Caregiving for children through conflict and displacement: a pilot study testing the feasibility of delivering and evaluating a light touch parenting intervention for caregivers in the West Bank

A child's adjustment to wartime stress is reliant not only on individual responses and qualities, but very significantly on the availability of support that they may receive from their parent or caregivers and quality of relationships. Strengthening parental support has the potential to be valuable. A pilot two-arm randomised controlled trial investigated the feasibility of delivering and evaluating the “Caring for Children Through Conflict and Displacement” intervention with caregivers in the West Bank. Feasibility to recruit and train non-specialist staff on-the-ground to screen families for eligibility, collect outcome data, deliver the intervention and to recruit and retain families in the study were examined. Research staff and intervention facilitators were successfully appointed in the field, screened participants and delivered the intervention to 120 caregivers, collecting outcome measures pre-and post-delivery. All families completed the outcome measures, with very little missing data. This indicated that the intervention can be delivered feasibly and evaluated with families in this humanitarian context. Preliminary outcome data showed promise that the intervention may have the potential to both improve family functioning and reduce children's problem behaviour. Implications of family-focused initiatives, particularly within a conflict/post-conflict context for the prevention of several negative health and social outcomes directions, are discussed.     

Staying Together: A Bidirectional Delay–Coupled Approach to Joint Action

To understand how individuals adapt to and anticipate each other in joint tasks, we employ a bidirectional delay–coupled dynamical system that allows for mutual adaptation and anticipation. In delay–coupled systems, anticipation is achieved when one system compares its own time‐delayed behavior, which implicitly includes past information about the other system’s behavior, with the other system’s instantaneous behavior. Applied to joint music performance, the model allows each system to adapt its behavior to the dynamics of the other. Model predictions of asynchrony between two simultaneously produced musical voices were compared with duet pianists’ behavior; each partner performed one voice while auditory feedback perturbations occurred at unpredictable times during live performance. As the model predicted, when auditory feedback from one musical voice was removed, the asynchrony changed: The pianist’s voice that was removed anticipated (preceded) the actions of their partner. When the auditory feedback returned and both musicians could hear each other, they rapidly returned to baseline levels of asynchrony. To understand how the pianists anticipated each other, their performances were fitted by the model to examine change in model parameters (coupling strength, time‐delay). When auditory feedback for one or both voices was removed, the fits showed the expected decrease in coupling strength and time‐delay between the systems. When feedback about the voice(s) returned, the coupling strength and time‐delay returned to baseline. These findings support the idea that when people perform actions together, they do so as a coupled bidirectional anticipatory system.     

Complex Communication Dynamics: Exploring the Structure of an Academic Talk

Communication is a multimodal phenomenon. The cognitive mechanisms supporting it are still understudied. We explored a natural dataset of academic lectures to determine how communication modalities are used and coordinated during the presentation of complex information. Using automated and semi‐automated techniques, we extracted and analyzed, from the videos of 30 speakers, measures capturing the dynamics of their body movement, their slide change rate, and various aspects of their speech (speech rate, articulation rate, fundamental frequency, and intensity). There were consistent but statistically subtle patterns in the use of speech rate, articulation rate, intensity, and body motion across the presentation. Principal component analysis also revealed patterns of system‐like covariation among modalities. These findings, although tentative, do suggest that the cognitive system is integrating body, slides, and speech in a coordinated manner during natural language use. Further research is needed to clarify the specific coordination patterns that occur between the different modalities.     

Evaluating young children''s cognitive capacities through computer versus hand drawings

Young normal and handicapped children, aged 3 to 6 years, were taught to draw a scene of a house, garden and a sky with a computer drawing program that uses icons and is operated by a mouse. The drawings were rated by a team of experts on a 7-category scale. The children's computer- and hand-produced drawings were compared with one another and with results on cognitive, visual and fine motor tests. The computer drawing program made it possible for the children to accurately draw closed shapes, to get instant feedback on the adequacy of the drawing, and to make corrections with ease. It was hypothesized that these features would compensate for the young children's limitations in such cognitive skills, as memory, concentration, planning and accomplishment, as well as their weak motor skills. In addition, it was hypothesized that traditional cognitive ratings of hand drawings may underestimate young children's intellectual ability, because drawing by hand demands motor skills and memory, concentration and planning skills that are more developed than that actually shown by young children. To test the latter hypothesis, the children completed a training program in using a computer to make drawings. The results show that cognitive processes such as planning, analysis and synthesis can be investigated by means of a computer drawing program in a way not possible using traditional pencil and paper drawings. It can be said that the method used here made it possible to measure cognitive abilities "under the floor" of what is ordinarily possible by means of traditionally hand drawings.     

An investigation of planned helping behavior

It is argued that stable, individual differences in helping behavior have not generally been observed in previous research because of the type of helping studied. This paper advocates the study of planned helping behavior as opposed to spontaneous helping behavior. The results of three studies are reported. In Study 1, an instrument designed to measure level of involvement in planned helping activities was developed. Scores on this instrument were found to be stable over a 7-month period. Further analysis revealed two major types of planned helping: (a) formal, organizational helping and (b) informal helping between friends and family. Study 2 examined a variety of intrapsychic and demographic correlates of formal and informal planned helping. Study 3 found support for the hypothesis that people in helping professions have higher levels of involvement in everyday planned helping than do people in nonhelping occupations. It is concluded that the study of planned helping, although posing methodological difficulties, is a necessary adjunct to experimental research.     

The choice of constraints in correspondence analysis

A discussion of alternative constraint systems has been lacking in the literature on correspondence analysis and related techniques. This paper reiterates earlier results that an explicit choice of constraints has to be made which can have important effects on the resulting scores. The paper also presents new results on dealing with missing data and probabilistic category assignment.I am most grateful to the following for their helpful comments. Arto Demirjian, Michael Greenacre, Michael Healy, Shizuhiko Nishisato, Roderick Mcdonald, and several anonymous referees.     

The effects of recency and story content on children's moral judgments

Sixteen stories were read to children at ages 4, 7, and 11 years and to college freshmen (n = 24 per age level) to investigate the effects of recency and specific story content on the development of moral reasoning. The stories consisted of either positive or negative intention and either positive or negative consequence in one of four situations: rule breaking, property damage, property damage with peer interaction, or injury to a person. At each age level, half of the subjects heard the stories with the intention first and the consequence second, and half heard them in the reverse order. Analyses confirmed that in general younger children judged on consequence, whereas older children utilized intention, and that on stories containing intentional injury to a person, the younger child took intention into account. Recency effects were evidenced for both the 4- and 7-year-olds. In the 4-year-old group, however, the recency effects failed to override the salience of negative consequence in contexts of positive intention and negative consequence. This suggests that preschool children may respond primarily to the negative aspect of the story, whether intention or consequence.     

A transnational family story: A narrative inquiry on the emotional and intergenerational notions of ‘home’

At the core of migratory experiences lie key questions pertaining to one's emotional changing Self: the complexity of conflicting identities, feelings of (un)belonging, varying degrees of emotional place (un)attachment, and the fundamental (re)conceptualizations of ‘home’. Though well-studied from various angles, ‘home’ as an emotional concept in the context of generational family migration research has many gains yet to be made. Through an in-depth study on three generations of one author's own family, this paper provides personal insight into the intergenerational and emotional dimensions of this topic. Unanimously, the findings demonstrate that notions of ‘home’ as where family is remain predominant, with ties to transnationally dispersed family members rendering ‘home’ as multiple. Places of familial heritage further remain central in conceptualizations of ‘home’ through a retainment of cultural practices and values derived from familial homelands. Despite these cross-generational similarities, challenges and emotional uncertainties on the topic are seen to be increasingly prevalent in the youngest generation. Above all, interviewees' post-migration reflections demonstrate that such conceptualizations are intricate, relational and do not exist in an emotional vacuum.