Search

This article analyses the child psychiatry and psychology developed during the Spanish Civil War and immediate postwar period. The aim is to demonstrate that, despite the existence of a certain degree of disciplinary continuity in relation to the pre-war period, both disciplines were placed at the service of Francoism. This meant that the association of psychology and psychiatry with pedagogy in order to educate/cure children played a key role in legitimising the child intervention policies of Franco's regime, and this strategy was best reflected in Vallejo Nágera's proposal regarding "biological pedagogy". Finally, it analyses how psychiatry and psychology were used outside the school context to re-educate and control an infant population trapped between two worlds as the result of the Civil War.

The new Institute of Medicine/National Research Council report, "Transforming the Workforce for Children From Birth Through Age 8: A Unifying Foundation" (2015), begins with a summary of the science of early development and learning, with particular attention to discoveries during the past 15 years since the publication of "From Neurons to Neighborhoods" (National Research Council & Institute of Medicine, 2000). This article summarizes what has been learned during this period and its implications for practitioners who work with young children. New advances include better understanding of the scientific foundations for learning that develop during the first 3 years, the realization that early learning is more than just acquiring cognitive skills, knowledge of the influence of chronic stress and the significance of early relationships, and new understanding of the interaction of biology and environment in early learning.

The article covers the analysis of the child's psychology compliance with culture rules--the cultural congruence. The description of the technique aimed to detect the cultural congruence of five- to six-year-old children is presented. The technique is made on the basis of the revealed range of rules of a child's and adult's interaction in a social situation. It provides the possibility to determine the child's compliance with the norms according to four scales, in combination they form the cultural congruence indicator. Scales of cultural congruence are correlated to a number of factors: "compliance with adult's expectations," "obedience," "self-control," "observance of safety rules," "self-care." The technique of cultural congruence determination is approved for the Russian sample of children living in the megalopolis with the population over one million people. Along with the empirical material, special attention is paid to the theoretical analysis of differences in the positions 'personality' and 'subject' in their interaction with culture as the system of standard situations.

In this article, the author discusses the dilemma between retaining and promoting students who are unprepared for the next level, and offers a solution to this dilemma. In a perfect world, every student would be academically prepared for the next grade, and there would be no need to choose between holding students back and passing them on unprepared. Of course, getting every single student caught up is easier said than done. A good start, though, is to provide interventions before a student falls hopelessly behind. Some measures, such as summer school and small class sizes, will have to be decided at the district or school level. A teacher, however, may be able to get a student started with other forms of help, such as before- or after-school tutoring, from the very beginning of the year. A few strategies that teachers can try are offered.

In this article, the author presents the story of Tucker, a child who constantly looks for attention. The author assesses that children like Tucker frequently wrestle with feelings of jealousy and competition. However, Tucker's intense competitiveness is a bit beyond what one would expect, even for a young child who has a chronically ill older brother. The author provides suggestions on how teachers and parents can help Tucker discover both the pleasure of being himself and the rewards of being a cooperative member of the group.

Background: Childhood internalizing and externalizing problems are closely related and often co-occur. Directional models have been employed to test how these problems are related, while few studies have tested a third variables model. Objective: This study investigates whether internalizing and externalizing problems are reciprocally or unidirectionally related, whether these relations can be explained by third variables, and how these relations are associated with onset and stability. Methods: A community sample of 1,434 children aged 5.08 (SD = 1.25) and their mothers participated in two 1-year interval data waves. Internalizing and externalizing problems were examined with the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. Results: Using latent cross-lagged modeling, externalizing problems were found not be related to subsequent internalizing problems, or vice versa. These results were also found when controlling for inadequate parenting, parenting stress, maternal health and social preference. When taking problem level into account, externalizing problems were related to stability of clinical level internalizing problems, even when controlling for third variables inadequate parenting, parenting stress, maternal mental health and social preference. Conclusions: Strong autoregressive paths for internalizing and externalizing problems were found. Internalizing and externalizing problems do not seem to influence each other over time in the community sample. When investigating relations among internalizing and externalizing problems, it seems to be important to take problem level into account.

A renowned child psychoanalyst, Erik H. Erikson (1902-1994) is perhaps best known for his work on developmental theory ("Childhood and Society," 1950) and his studies of the lives of Martin Luther ("Young Man Luther," 1958) and Gandhi ("Gandhi's Truth", 1969). Twice he found himself intensely engaged in the role of teacher--once as a young artist who had been called by a friend to help in the progressive school formed for the children of Sigmund and Anna Freud's patients in Vienna (1927-1932), and years later (1960-1970) as a tenured professor at Harvard. This essay describes Erickson's teaching experience in both settings and suggests some of the reasons he was honored by Harvard in 1980 as a "humane teacher." Implications from Erikson's educational practice are drawn that demonstrate how Erikson moved beyond the rote memorization and authoritarian educational practice he experienced as a youth. The essay suggests Erikson's teaching stance at Harvard fits the author's theological tradition's use of the term "teaching elder."

My paper situates literacy in the pre-symbolic implications of the maternal relation. Turning to child psychoanalysis, particularly Melanie Klein's theories of infancy and symbolization, my paper discusses the role the child's inner life plays in her engagements with literacy. Citing cases of second language learning, I pose literacy as an emotional situation. I insist that educators begin to acknowledge and attend to the inner life of children in their practices of literacy. Reorienting literacy toward its emotional, relational, and maternal wellspring might develop within us new orientations to literacy as psychosocial experience and practice.

The amount of information that students can successfully learn and recall at least 1 day later is called an acquisition rate (AR) and is unique to the individual student. The current study extended previous drill rehearsal research with word recognition by (a) using students identified with a learning disability in reading, (b) assessing set sizes based on AR to determine efficiency, and (c) examining generalization. One fourth- and two fifth-grade male students identified with a learning disability in reading were taught words in sets of two, eight, and their individual AR. Retention was higher in the AR condition, and the AR condition was more efficient than the other two. Implications for future research are included.

This article engages critically with the concept of agency in infant and toddler educational discourse. It is argued that agency, when conceptualised with emphasis on individuality and the autonomous self, poses a conceptual "dead end" for those who are not-yet-in-language, such as babies and toddlers. In considering agency as an aspect of becoming that is inherent in all matter, the article seeks to explore new pathways for conceptualising agency in infant and toddler education. Methodologically, the article aims to generate complex questions and, following Nigel Thrift's call, "wild ideas", rather than solutions by addressing the relationship between discourse and matter to open up new spaces for thinking and doing "agency" in education, for babies and toddlers and beyond.

Discipline and behavior modification in schools is a culturally dependent and sensitive subject. Despite research demonstrating that corporal punishment is not effective, it remains a common practice in over 70 countries worldwide. School discipline practices vary widely around the world and even within national borders. While physical punishment continues to be practiced around the world, many schools employ a system of rewards and sanctions. All of these practices are external to the child, and can be ineffective in cultivating an innate sense of right and wrong in children. Best practices call for the creation of an environment in which children develop their own sense of morality through guided reflection and autonomous growth. In this article, the authors explore research on this topic and elucidate the dichotomy between heteronomous and autonomous moral development.

Two studies investigated young 2- and 3-year-old Turkish children's developing understanding of normativity and freedom to act in games. As expected, children, especially 3-year-olds, protested more when there was a norm violation than when there was none. Surprisingly, however, no decrease in normative protest was observed even when the actor violated the norms due to a physical constraint, and not due to unwillingness. The increase in helping responses in this case lends support to the idea that at these ages, children could not yet incorporate an actor's freedom to act in line with his will as they respond to norm transgressions. The results of the two studies are discussed in the light of two general research issues: a) the importance of cross-cultural research, and b) the interaction of the cognitive system with the emotional-empathic system in development.

Understanding ownership rights is necessary for socially appropriate behavior. We provide evidence that preschoolers' and adults' judgments of ownership rights are related to their judgments of bodily rights. Four-year-olds (n = 70) and adults (n = 89) evaluated the acceptability of harmless actions targeting owned property and body parts. At both ages, evaluations did not vary for owned property or body parts. Instead, evaluations were influenced by two other manipulations--whether the target belonged to the agent or another person, and whether that other person approved of the action. Moreover, these manipulations influenced judgments for owned objects and body parts in the same way: When the other person approved of the action, participants' judgments were positive regardless of who the target belonged to. In contrast, when that person disapproved, judgments depended on who the target belonged to. These findings show that young children grasp the importance of approval or consent for ownership rights and bodily rights, and likewise suggest that people's notions of ownership rights are related to their appreciation of bodily rights.

Using epistemic perspectives as a theoretical framework, this study investigated Australian pre-service teachers' perspectives about knowing, knowledge and children's learning, as they engaged in a semester-long unit on philosophy in the classroom. During the field experience component of the unit, pre-service teachers were required to teach at least one philosophy lesson. Pre-service teachers completed the Personal Epistemological Beliefs Survey at the beginning and end of the unit. They were also interviewed in focus groups at the end of the semester to investigate their views about children's learning. Paired sample t-tests were used to explore changes in epistemic beliefs over time. Significant differences were found for only some individual items on the survey. However, when interviewed, pre-service teachers indicated that field experiences helped them consider children as competent "thinkers" who were capable of engaging in philosophy in the classroom. They reported predominantly student-centred perspectives of children's learning, although a process of adjudication (exploring disagreements and evidence for responses) was lacking in these responses.

In this article author Prairie Boulmier writes that Paul Tough, author of "How Children Succeed," has emerged as a visible and respected voice on education reform and research in the U.S. Boulmier describes "How Children Succeed" and its focus on an increasing knowledge base that supports so-called "noncognitive" skill development in children--including traits like curiosity, self-control, and character--and programs such as Tools of the Mind and the KIPP character education program. Boulmier points out that although Tough admits he has not yet seen the perfect solution, he still offers a challenging view of what education reform could look like if schools cared more about noncognitive skills. "How Children Succeed" (2012) is described as a compelling overview of decades of research, looking deeply into programs, teachers, mentors, and students who are challenging the American view of education. The hope that the focus in education appears to be shifting toward emotional regulation, executive functioning, and character traits should be encouraging to those involved in the Montessori movement.

Background: The high prevalence of attention problems in children warrants concern, as it is a risk factor for internalizing and externalizing problems. There lies a need to understand possible factors that may mediate this link so that interventions may be targeted to alleviate these mediators and interrupt the link between attention problems and negative outcomes. Objective: This study investigated the role of peer problems in the association between attention problems and internalizing problems, and between attention problems and externalizing problems in an Asian sample (N = 312). Method: Participants' data were from the archival records of an outpatient child psychiatric clinic. Results: Findings indicated that peer problems was a statistically significant mediator for both associations. Additionally, peer problems was a complete mediator for the association between attention problems and internalizing problems, but a partial mediator for the link between attention problems and externalizing problems. Conclusions: Findings suggest that the association between attention problems and internalizing and externalizing problems occurs via an indirect mediated pathway, through peer problems. These findings provide some preliminary evidence for the design and evaluation of future intervention studies aimed at the peer group level for the amelioration of peer problems in children with attention problems.

People often displace their anger and aggression against innocent targets, sometimes called scapegoats. Tragic historic events suggest that members of ethnic minority out-groups may be especially likely to be innocent targets. The current experiment examined displaced aggression of Dutch youths against Dutch in-group peers versus Moroccan out-group peers. Participants (N = 137, M[subscript age] = 11.6 years) completed a personal profile that was allegedly evaluated by Dutch peer judges. After randomly receiving negative or neutral feedback from these peers, participants were given the opportunity to aggress against other innocent Dutch and Moroccan peers by taking money earned away from them. Results showed that in response to negative feedback, participants displaced aggression disproportionally against innocent Moroccan out-group targets. This effect was not driven by ethnic prejudice; in both conditions, participants holding more negative attitudes of Moroccans engaged in higher levels of aggression regardless of the ethnicity of the target. (Contains 1 figure.)

Individuals with Down syndrome tend to have a marked impairment of verbal short-term memory. The chief aim of this study was to investigate whether phonemic discrimination contributes to this deficit. The secondary aim was to investigate whether phonological representations are degraded in verbal short-term memory in people with Down syndrome relative to control participants. To answer these questions, two tasks were used: a discrimination task, in which memory load was as low as possible, and a short-term recognition task that used the same stimulus items. Individuals with Down syndrome were found to perform significantly better than a nonverbal-matched typically developing group on the discrimination task, but they performed significantly more poorly than that group on the recognition task. The Down syndrome group was outperformed by an additional vocabulary-matched control group on the discrimination task but was outperformed to a markedly greater extent on the recognition task. Taken together, the results strongly indicate that phonemic discrimination ability is not central to the verbal short-term memory deficit associated with Down syndrome. (Contains 3 figures and 2 tables.)

In this article I explore if and how very young children can be the educators of their early childhood educators. I describe and discuss a story constructed from a fieldwork done in one early childhood setting in Norway. The story is read with Levinas and his concepts Said and Saying. Further I discuss if and how this might be understood as education arguing that the children`s expressions are offering new beginning and change in the pedagogical thinking and praxis within the early childhood setting.

Classical conceptual distinctions in philosophy of education assume an individualistic subjectivity and hide the learning that can take place in the space between child (as educator) and adult (as learner). Grounded in two examples from experience I develop the argument that adults often put metaphorical sticks in their ears in their educational encounters with children. Hearers' prejudices cause them to miss out on knowledge offered by the child, but not heard by the adult. This has to do with how adults view education, knowledge, as much as child, and is even more extreme when child is also black. The idea is what Miranda Fricker calls "epistemic injustice" which occurs when someone is wronged specifically in their capacity as a knower. Although her work concerns gender and race, I extrapolate her radical ideas to (black) child. Awareness of the epistemic injustice that is done to children and my proposal for increased epistemic modesty and epistemic equality could help transform pedagogical spaces to include child subjects as educators. A way forward is suggested that involves "cracking" the concept of child and a different non-individualised conception of education.

This paper critically evaluates the ways we look to children to educate us and explores how we might depart from that dynamic, exploring how a range of conceptual frameworks from historical and cultural studies and psychoanalysis might contribute to understanding the problematic of childhood, its problems and its limitations. While "child as educator" may appear to reverse the typical power relations between adults and children, it is argued that this motif in fact repeats many of the same problems as any claims about what children, and especially what "child", is like. Specifically, the paper first reviews analyses of what is at stake in the figure of "child"; second, feminist engagement with the notion of "intersectionality" is discussed in terms of how it might inform debates about childhood. Finally, drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytic approaches, analysis focuses on the notion of misrecognition structured in the "as" connecting "child" and "educator".

Background: There has been an 8-fold increase in use of the term resilience within scientific and scholar literature over the last twenty years. The arena of public policy has also seen increasing use made of the concept, both with respect to child well-being and development and wider issues. Method: A focal sample of literature comprising 108 papers addressing public policy implications of work on child resilience was identified by a structured bibliographic search. Results: This literature suggests that current work: is characterized by a breadth of sectoral engagement across the fields of education, social work, and health; demonstrates diversity with regard to the systemic levels--individual (biological and psychological), communal (including systems of faith and cultural identity), institutional and societal--with which it engages; but is based more upon conceptual rather than empirical analysis. Major themes of policy recommendation target strengthened family dynamics, increased capacity for counseling and mental health services, supportive school environments, development of community programs, promotion of socioeconomic improvement and adoption of a more comprehensive conception of resilience. Evaluations of resiliency-informed policy initiatives are limited in number, with greatest rigor in design associated with more discrete programmatic interventions. Conclusion: A number of strategies to strengthen research-policy linkages are identified. These include greater commitment to operationalize indicators of resilience at all levels of analysis; more coherent engagement with the policy making process through explicit knowledge translation initiatives; and developing complex adaptive systems models amenable to exploring policy scenarios. (Contains 4 tables and 2 boxes.)

Young children answer many questions every day. The extent to which they do this in an adult-like way -- following Grice's Maxim of Quantity by providing the requested information, no more no less -- has been studied very little. In an experiment, we found that two-, three- and four-year-old children are quite skilled at answering argument-focus questions and predicate-focus questions with intransitives in which their response requires only a single element. But predicate-focus questions for transitives -- requiring both the predicate and the direct object -- are difficult for children below four years of age. Even more difficult for children this young are sentence-focus questions such as "What's happening?", which give the child no anchor in given information around which to structure their answer. In addition, in a corpus study, we found that parents ask their children predicate-focus and sentence-focus questions very infrequently, thus giving children little experience with them.

Background: Prediction of antisocial behavior is important, given its adverse impact on both the individuals engaging in antisocial behavior and society. Additional research identifying early predictors of future antisocial behavior, or antisocial propensity, is needed. The present study tested the hypothesis that both concern for others and active disregard for others in distress in toddlers and young children predict antisocial behavior during middle childhood and adolescence. Methods: A representative sample of same-sex twins ("N" = 956) recruited in Colorado was examined. Mother-rated and researcher-observed concern and disregard for others assessed at age 14-36 months were examined as predictors of parent- (age 4-12), teacher- (age 7-12), and self-reported (age 17) antisocial behavior. Results: Observed disregard for others predicted antisocial behavior assessed by three different informants (parents, teachers, and self), including antisocial behavior assessed 14 years later. It also predicted a higher order antisocial behavior factor (beta = 0.58, p less than 0.01) after controlling for observed concern for others. Mother-rated disregard for others predicted parent-reported antisocial behavior. Contrary to predictions, neither mother-rated nor observed concern for others inversely predicted antisocial behavior. Results of twin analyses suggested that the covariation between observed disregard for others and antisocial behavior was due to shared environmental influences. Conclusions: Disregard for others in toddlerhood/early childhood is a strong predictor of antisocial behavior in middle childhood and adolescence. The results suggest the potential need for early assessment of disregard for others and the development of potential interventions. (Contains 2 figures, 1 table, and 2 footnotes.)

Affective bonding, social attention, and intersubjective capabilities are all conditions for jealousy, and are deficient in autism. Thus, examining jealousy and attachment may elucidate the socioemotional deficit in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Jealousy was provoked in 30 high-functioning children with ASD (HFASD) and 30 typical children (ages 3-6 years) through two triadic social (storybook-reading) scenarios--mother-child-rival and stranger-child-rival. A control nonsocial scenario included mother/stranger-book. For both groups, higher jealousy expressions emerged for mother than stranger, and for social than nonsocial scenarios. Attachment security (using Attachment Q-Set) was lower for HFASD than typical groups, but attachment correlated negatively with jealous verbalizations for both groups and with jealous eye gazes for "HFASD". Implications for understanding jealousy's developmental complexity and the socioemotional deficit in ASD are discussed.

This article describes our state of knowledge regarding the development and prevention of conduct problems in early childhood, then identifies directions that would benefit future basic and applied research. Our understanding about the course and risk factors associated with early-developing conduct problems has been significantly enhanced during the past three decades; however, many challenges remain in understanding the development of early conduct problems for girls, the contribution of poverty across variations in community urbanicity, and developing cascading models of conduct problems that incorporate prenatal risk. Significant advances in early prevention and intervention are also described, as well as challenges for identifying and engaging parents of at-risk children in nontraditional community settings.

Age differences in rates of forced confabulation and memory consequences thereof were assessed using a recall task similar to real forensic interview procedures. Children viewed a target video and were tested with the same 18 questions immediately afterward and 1 week later. Of the 18 questions, 12 were answerable; the 6 unanswerable questions referred to information not in the video. Participants in the voluntary confabulation condition had a "don't know" response option; those in the forced confabulation condition did not. Although 6-year-olds and 9-year-olds were equally likely to provide a response to an unanswerable question initially, 1 week later 9-year-olds were significantly more likely than 6-year-olds to repeat their initial confabulated responses. These findings suggest that pressing child witnesses to answer questions they are initially reluctant to answer is not an effective practice, and the consistency of children's responses over time is not necessarily an indication of the accuracy of their eyewitness memory. (Contains 1 figure and 4 tables.)

Recent research has shown that by 30 months of age, children can successfully update their representation of an absent object's location on the basis of new verbal information, whereas 23-month-olds often return to the object's prior location. The current results show that this updating failure persisted even when (a) toddlers received visual and verbal information about the prior location but no motor information, or (b) toddlers received only visual information about the prior location, or (c) toddlers received only verbal information about the prior location, and (d) whether or not the prior location was mentioned at the time they received the new verbal information. The results are explained in terms of working memory limitations on children's ability to use language when the new information conflicts with existing information. (Contains 2 figures.)

This study examined the strategic use of questions to solve problems across early childhood. Participants (N = 54, 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds) engaged in two tasks: a novel problem-solving question task that required asking questions to an informant to determine which card in an array was located in a box and a cognitive flexibility task that required classifying stimuli by multiple dimensions. The results from the question task indicated that there were age differences in the types of questions asked, with 6-year-olds asking more constraint-seeking questions than 4- and 5-year-olds. The number of constraint-seeking questions asked was the only significant predictor of accuracy. Performance on the cognitive flexibility task correlated with both constraint-seeking strategy use and accuracy in the question task. In sum, our results provide evidence that the capacity to use questions to generate relevant information develops before the capacity to apply this information successfully and consistently to solve complex problems. We propose that the process of using questions as strategic tools is an ideal context for examining how children come to gain active and intentional control over problem solving. (Contains 4 figures and 4 tables.)

Children and adolescents encounter different hurtful experiences in school settings. How these events are processed (e.g., whether they think that the transgressor was hostile) is likely to depend on the relationship with the transgressor. In this study, we examined how adolescents (58 girls and 35 boys, mean age = 14.03 years, SD = 0.60) dealt with the hurt caused by someone they liked or disliked. Our findings show that the hurt caused by a disliked transgressor is likely to lead to more negative cognitive (e.g., hostile attributions), affective (e.g., feelings of anger), and motivational (e.g., avoidance/revenge) outcomes than the hurt caused by a liked peer. In addition, we found that associations between cognitive processes and avoidance/revenge were mediated by feelings of anger, but only when the transgression occurred in the context of disliking. These results highlight the importance of studying how adolescents process hurtful experiences in different relational contexts. (Contains 1 figure and 3 tables.)

Previous research has shown indirectly that infants may use two different mechanisms-an object tracking system and an analog magnitude mechanism--to represent small (less than 4) and large (greater than or equal to 4) numbers of objects, respectively. The current study directly tested this hypothesis in an ordinal choice task by presenting 10- to 12-month-olds with a choice between different numbers of hidden food items. Infants reliably chose the larger amount when choosing between two exclusively small (1 vs. 2) or large (4 vs. 8) sets, but they performed at chance when one set was small and the other was large (2 vs. 4) even when the ratio between the sets was very favorable (2 vs. 8). The current findings support the two-mechanism hypothesis and, furthermore, suggest that the representations from the object tracking system and the analog magnitude mechanism are incommensurable. (Contains 1 figure.)

Previous studies have reported that infants selectively reproduce observed actions and have argued that this selectivity reflects understanding of intentions and goals, or goal-directed imitation. We reasoned that if selective imitation of goal-directed actions reflects understanding of intentions, infants should demonstrate stability across perceptually and causally dissimilar imitation tasks. To this end, we employed a longitudinal within-participants design to compare the performance of 37 infants on two imitation tasks, with one administered at 13 months and one administered at 14 months. Infants who selectively imitated goal-directed actions in an object-cued task at 13 months also selectively imitated goal-directed actions in a vocal-cued task at 14 months. We conclude that goal-directed imitation reflects a general ability to interpret behavior in terms of mental states. (Contains 1 figure and 1 table.)

Many studies have found benefits of positive psychological interventions, such as gratitude promotion or thinking about best possible selves, for adolescents and adults. Almost no research, however, has been conducted on the efficacy of such interventions for children. The authors' primary goal was to compare the outcomes of gratitude promotion and best possible selves interventions to a control condition, using a sample of elementary school-aged children (N = 62, ages 5-11 years). Children participated in once-weekly intervention sessions in which they were asked to draw a picture of something for which they were grateful that day (gratitude condition), a future version of themselves as happy and engaged (best possible selves condition), or something they had done that day (control condition). Analyses of the content of children's drawings indicated that children of this age were capable of articulating things for which they were grateful and positive future selves. Outcomes for the gratitude condition did not differ from the control condition; however, participants in the best possible selves condition showed greater gains in self-esteem than those in the gratitude or control conditions. (Contains 3 tables.)

In June 2011 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that video games enjoy full free speech protections and that the regulation of violent game sales to minors is unconstitutional. The Supreme Court also referred to psychological research on violent video games as "unpersuasive" and noted that such research contains many methodological flaws. Recent reviews in many scholarly journals have come to similar conclusions, although much debate continues. Given past statements by the American Psychological Association linking video game and media violence with aggression, the Supreme Court ruling, particularly its critique of the science, is likely to be shocking and disappointing to some psychologists. One possible outcome is that the psychological community may increase the conclusiveness of their statements linking violent games to harm as a form of defensive reaction. However, in this article the author argues that the psychological community would be better served by reflecting on this research and considering whether the scientific process failed by permitting and even encouraging statements about video game violence that exceeded the data or ignored conflicting data. Although it is likely that debates on this issue will continue, a move toward caution and conservatism as well as increased dialogue between scholars on opposing sides of this debate will be necessary to restore scientific credibility. The current article reviews the involvement of the psychological science community in the "Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association" case and suggests that it might learn from some of the errors in this case for the future. (Contains 1 figure and 8 footnotes.)

A core component of applied educational and child psychology practice is the skilfulness with which practitioners are able to rigorously structure and conceptualise complex real world human problems. This is done in such a way that when they (with others) jointly work on them, there is an increased likelihood of positive outcomes being achieved for clients. The Problem-analysis Framework as discussed in this paper offers one way of working with such complexity which is grounded in a sound knowledge based in applied psychology. This paper provides further clarity on using the framework within applied practice. The authors were all trained in and use the Problem-analysis Framework and now work in many different types of applied settings within Australia, Iceland, New Zealand, Singapore and the United Kingdom. This paper illuminates important aspects of the problem-analysis approach itself for those currently learning it, as well as providing an "aide-memoire" to those using it and those who want to develop their skills in this area. (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.)

Despite a growing interest in the question of tool-use development in infants, no study so far has systematically investigated how learning to use a tool to retrieve an out-of-reach object progresses with age. This was the first aim of this study, in which 60 infants, aged 14, 16, 18, 20, and 22 months, were presented with an attractive toy and a rake-like tool. There were five conditions of spatial relationships between the toy and the tool, going from the toy and tool being connected to there being a large spatial gap between them. A second aim of the study was to evaluate at what age infants who spontaneously fail the task can learn this complex skill by being given a demonstration from an adult. Results show that even some of the youngest infants could spontaneously retrieve the toy when it was presented inside and touching the top part of the tool. In contrast, in conditions with a spatial gap, the first spontaneous successes were observed at 18 months, suggesting that a true understanding of the use of the tool has not been fully acquired before that age. Interestingly, it is also at 18 months that infants began to benefit from the demonstration in the conditions with a spatial gap. The developmental steps for tool use observed here are discussed in terms of changes in infants' ability to attend to more than one item in the environment. The work provides insight into the progressive understanding of tool use during infancy and into how observational learning improves with age. (Contains 2 figures.)

Objectives: With the continued push to implement empirically supported treatments (ESTs) into community-based organizations, it is important to investigate whether working condition disruptions occur during this process. While there are many studies investigating best practices and how to adopt them, the literature lacks studies investigating the working conditions in programs that currently use ESTs. Method: This study compared the culture and climate scores of a large organization's programs that use ESTs and those programs indicating no EST usage. Results: Of the total 55 different programs (1,273 frontline workers), 27 programs used ESTs. Results indicate that the programs offering an EST had significantly more rigid and resistant cultures, compared to those without any ESTs. In regard to climate, programs offering an EST were significantly less engaged, less functional, and more stressed. Conclusion: Outcomes indicate a significant disruption in organizational culture and climate for programs offering ESTs. (Contains 2 tables.)

Children can identify owners either by seeing a person in possession of an object (a visual cue) and inferring that they are the owner or by hearing testimony about a claim of ownership (a verbal cue). A total of 391 children between 2.5 and 6 years of age were tested in three experiments assessing how children identify owners when these two cues are in conflict. Children were presented with stories using two dolls and a toy. One doll possessed the toy, and children were told that the toy was either the possessor's or the nonpossessor's. Two forms of ownership statement were used: a third-person statement, "That is Billy's ball", and a first-person statement by one of the dolls, "That is my ball". The results show that by 4 years of age, children prioritize the verbal statements as a more reliable cue to ownership than physical possession. Younger children did not prioritize possession over the verbal cue to ownership but rather gave mixed responses. These results are discussed in terms of children's social experience outside of the home and their acceptance of testimony in other domains. (Contains 1 table and 4 figures.)

Three studies assessed parent-child agreement in perceptions of children's everyday emotions in typically developing 4- to 11-year-old children. Study 1 (N = 228) and Study 2 (N = 195) focused on children's worry and anxiety. Study 3 (N = 90) examined children's optimism. Despite child and parent reporters providing internally consistent responses, their perceptions about children's emotional wellbeing consistently failed to correlate. Parents significantly underestimated child worry and anxiety and overestimated optimism compared to child self-report (suggesting a parental positivity bias). Moreover, parents' self-reported emotions correlated with how they reported their children's emotions (suggesting an egocentric bias). These findings have implications for developmental researchers, clinicians, and parents. (Contains 5 tables and 3 figures.)

Exposure to stress is associated with a wide range of internalizing and externalizing problems in adolescents, including aggressive behavior. Extant research examining mechanisms underlying the associations between stress and youth aggression has consistently identified social information processing pathways that are disrupted by exposure to violence and increase risk of aggressive behavior. In the current study, we use longitudinal data to examine emotion dysregulation as a potential mechanism linking a broader range of stressful experiences to aggressive behavior in a diverse sample of early adolescents (N = 1065). Specifically, we examined the longitudinal associations of peer victimization and stressful life events with emotion dysregulation and aggressive behavior. Structural equation modeling was used to create latent constructs of emotion dysregulation and aggression. Both stressful life events and peer victimization predicted subsequent increases in emotion dysregulation over a 4-month period. These increases in emotion dysregulation, in turn, were associated with increases in aggression over the subsequent 3 months. Longitudinal mediation models showed that emotion dysregulation mediated the relationship of both peer victimization (z = 2.35, p = 0.019) and stressful life events (z = 2.32, p = 0.020) with aggressive behavior. Increasing the use of adaptive emotion regulation strategies is an important target for interventions aimed at preventing the onset of adolescent aggressive behavior.

A recent meta-analysis of 103 studies Burt ("Clinical Psychology Review," 29:163-178, 2009a) highlighted the presence of etiological distinctions between aggressive (AGG) and non-aggressive rule-breaking (RB) dimensions of antisocial behavior, such that AGG was more heritable than was RB, whereas RB was more influenced by the shared environment. Unfortunately, behavioral genetic research on antisocial behavior to date (and thus, the research upon which the meta-analysis was based) has relied almost exclusively on the classical twin model. This reliance is problematic, as the strict assumptions that undergird this model (e.g., shared environmental and dominant genetic influences are not present simultaneously; there is no assortative mating) can have significant consequences on heritability estimates when they are violated. The nuclear twin family model, by contrast, allows researchers to relax and statistically evaluate many of the assumptions of the classical twin design by incorporating parental self-report data along with the more standard twin data. The goal of the current study was thus to evaluate whether prior findings of etiological distinctions between AGG and RB persisted when using the nuclear twin family model. We examined a sample of 312 child twin families from the Michigan State University Twin Registry. Results strongly supported prior findings of etiological distinctions between AGG and RB, such that broad genetic influences were observed to be particularly important to AGG whereas shared environmental influences contributed only to RB. Nevertheless, the current findings also implied that additive genetic influences on antisocial behavior may be overestimated when using the classical twin design.

Cognitive biases are of interest in understanding the development of anxiety disorders. They also play a significant role during psychotherapy, where cognitive biases are modified in order to break the vicious cycle responsible for maintaining anxiety disorders. In a previous study, the vigilance-avoidance pattern was shown in children with separation anxiety disorder (In-Albon et al. "Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology" 38:225-235, 2010). The exhibited avoidance pattern may be essential for the maintenance of the anxiety disorder. Therefore, in the present study we used eye tracking methodology presenting disorder specific pictures to examine possible changes in the vigilance-avoidance pattern in 18 children with separation anxiety disorder after cognitive-behavioral treatment (CBT) and 13 healthy controls. Results indicated that following treatment, the vigilance pattern of children with separation anxiety disorder reduced significantly. Thus, the vigilance-avoidance pattern can be modified by CBT.

The goal of this study was to examine the impact of different parenting characteristics on child disruptive behavior and emotional regulation among a sample of at-risk children. The sample consisted of 373 Australian 5- to 9-year-old children who were screened for serious behavior problems. Seven parenting variables based on self-report were evaluated, involving parenting practices, emotion beliefs and behaviors, emotion expressiveness, and mental health. Outcome variables based on parent/teacher report were child disruptive behavior problems and emotion regulatory ability. When entered simultaneously in a multiple regression analysis, inconsistent discipline, negative parental emotional expressiveness, and parent mental health demonstrated the strongest relationship to disruptive behavior problems and problems with emotion regulation. The data presented here elucidate multiple risk pathways to disruptive behavior disorders and can inform the design of prevention and early intervention programs.

The ability to detect and prefer a face when embedded in complex visual displays was investigated in 3- and 6-month-old infants, as well as in adults, through a modified version of the visual search paradigm and the recording of eye movements. Participants "(N" = 43) were shown 32 visual displays that comprised a target face among 3 or 5 heterogeneous objects as distractors. Results demonstrated that faces captured and maintained adults' and 6-month-olds' attention, but not 3-month-olds' attention. Overall, the current study contributes to knowledge of the capacity of social stimuli to attract and maintain visual attention over other complex objects in young infants as well as in adults. (Contains 3 tables and 4 figures.)

We examined whether inductive reasoning development is better characterized by accounts assuming an early category bias versus an early perceptual bias. We trained 264 children aged 3 to 9 years to categorize novel insects using a rule that directly pitted category membership against appearance. This was followed by an induction task with perceptual distractors at different levels of featural similarity. An additional 52 children were given the same training followed by an induction task with alternative stimuli. Categorization performance was consistently high; however, we found a gradual transition from a perceptual bias in our youngest children to a category bias around 6 or 7 years of age. In addition, children of all ages were equally distracted by higher levels of featural similarity. The transition is unlikely to be due to an increased ability to inhibit perceptual distractors. Instead, we argue that the transition is driven by a fundamental change in children's understanding of category membership. (Contains 3 tables and 6 figures.)