing on the generalization gradient. The relationship between discriminability among test stimuli and the slope of the spectral gradient is discussed in the third section, with emphasis upon recent reassessments of the pigeon's hue discriminability function. The fourth section reviews the topic of inhibitory stimulus control, one which developed with the discovery of the peak shift following intradimensional discrimination training. Problems of definition and measurement are discussed in conjunction with the gradient forms used to index inhibitory control. The last section is devoted to attentional effects and the two principal theories postulated to account for them. A survey of different attentional paradigms is provided and the possible role of constant irrelevant stimuli as a source of control is examined. A brief conclusion summarizes the contribution of the generalization technique toward an understanding of the nature and acquisition of stimulus control.     

Pilot test of a measure to assess clients’ perceptions of their home visitors

Home visiting services for caregivers of infants and young children have been found to be an effective method for promoting child development. Unfortunately, such services suffer from high rates of attrition, suggesting the need to identify factors related to client retention in services. Research has indicated that the client-provider relationship is an important predictor of client retention in home visiting services; however, measures to assess this relationship are limited. This study reports on a pilot test of the Client Perceptions of Home Visitors Questionnaire, developed to assess home visiting clients’ perceptions of their relationship with their home visitor. The measure was completed by 39 diverse home visiting clients during pregnancy in a midwestern town in the United States. The scale was found to have good internal consistency. Validity analyses found that the scale was positively associated with client satisfaction with services and perceived provider cultural sensitivity. The scale was also positively associated with retention in services at an 8-month follow-up. Additional research should examine the measure's psychometrics with larger samples.     

Vulnerability of facial attractiveness perception to early and multi-year visual deprivation

Judgments of facial attractiveness invariably accompany our perception of faces. Even neonates appear to be capable of making such judgments in a manner consistent with adults. This suggests that the processes supporting facial attractiveness require little, if any, visual experience to manifest. Here we investigate the resilience of these processes to several years of early-onset visual deprivation. Specifically, we study whether congenitally blind children treated several years after birth possess the ability to rate facial attractiveness in a manner congruent to normally sighted individuals. The data reveal significant individual variability in the way each newly sighted child perceives attractiveness. This is in marked contrast to data from normally sighted controls who exhibit strong across-subject agreement in facial attractiveness ratings. This variability may be attributable, in part, to atypical facial encoding strategies used by the newly sighted children. Overall, our results suggest that the development of facial attractiveness perception is likely to be vulnerable to early visual deprivation, pointing to the existence of a possible sensitive period early in the developmental trajectory.     

Mother–child relationship quality from preschool to adolescence: Variation by maternal education

Using longitudinal data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N = 1088), we examine changes in maternal perception of closeness and conflict in the mother–child relationship from the child's preschool to adolescent years, with attention to variation by maternal education. Analyses using individual growth models show that mother–child closeness increases, while mother–child conflict decreases, from preschool to first grade. From first grade to age 15, mother–child closeness decreases, while mother–child conflict increases, both gradually. The decrease in mother–child conflict from preschool to first grade and the increases in mother–child conflict from first to fifth grade, sixth grade, and age 15 are less steep for mothers with a college degree than for mothers without a college degree. These findings underscore the importance of examining changes in parent–child relationships using longitudinal data across children's developmental stages and their variations by parental social and economic status.