Collective Identities of Class and Gender: Working-Class Women in the Pittston Coal Strike

This article investigates the intersections and tensions between two collective identities, those of class and gender, for working-class women involved in supporting the 1989–1990 strike against Pittston Coal Group in southwestern Virginia. In the case of this year-long (and ultimately successful) strike, women were organized by United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) staff in strike support activities, but they also sought to organize themselves as women. The tensions between their identity as members of the working class and their identity as women are revealed by examining their forms of activism, their relationship with the UMWA, the divisions between groups of activist women, and the articulation of women's involvement in the strike. The experiences of these women are briefly compared with women's activism in the 1984–1985 British Coal strike. The article concludes by arguing that collective identity is best understood as it emerges in response to specific contexts.     

Distinguishing genetic from nongenetic medical tests: Some implications for antidiscrimination legislation

Genetic discrimination is becoming an increasingly important problem in the United States. Information acquired from genetic tests has been used by insurance companies to reject applications for insurance policies and to refuse payment for the treatment of illnesses. Numerous states and the United States Congress have passed or are considering passage of laws that would forbid such use of genetic information by health insurance companies. Here we argue that much of this legislation is severely flawed because of the difficulty in distinguishing genetic from nongenetic tests. In addition, barring the use by insurance companies of a genetic test but not a nongenetic test (conceivably for the same multifactorial disease) raises issues of fairness in health insurance. These arguments suggest that ultimately the problems arising from genetic discrimination cannot be solved by narrowly focused legislation but only by a modification of the entire health care system.     

Spontaneous play in two-year-olds born to substance-abusing mothers

The aim of the study was to determine if spontaneous play was altered in 2-year-olds born to polysubstance-abusing mothers. The study is part of a longitudinal research project of chronic substance-abusing mothers and their children living in poverty in the inner city of Los Angeles, identified in the hospital at birth by positive urine-toxicology screens, and compared to non-substance-abusing mothers and their children living in the same geographic area, of similar ethnic group and socioeconomic and marital status. The behavior of the 31 target and 21 comparison children in the 16-minute procedure was measured by frequency counts of manipulative, functional, and symbolic acts as well as by ratings of the quality of play. The play of the prenatally drug-exposed children differed from the comparison group by demonstrating significantly more immature play strategies, less sustained attention, more deviant behaviors, and fewer positive social interactions with their caregivers.     

Talking with Feeling: Integrating Affective and Linguistic Expression in Early Language Development

Abstract

The purpose of the longitudinal study reported here was to determine the developmental relation between the two systems of expression available to the young child in the period of early language learning: affect and speech. Two achievements in language were identified for a group of 12 infants: First Words, at the beginning of the single-word period (mean age about 13 months), and a Vocabulary Spurt, which occurred toward the end of the period (mean age about 19 months). Affect expression was coded continuously in the stream of the infants' activity as they and their mothers played with groups of toys and ate a snack. The occurrence of words was examined in relation to the expression of affect and the results of this study concern developments in the integration of these two forms expression. The children's words occurred closely in time with their expression of emotionally toned affect. We concluded, then, that they were learning words to express what their feelings were about even though none of the actual words they said were emotion terms. However, the cognitive requirements for emotional expression and expression through speech resulted in several constraints on their integration. Words were said with neutral affect expression most often, with a peak in emotional expression in the moments immediately after words but a decrease in emotional expression before words. The peak in emotional expression with words was significantly greater, and the pre-word dip in emotional expression was significantly less, at the Vocabulary Spurt than at First Words. Thus, the two systems of expression converged in the period of single-word development as the children came to be able to say words with emotional affect. However, the words that were said together with emotional expression were said with positive rather than negative valence, with low rather than heightened intensity, and were among the most frequent and earliest learned words. These results are discussed in terms of the acquisition of language for expression and the different cognitive requirements for expression through affect and speech.     

The explanatory power of the substance view of persons.

The purpose of this essay is to offer support for the substance view of persons, the philosophical anthropology defended by Patrick Lee in his essay. In order to accomplish this the author (1) presents a brief definition of the substance view; (2) argues that the substance view has more explanatory power in accounting for why we believe that human persons are intrinsically valuable even when they are not functioning as such (e.g., when on is temporarily comatose), why human persons remain identical to themselves over time, and why it follows from these points that the unborn are human persons; and (3) responds to two arguments that attempt to establish the claim that the early human being is not a unified substance until at least fourteen days after conception.     

Maternal sensitivity during infancy and subsequent life events relate to attachment representation at early adulthood.

A prospective longitudinal research study of 86 prematurely born children from birth to age 18 years provided empirical evidence for continuity from infancy experience to representations of attachment at age 18 years. Young adults whose representation of attachment was dismissing had been objectively observed during infancy, 16-17 years earlier, to receive less sensitive maternal care than those infants who were later judged at early adulthood to have secure or preoccupied representations. Infancy experience alone did not differentiate young adults with secure representations from those with preoccupied representations. Rather, adverse life events through age 12, particularly parental divorce, reduced the likelihood of secure representations and increased the likelihood of preoccupied representations. The absence of adverse life events did not increase the likelihood of security for those who had not experienced early sensitive caregiving.     

Mothers' use of personal pronouns when talking with toddlers

The verbal interaction of 2-year-old children (N = 46; 16 girls, 30 boys) and their mothers was audiotaped, transcribed, and analyzed for the use of personal pronouns, the total number of utterances, the child's mean length of utterance, and the mother's responsiveness to her child's utterances. Mothers' use of the personal pronoun we was significantly related to their children's performance on the Stanford-Binet at age 5 and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children at age 8. Mothers' use of we in social--vocal interchange, indicating a system for establishing a shared relationship with the child, was closely connected with their verbal responsiveness to their children. The total amount of maternal talking, the number of personal pronouns used by mothers, and their verbal responsiveness to their children were not related to mothers' social class or years of education.     

A collaborative effort to study mother—child interaction in three risk groups: Social risk mother,adolescent mother,preterm infant

This paper describes the collaborative efforts of three intervention projects with similar data sets on high-risk populations of mothers and their children at 13 and 20 months. The three projects collected data on a total of 190 dyads from three risk groups: adolescent mothers and their infants, high social risk mothers and their infants, and high social risk mothers and their preterm infants. The authors define the common set of measures and resulting variables used collaboratively to measure parent-child interaction and compare the three risk groups at both 13 and 20 months.