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New Findings

 

Comparing tight and loose cultures

Anthropologists who study differences among cultures have drawn a distinction between what they call tightness and looseness. Tight cultures are characterized as having strong norms governing social behavior across a variety of circumstances combined with a low tolerance for behavior that diverges from these norms. Loose cultures are the opposite; they exhibit weak or relaxed norms about acceptable social behavior and a high degree of tolerance for different behaviors.

In the field of anthropology, the tightness – looseness dimension has been largely applied to the analysis of cultures that are less technologically advanced than the cultures of the highly industrialized nations of the world. Dr. Michele Gelfand, along with 42 coauthors, engaged in the project of applying the tightness – looseness dimension to current technologically advanced nations around the globe.

As indicated by the very large number of coauthors on the paper, the project was immense in scope and detail. Dr. Gelfand and her colleagues developed a questionnaire that was designed to measure the degree of tightness or looseness of a particular culture. On this questionnaire people used a six-item scale (ranging from, for example, “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”) to respond to statements like “In this country, if someone acts in an inappropriate way, others will strongly disapprove.”

The questionnaires were used to gather data from 6823 people in 33 nations. Questions were translated into the native language for each nation and each translation was evaluated in terms of whether it was both comprehensible and carried the intended meaning within the relevant culture. Extensive data analyses gave evidence that the scale was reliably measuring tightness and looseness. The scale was then used to rank order the 33 nations in terms of tightness – looseness.

Dr. Gelfand and her colleagues proposed that tightness – looseness is a far-reaching concept that plays out in complex, interacting ways throughout different levels of society. First, they followed the thinking of the earlier anthropologists in proposing that tight cultures are more likely to develop in circumstances in which people are subject to natural or human-made threats or pressure. For example, nations that have scarce natural resources, have large populations relative to their available resources, or that are subject to consistent political or economic pressure from other nations are more likely to be tight than loose. They then used historical and modern records to examine the natural and human-made threats experienced by each of the 33 nations in the study. As just one example of the thoroughness with which the study was carried out, scarcity of natural resources was independently evaluated in terms of percentage of farmland, food deprivation, food supply and production, protein and fat supply, access to safe water and air quality. In all of the cases examined, tight nations experienced greater degrees of natural and human-made threat than loose nations.

The investigators went on to predict that tight nations would have national and political institutions that are more restrictive and less tolerant. They found that tight nations are more likely to have autocratic governments, have more restrictions placed on the media, have less access to new communications technologies, have fewer civil liberties, have harsher and more effective criminal justice systems, have lower crime rates and are more religious than loose nations.

In addition, the investigators theorized that tightness – looseness would also be evident in the way people think about what constitutes acceptable behavior across a variety of typical social circumstances. To test this idea they developed a scale to measure the extent to which various typical behaviors are governed by social norms within a culture. In this scale, people were asked to rate the appropriateness of 12 behaviors such as arguing, eating, kissing or singing across 15 situations such as attending a funeral, walking on the sidewalk or riding in an elevator. As expected, it was found that the range of behaviors that were deemed acceptable in common social circumstances was much more restricted in tight nations than in loose nations. People in tight nations tended to be less tolerant of behavioral variety in common social circumstances than people in loose nations.

Finally, the investigators proposed that the institutional and social constraints that are present in tight societies would be reflected in subjective psychological factors such as the degree to which people score high in measures of self-regulation and control. Again, as expected, people in tight nations tended to show higher cautiousness, higher impulse control, a greater need for structure and greater self-monitoring than people in loose nations.

Dr. Gelfand and her colleagues conclude their report by pointing out that a culture may appear dysfunctional or even immoral from the point of view of a second culture that is substantially different from the first on the tightness – looseness scale. This difference in viewpoint can exacerbate problems in a world where cross-cultural communication, cooperation and understanding are important.

This research was published in the journal Science. If you would like to read the full article, click here.

 

Integrating sensory information from different sources

Humans and other organisms live in a complex and ever-changing environment that is rich in both opportunity and threat. One of the basic problems faced by scientists is understanding how organisms gather and process information about their immediate environment in a way that allows them to successfully interact with it.

Think about the situation when you get a fleeting glimpse of something that you think may hit you and you quickly jerk away. It’s an automatic reaction but to carry it out you must perceive something in the environment, identify it as a possible threat, locate where it is relative to you and what direction it’s moving, and initiate a movement away from the path of the threatening object. All of this may seem effortless but understanding how we do it is a difficult problem.

One method of approaching this problem is to study how information from the environment is processed in organisms that have simpler nervous systems than humans. Discovering how information from various sources can be integrated and used in a simple nervous system may provide knowledge about the basic building blocks that more complex nervous systems use to interact with the environment in more sophisticated ways.

Dr. Jens Herberholz studies the nervous system of crayfish. Crayfish typically escape from predators by moving either forward or backward depending on which direction the threat is coming from. These forward and backward escape movements are controlled by bilateral pairs of giant interneurons. (Interneurons are neurons that connect neurons that receive information from the environment with neurons that trigger muscular activity). In crayfish, activation of the medial giant interneurons results in muscular activity that quickly moves the animal backward and activation of the lateral giant interneurons moves it forward and upward.

In the past it was believed that the lateral giant interneurons that move the crayfish forward receive only mechanosensory information from the rear of the animal. (Mechanosensory information is sensory information about mechanical stimuli in the environment. For the crayfish this might include contact with an object or the pressure of currents in the water.) Dr. Herberholz and his student Yen-Chyi Liu have shown that the situation is not this simple. Careful surgical techniques were used to place recording electrodes at critical locations in the crayfish nervous system. These electrodes allowed the investigators to determine whether stimulation of sensory neurons located on different parts of the crayfish’s body resulted in information being integrated by the lateral giant interneurons.

The researchers discovered that the laterial giant interneurons receive visual and mechanosensory inputs that originate at the front of the crayfish. The activity in the interneurons that results from this information does not reach the point at which the neurons fire and move the crayfish. Instead it acts to increase the excitability of the interneurons so that it takes less stimulation from the rear to fire the neurons than it typically would. This is useful in a circumstance where the crayfish detects a possible threat first with its eyes or sensory hairs on its antennae, and is then in the position to execute the escape more quickly when the actual attack is directed to the rear. In addition, it provides a nice example for how individual interneurons integrate information from multiple sensory systems and combine inputs from different sensory areas to mediate an adaptive behavioral response.

The paper, "Sensory Activation and Receptive Field Organization of the Lateral Giant Escape Neurons in Crayfish", published in the Journal of Neurophysiology can be found here.

 

ADHD, depression, and suicide among teenagers

It is not uncommon for patients to be diagnosed with more than one type of mental disorder. While this can make accurate diagnosis very difficult, it also provides an opportunity to identify patients who may be at risk of developing related mental health problems in future years. For example, approximately 16% to 37% of adults who are diagnosed with ADHD (attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder) are also diagnosed with some form of depression. When depression is combined with ADHD the depression often begins earlier, lasts longer and is more severe than when depression occurs alone.

Previous studies that have followed children diagnosed with ADHD over time have produced inconsistent findings with regard to the relationship between ADHD and depression. Some studies have shown no relationship while others have shown a clear increase in the likelihood of a future diagnosis of depression among children diagnosed with ADHD at an earlier age.

Dr. Andrea Chronis-Tuscano and her colleagues have examined the relationship between ADHD and depression with a study that is more thorough than many of the studies that preceded it. In addition to depression, this study examined the relationship between an early diagnosis of ADHD and both later suicide attempts and concrete thoughts about committing suicide.

The study followed 248 children over a period of 14 years. Half of the children were diagnosed with ADHD between the ages of 3.8 and 7.0. The other half never received an ADHD diagnosis. The two groups were matched on factors such as sex, ethnicity, age and economic status. The children were assessed once a year as many as 11 times during the 14 years of the study using a variety of diagnostic techniques.
The study produced several important findings. Children diagnosed with ADHD between the ages of 4 and 6 were much more likely to be diagnosed with depression or to have attempted suicide before the age of 19 than were children who were not diagnosed with ADHD. Among the ADHD children, girls were more likely to be diagnosed with depression and were more likely to attempt suicide than boys. Also, children of either sex whose mother was diagnosed with depression and children who were diagnosed with emotional and behavior problems in addition to ADHD were more likely to be diagnosed with depression and more likely to either attempt suicide or engage in concrete thinking about committing suicide.

The results from the study carried out by Dr. Chronis-Tuscano and her colleagues show promise of providing a foundation on which to base early intervention programs that are designed to help children who have a higher than average risk of developing depression or contemplating or attempting suicide.

 

Bias in workplace evaluations

Bias in the workplace is a persistent problem that can take many forms. Employees who are categorized as members of groups that are perceived as being of lower status than other groups may suffer lower performance reviews and fewer opportunities for promotion. They may also be held to more stringent standards of what counts as acceptable behavior in the workplace and be subject to more severe penalties when they do not live up to these standards.

A good deal of prior research in both psychology and sociology has demonstrated that employees who are members of groups that are perceived to be of lower status are evaluated differently than people who are perceived to be members of higher status groups. These results hold whether status is defined in terms of the individual’s position of authority on the job or in terms of demographic categories such as ethnicity or gender.

Dr. Michele Gelfand and her colleague Dr. Hannah Riley Bowles have enriched the study of bias in the workplace by examining whether the status of the person making the evaluation affects how employees of different perceived status are evaluated. In a series of studies they asked participants to recall a situation where they had been in either a high or low status position on a job and then imagine themselves in a position with that same level of status in a fictional company. They were then asked to evaluate the behavior of a fictional employee. The employee was identified as having either a high or low status position within the fictional company.

They found that people who thought of themselves as holding high status positions within the company tended to evaluate low status employees’ behavior more harshly than they evaluated the actions of high status employees. In other words, when low and high status employees exhibited the same behavior, the low status employees were judged more harshly and punished more severely.

This pattern of letting high status employees get away with it more often disappeared when the participants in the study thought of themselves as holding a low status position in the company. In this case, when high and low status employees were depicted as having engaged in the same behavior, they were given roughly the same evaluations . Unlike the high status evaluators, the low status evaluators did not show a status-based bias in their evaluations.

Drs. Gelfand and Bowles followed up this study with another in which perceived status differences were derived from cultural stereotypes based on ethnicity (White people perceived as high status and Black people perceived as low status) and gender (males perceived as high status and females perceived as low status). Employees in the fictional workplace scenario were identified as male or female, Black or White. The participants in the study who were evaluating the fictional behavior in the workplace were either men or women who were not categorized by ethnicity.

The results from the second study followed the same pattern as the first study. Evaluators who were members of a group that is perceived as having high status (that is, men) judged workplace behavior more harshly for individuals from groups that are perceived to hold low status (women or Blacks) than for individuals from groups that are perceived to have high status (men or Whites). The evaluators who were members of a group that is perceived as having low status (women) did not show this bias. Women evaluators judged men and women, Blacks and Whites roughly equally.

These results are striking in their implications for workplace evaluations. At the very least, they indicate that the fairness of a job evaluation depends not only on the actions an employee engaged in while on the job but also on both the employee and the evaluator’s perceived status both within the company and in the society at large.

 

A unified theory of how people make judgments

Psychologists who study judgment have distinguished between “intuitive” and “deliberate” judgments. Deliberate judgments are typically characterized as being based on careful consideration of all, or most, of the available evidence. They take effort, are time consuming, and are thought to be the more accurate of the two. Intuitive judgments are characterized as being based on rough rules of thumb (commonly called “heuristics”) that focus on a relatively small amount of the relevant evidence. They take little effort, little time, and are thought to be less accurate than deliberate judgments.

An example of the difference between intuitive and deliberate judgments can be drawn from the political realm. If a person judges a candidate’s tax proposals based on whether they like or dislike the media image presented by the candidate or their opponent, they have made an intuitive judgment. If they make a judgment on the same tax proposals by doing the math and working out whether taxes for people in their income and tax brackets will rise, fall or remain unchanged, they have made a deliberate judgment.

It is theorized that these two types of judgment are produced by different underlying cognitive processes. The basic idea is that people have two separate cognitive systems for making judgments, one which produces intuitive judgments and one which produces deliberative judgments.

Dr. Arie Kruglanski and his colleague Dr. Gerd Gigerenzer have presented a unified theory of judgment as an alternative to this dualistic view. In their theory judgments are based on rules that people follow and the same rules can underlie both deliberate and intuitive judgments.

The take-the-best rule is an example that is often considered as a heuristic that leads to intuitive judgments. If you are trying to decide among two alternatives, you use the take-the-best rule when you order the factors that are important to your decision from most important to least important and compare the two alternatives on each factor starting with the most important. If one of the alternatives is better than the other with regard to the most important factor, you choose that alternative. If they are both equal, you compare the alternatives on the second most important factor. You continue in this manner until you reach a factor that favors one alternative over the other and then you choose that alternative.

The take-the-best rule is often considered as a heuristic that produces intuitive judgments because decisions made using the rule usually take only some of the available evidence into account. For example, suppose someone was trying to decide which elementary school would be best for their children and they rated being within safe walking distance as the most important factor. They then choose the school down the block because it is the only alternative within safe walking distance without considering other factors that, taken together, might outweigh the importance of the distance of the school from the home such as the school district the school is in, the quality of the teachers that teach their children’s grades, and whether or not the school has programs that might benefit or interest their children.

Kruglanski and Gigerenzer point out that this heuristic that is typically seen as being the basis for intuitive judgments can also be used in a deliberative manner. For example, college and professional sports often use elaborate tie-breaking procedures that are perfect examples of the take-the-best rule. The NFL, for example, uses a 12 step procedure to determine a division winner if two teams are tied at the end of the regular season (the take-the-best rules the NFL uses to break ties can be found here). The implementation of these take the best procedures is often the result of a highly deliberative and sometimes contentious process.

In addition to pointing out that intuitive and deliberate judgments do not rely on different rules, Kruglanski and Gigerenzer provide evidence that the two types of judgment do not necessarily correspond to different levels of accuracy. There are many cases in which deliberate judgments are more accurate but there are also cases where intuitive judgments are consistently more accurate.

Moving away from a division between intuitive and deliberate judgments to a unified theory, shifts the focus of attention in research about judgment from whether or not a rule people use is a deliberative or intuitive rule to how people choose which rule to use in different circumstances. Kruglanski and Gigerenzer break this question down into two parts: Of all the rules that are available to them, how do people determine which rules are applicable to the situation at hand, and once a set of applicable rules has been identified, how do people choose which specific rule to use. They point out that answering these questions involves detailed consideration of factors such as the situation in which the person has to make the judgment, how important the judgment is to the person making it, and whether the person making the judgment views a rule as being both relevant to and useful for the case at hand.

Areas of the brain that are able to extract information about where an on object is located without losing track of what the object is

Imagine looking out your window and seeing a cat basking in the sun. Now take two steps to the left and look out the window again. While you were moving the cat rolled over so that its other side is exposed to the heat. Your position has changed and the position of the car has changed but it seems to be a trivial matter for you to tell that you’re still looking at a cat. It may seem trivial but it isn’t.

We see things as the result of light waves striking the retina in the eye. Stimulation of different areas of the retina produces different patterns of neural activity in particular areas of the cortex of the brain and these patterns of neural activity are classified as an instance of a particular category of objects like cats. When the object or the person viewing the object moves, the pattern of light waves striking the retina and hence the pattern of activation in the cortex changes and yet we are still able to identify the object. We still see the same cat even though the information the brain is receiving about the cat has markedly changed. The fact that people’s ability to correctly identify objects when the location of the object on the retina has changed is called translation invariance.

Dr. Thomas Carlson and his colleagues have examined the problem of translation invariance using an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) procedure to identify particular areas of the cortex that are involved in the coding of information about where an object is located in space. Dr. Carlson and his colleagues focused their attention on object selective cortex which is a part of the brain that is involved in the early stages of processing visual information. Participants in the study performed a simple visual task that involved identification of faces, scenes, animals and cars in four different locations while undergoing fMRI scanning.

Analyses of the resulting data identified three areas in object selective cortex (the lateral occipital area, the fusiform face area, and the parahippocampal place area) that code for the spatial position of objects. The analyses also showed that these areas of the brain enabled objects to be correctly identified as instances of a category even though the position of the object in space had changed. In other words, the lateral occipital area, the fusiform face area, and the parahippocampal place area are capable of extracting information about changes in location without losing information about the identity of the object.

Thomas Carlson, Hinze Hogendoorn, Hubert Fonteijn, Frans A.J. Verstraten, Spatial coding and invariance in object-selective cortex, Cortex, In Press

 

Behavioral activation therapy helps mildly depressed people quit smoking

Behavioral activation therapy began as a type of treatment for depression that is based on the general idea that treatment will be more effective if it includes more reinforcement for behaviors and activities that are not associated with depression and less punishment for behaviors and activities that are associated with depression. Dr. Laura MacPherson and her colleagues explored whether this type of therapy might be effective in helping mildly depressed people who want to quit smoking by comparing a group who received a Behavioral Activation Treatment for Smoking (BATS) with a group that received a therapeutic treatment that did not include BATS.

All of the participants in the study received eight weeks of therapeutic treatment. The standard group received a typical smoking-cessation treatment based on the United States Department of Health and Human Services clinical practice guidelines. One component of the treatment received by the standard group which has been shown to be ineffective in helping people quit smoking, relaxation therapy, was replaced with behavioral activation therapy in the BATS group. Both groups received an hour of therapy each week. Both groups also used a transdermal nicotine patch as part of their treatment. Participants in both groups were tested for both the severity of their depressive symptoms and their success at refraining from smoking at intervals of 1, 4, 16, and 26 weeks after the therapeutic treatment ended. Refraining from smoking was measured by each person’s report of whether or not they had smoked and was verified by biochemical drug tests that detect recent smoking.

The people in the BATS group showed both lower depressive symptoms and increased success at refraining from smoking than people in the group that received the standard form of therapy. While a number of studies have shown that behavioral activation therapies can be effective treatments for depression, the results of this study indicate that BATS shows promise of helping mildly depressed people quit smoking.

One notable aspect of the study was that 75% of the participants were ethnic minorities and 37% were classified as low-income, two groups that are typically not well studied in research concerned with quitting smoking. One the one hand, having results from these under-represented groups is an important addition to the data regarding quitting smoking. On the other hand, it is currently unknown whether or not there may be problems generalizing results about quitting smoking from these groups to the general population.

MacPherson, L., Tull, M. T., Matusiewicz, A., Rodman, S., Strong, D.R., Kahler, C.W., Hopko, D., Zvolensky, M., Brown, R.B., Lejuez, C.W. (in press). Randomized controlled trial of behavioral activation smoking cessation treatment for smokers with elevated depressive symptoms. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.

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The importance of the personal relationship between the therapist and client during therapy

The complex relationship between a therapist and a client can be analyzed at a number of levels. Psychotherapists have considered several aspects of the therapist-client relationship that are thought to play a role in the success or failure of the therapeutic treatment. The “working alliance” refers to those aspects of the therapist-client interaction that both parties agree to engage in as part of the therapy. “Transference-countertransference” refers to the projection of emotions associated with a different person onto the therapist by the client (transference) or onto the client by the therapist (countertransference). The “real relationship” refers to the personal relationship between the client and the therapist independently of their working alliance or transference-countertransference patterns. In terms of important factors that affect the success of therapy, the real relationship has generally received less attention from psychotherapists than either the working alliance or transference-countertransference.

Dr. Charles Gelso presents a theory of the real relationship that attempts to realign this imbalance. According to Dr. Gelso’s theory the real relationship has two primary characteristics, realism and genuineness. Realism has to do with the extent to which both the client and the therapist experience and perceive “the other in ways that fit him or her (rather than projections based on fears and wishes related to significant others from the past), and genuineness reflects the ability to be who one truly is, as opposed to being phony or inauthentic.” The theory also takes into account the magnitude or the degree of both realism and genuineness in the therapist-client relationship and whether the evaluation of the other person within the real relationship is positive or negative (termed “valence”).

In addition to summarizing the theory, Dr. Gelso reviews several empirical measures that have been designed to both measure the theoretical constructs (such as realism and genuineness) presented by the theory and to determine the degree to which these theoretical constructs are associated with both therapeutic progress and outcome. As this review makes clear, these empirical measures, while far from perfect, indicate that the real relationship is an important facet of the client-therapist interaction.
The article is accompanied by critical commentary from several scholars in the field along with Dr. Gelso’s response to the commentaries.

Gelso, C. J. (2009). The real relationship in a post-modern world: Theoretical and Empirical Explorations. Psychotherapy Research, 19, 253-264.

Diabetes-related iron deficiency during pregnancy affects children's memory

Diabetics can experience hypoxia (lack of oxygen), hyperglycemia (too much blood sugar or glucose), hypoglycemia (too little glucose) and iron deficiency.  Recent research involving both humans and animals has focused on how Infants of Diabetic Mothers (IDMs) may be affected by the mother’s iron deficiency during pregnancy.  A lack of iron can have a negative effect on the development of the hippocampus, a brain structure that is involved in memory, among other things, and previous research has shown that IDMs at one year of age show decreased memory abilities.

Diabetics can experience hypoxia (lack of oxygen), hyperglycemia (too much blood sugar or glucose), hypoglycemia (too little glucose) and iron deficiency. Recent research involving both humans and animals has focused on how Infants of Diabetic Mothers (IDMs) may be affected by the mother’s iron deficiency during pregnancy. A lack of iron can have a negative effect on the development of the hippocampus, a brain structure that is involved in memory, among other things, and previous research has shown that IDMs at one year of age show decreased memory abilities.

Dr. Tracy Riggins and her colleagues at The Center for Neurobehavioral Development at the University of Minnesota asked whether these early memory deficits continued later in life by comparing the memory performance of IDMs between ages 3 and 4 with controls whose mothers had not been iron deficient during pregnancy. The children were shown a sequence of events related to a theme such as “going camping”. Memory was tested in several ways that involved asking the children to recall the events in the sequence both immediately after they saw the sequence and after a delay of approximately one week. Electroencephalograph (EEG) recordings from the hippocampus were also taken as the children looked at pictures of a woman’s hand performing the events.

The difficulty of remembering the events was varied by manipulating the order in which the events in the sequence were presented to the children. Some of the events in the sequence were related in that one event naturally preceded the other. For example, in the “going camping” sequence “baiting a hook” naturally precedes “catching a fish”. Events like this are easier to remember when they are presented in their natural or logical order. Sequences were easier to remember when many of their events were presented to the children in logical order. They were harder to remember when a logical order was not present at all.

The results showed that the IDMs had poorer memory than the control children for the events in the hard-to-remember sequences. The EEG data indicated that these memory deficits involved both encoding (learning information) and retrieval of information from memory. The memory impairment was also shown to be correlated to the magnitude of the iron deficiency experienced during pregnancy.

According to the American Diabetes Association there are currently an estimated 23 million Americans (approximately 8% of the population) with diabetes. There are also indications that countries that have experienced an increase in economic livelihood coupled with a lack of emphasis on a physically active lifestyle are experiencing a greater incidence of diabetes than the United States. Given these numbers, the finding that memory impairments associated with the iron deficiencies experienced by diabetic mothers are still apparent after three to four years is not good news. However, finding out that some of the memory problems experienced by IDMs last longer than previously expected can help to emphasize the need to make sure that diabetic mothers have enough iron in their diet. In addition, finding out that the memory deficits experienced by IDMs can be overcome if the information to be remembered is presented in a logical order can help in designing situations that make it easier for everyone, including IDMs, to learn and remember.

Riggins, T., Miller, N. C., Bauer, P. J., Georgieff, M. K., & Nelson, C. A. (in press). Consequences of maternal diabetes mellitus and neonatal iron status on children's explicit memory performance. Developmental Neuropsychology.

 

Discrepancies in evaluations of children's behavior

It is not uncommon for people who interact with children to give different – sometimes very different – evaluations of the child’s behavior. For example, parents and teachers may give very different answers when asked to evaluate whether or not a child’s behavior is disruptive. Theses discrepancies can stem from a variety of factors: The child may behave differently with the parent than with the teacher. The parents’ and teachers’ criteria of what constitutes disruptive behavior may differ. The circumstances in which the parents or teachers were asked to give their evaluations may bias their answers.

Discrepancies in evaluations of children’s behavior pose a problem for the psychological clinician faced with the task of determining whether or not the child has a problem and, if so, identifying what that problem might be. In some cases discrepancies in characterizations of a child’s behavior are treated as coming from sources other than the child such as bias introduced by the evaluation process or different standards of evaluation held by the adults who are evaluating the child. In other cases, discrepancies in evaluations of a child’s behavior are understood as evidence that the behavior does not indicate a severe problem. This conclusion is based on the idea that the problematic behavior would occur more frequently and would be more easily seen and understood if it was being caused by a severe problem.

Dr. Andres De Los Reyes and his colleagues carried out a study that involved a child interacting with their parent in one case and a clinician the child had not met before in another. All of these interactions took place in a laboratory where the structure and the content of the interactions could be made as similar as possible. Independent coders observed these interactions and evaluated the child’s behavior within them. The evaluations of these observers were then compared with evaluations of the child’s disruptive behavior taken outside of the laboratory, from both the parent and the child’s teacher.

The results showed that the children often behaved very differently in the two laboratory situations and that the evaluations of the parents on the one hand and the teachers on the other accurately reflected differences in the child’s behavior observed in the laboratory. In particular, parent ratings appeared to reflect children’s behavior in the laboratory interactions between the parent and child and teacher ratings appeared to reflect behavior observed in interactions between the clinician and the child. These results indicate that discrepancies in evaluation of behavior may reflect real differences in the way a child behaves and cannot always be treated as being the result of factors outside the child such as bias introduced by the evaluation procedure.

Their results also indicated that differences in the child’s disruptive behavior in the two different circumstances may not be evidence of a single, but relatively weak, underlying cause. It is also possible that the circumstances themselves may have produced different kinds of similar behavior that could both be accurately labeled as “disruptive”.

De Los Reyes A, Henry DB, Tolan PH, Wakschlag LS (Jul 2009) Linking informant discrepancies to observed variations in young children's disruptive behavior., Journal of abnormal child psychology, 37 (5), 637-52

 

 

Children's memory for the sequence of events

The ability to recall contextual details associated with an event begins to develop in the first year of life, yet adult levels of recall are not reached until early adolescence. In the present investigation, both behavioral and electrophysiological measures were used to assess the development of memory for a specific contextual detail, the order in which events occur in time, in early childhood. Results revealed age-related improvements in memory for temporal order. The study also suggests that children's electrical brain activity related to memory performance may have similar properties to activity that has been observed in adults.

Riggins, T., Miller, N. C., Bauer, P. J., Georgieff, M. K., & Nelson, C. A. (2009). Electrophysiological indices of memory for temporal order in early childhood: Implications for the development of recollection. Developmental Science, 12(2), 209-219

Social Relationships among Crayfish

Crayfish form social relationships in which some crayfish are dominant and others are subordinate. Graham and Herberholz exposed two juvenile crayfish that had formed a stable dominant-subordinate relationship to a larger crayfish. The large crayfish fought with the smaller ones and defeated them both. After the large crayfish was removed, the dominant-subordinate relationship between the original pair was reversed in half of the cases examined. The authors conclude that social relationships among crayfish can be destabilized by the activities of other crayfish in the social environment, and this finding may generalize to other species that live in densely organized social settings.

Graham M.E. and Herberholz J. (2009) Stability of dominance relationships in crayfish depends on social context. Animal Behaviour 77: 195-199.

Coping with Domestic Abuse

Survivors of domestic violence face an array of social and institutional factors that can either facilitate or impede their quest to attain the job-related and life-related goals they set for themselves after they escape from the abusive relationship. However, it’s not always clear how people who have suffered from domestic violence view these facilitating or impeding factors. Dr. O’Brien and her colleagues examine how these factors are viewed and understood by the people who have suffered the abuse and how understandings of facilitating and impeding factors can differ with race.

Chronister, K. M., Brown, C, O'Brien, K. M., Wettersten, K. B., Burt, M., Falkenstein, C., Shahane, A. (2009) Domestic Violence Survivors: Perceived Vocational Supports and Barriers Journal of Career Assessment. 17: 116-131

Assessing the Diagnosis and Treatment of Depression in Children

In order to improve our ability to successfully treat people with mental health problems we need to be able to accurately diagnose the problem, prescribe an effective treatment method, and effectively monitor the whether the ongoing treatment is helping the problem. Dr. Lea Dougherty and her colleagues address these questions as they examine and evaluate a number of tools that are used to assess the diagnosis and treatment of depression in children.

Dougherty, L. R., Klein, D. N., Olino, T. M., & Laptook, R. S. (2008). Depression in children and adolescents. In J. Hunsely, and E. Mash (Eds.), A Guide to Assessments that Work (pp. 69-95). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.