Continuity and discontinuity of attachment from infancy through adolescence

This study reports relations between infant Ainsworth Strange Situation classifications, negative life events, and Adolescent Attachment Interview classifications. Overall, the stability of secure versus insecure classifications was 77%, and infant attachment classification was a significant predictor of adolescent attachment classification. Chi-square analyses indicate that negative life events are significantly related to change in attachment classification. The sample (n = 30) is drawn from the Family Lifestyles Project (FLS), an ongoing longitudinal study of children's development within the context of nonconventional family lifestyles. The distribution of family lifestyles within this study, unlike those in the full FLS sample, represent a higher proportion of conventional two-parent families (40%). There were no differences between adolescents reared in conventional or nonconventional families in the distribution of adolescent attachment security, the experience of negative life events, or the continuity of attachment from infancy through adolescence.     

Continuity of individual adaptation from infancy to kindergarten: a predictive study of ego-resiliency and curiosity in preschoolers

In this longitudinal study, individual differences in security of attachment at 18 months and effective autonomous functioning at age 2 years were related to the dimensions of ego-control and ego-resiliency at age 4--5 years. The kindergarten or nursery school teachers of 26 children completed California Child Q-Sorts. The children were also given a short form of the Block's laboratory battery (Banta's curiosity box, level of aspiration, motor impulse control delay of gratification, the Shure and Spivack Preschool Interpersonal Problem-solving Test, and the Lowenfeld mosaics). Following the Blocks, composited ego-resiliency and ego-control scores were derived from each data set. Children earlier classified as securely attached were, as predicted, significantly higher on ego-resiliency on both laboratory and Q-sort composites. They were also higher than anxiously attached infants on 3 independent measures of curiosity. An independently composited index of competence from 2-year tool-using measures also correlated significantly with later resiliency, as did 2-year measures of mothers' support and quality of assistance. The data provide initial links between the infant's quality of attachment, the toddler's effectiveness in a problem-solving situation, and competence during the preschool years.     

Social and cognitive development in infancy

The relation between social and cognitive development has been important in several accounts of infant development. Piaget’s theory specifies that social and cognitive development become significant at eight months and are closely linked thereafter. Brazelton and Trevarthen emphasize the role of social development and social interaction from the first months on. Neither theory predominates today, but studies of new topics such as the infant’s discrimination of people and objects may help decide which is correct. In contrast to the question of when infants distinguish the social from the cognitive, it is obvious that the social and physical environments of the child are fundamentally different all along. Adults, and not objects, have expectations for infant development and adjust their behaviour in line with those expectations. The research on developmental outcome preserves this difference. Cognitive development in infancy proceeds normally in a great many environments. Social development, on the other hand, has been found to vary with the characteristics of the caregiver. This difference between social and cognitive development is interpretable in terms of the difference between the social and physical worlds.     

The development of detour ability during infancy

3 longitudinal studies were conducted to examine the generalization of detour ability across motor responses and barrier types and the relationship between the development of object permanence and detour ability. In Experiment 1, 12 8-month-olds were tested every 3 weeks for 4 months on 4 different detour problems and Stage 4 and 6 object permanence tasks. In the detour problems, infants had to reach or move around a transparent or opaque barrier to obtain an object. The results indicated that infants made reaching detours before corresponding locomotor ones and generally made detours around opaque barriers before transparent ones. Infants also solved the Stage 4 task before the detour problems but failed to solve the Stage 6 task before testing ended. The results of Experiments 2 and 3 suggested that the difference in reaching and locomotor detour performance was not an artifact of barrier length or the infant's position relative to the barrier. The overall results are discussed in relation to issues of developmental synchrony and Piaget's theory of infant spatial development.     

Conceptual development in infancy: the understanding of containment

In each of 2 experiments, 2 measures were used to assess infants' understanding of the concept of "containment." After being habituated to videotaped episodes of sand being poured into and out of a cylinder, infants saw a "possible" event and then an "impossible" event. Infants who understand containment were expected to look longer at the "impossible" event. In the second test, infants were involved in a game of dropping blocks into a cup. In Experiment 1, 14-month-olds were contrasted with 20-month-olds to establish that the latter but not the former demonstrate an understanding of containment on both tasks. This age effect was obtained. In Experiment 2, we examined whether this understanding could be acquired by 14-month-olds. 50 infants were randomly assigned to 5 training conditions. 1 condition was effective in leading to the development of an understanding of containment: Infants who played with both cans and tubes in their home for 1 month performed in both tests similarly to untrained 20-month-olds.     

Phenomenal permanence and the development of predictive tracking in infancy

The perceived spatiotemporal continuity of objects depends on the way they appear and disappear as they move in the spatial layout. This study investigated whether infants' predictive tracking of a briefly occluded object is sensitive to the manner by which the object disappears and reappears. Five-, 7-, and 9-month-old infants were shown a ball rolling across a visual scene and briefly disappearing via kinetic occlusion, instantaneous disappearance, implosion, or virtual occlusion. Three different measures converged to show that predictive tracking increased with age and that infants were most likely to anticipate the reappearance of the ball following kinetic occlusion. These results suggest that infants' knowledge of the permanence and nonpermanence of objects is embodied in their predictive tracking.     

Individual differences and the development of joint attention in infancy

This study examined the development of joint attention in 95 infants assessed between 9 and 18 months of age. Infants displayed significant test-retest reliability on measures of following gaze and gestures (responding to joint attention, RJA) and in their use of eye contact to establish social attention coordination (initiating joint attention, IJA). Infants displayed a linear, increasing pattern of age-related growth on most joint attention measures. However, IJA was characterized by a significant cubic developmental pattern. Infants with different rates of cognitive development exhibited different frequencies of joint attention acts at each age, but did not exhibit different age-related patterns of development. Finally, 12-month RJA and 18-month IJA predicted 24-month language after controlling for general aspects of cognitive development.     

Rhythms of dialogue in infancy: coordinated timing in development.

Although theories of early social development emphasize the advantage of mother-infant rhythmic coupling and bidirectional coordination, empirical demonstrations remain sparse. We therefore test the hypothesis that vocal rhythm coordination at age 4 months predicts attachment and cognition at age 12 months. Partner and site novelty were studied by recording mother-infant, stranger-infant, and mother-stranger face-to-face interactions in both home and laboratory sites for 88 4-month-old infants, for a total of 410 recordings. An automated dialogic coding scheme, appropriate to the nonperiodic rhythms of our data, implemented a systems concept of every action as jointly produced by both partners. Adult-infant coordination at age 4 months indeed predicted both outcomes at age 12 months, but midrange degree of mother-infant and stranger-infant coordination was optimal for attachment (Strange Situation), whereas high ("tight") stranger-infant coordination in the lab was optimal for cognition (Bayley Scales). Thus, high coordination can index more or less optimal outcomes, as a function of outcome measure, partner, and site. Bidirectional coordination patterns were salient in both attachment and cognition predictions. Comparison of mother-infant and stranger-infant interactions was particularly informative, suggesting the dynamics of infants' early differentiation from mothers. Stranger and infant showed different patterns of vocal rhythm activity level, were more bidirectional, accounted for 8 times more variance in Bayley scores, predicted attachment just as well as mother and infant, and revealed more varied contingency structures and a wider range of attachment outcomes. To explain why vocal timing measures at age 4 months predict outcomes at age 12 months, our dialogue model was construed as containing procedures for regulating the pragmatics of proto-conversation. The timing patterns of the 4-month-olds were seen as procedural or performance knowledge, and as precursors of various kinesic patterns in the outcomes of 12-month-olds. Thus, our work further defines a fundamental dyadic timing matrix--a system that guides the trajectory of relatedness, informing all relational theories of development.     

父亲参与对儿童早期心理发展的影响探究

父亲参与是指父亲积极参加到儿童的家庭和学校生活之中,不仅仅指身体上的参与,还有情感和心理上的参与。父亲参与儿童早期的生活、游戏和活动,参与对儿童的抚养和教育,对儿童早期心理的发展和社会适应有着举足轻重的作用。     

Career development and mental health

Conclusion While the extent of linkages and the patterning of the relationships between career development and mental health is yet to be fully studied and articulated, this paper has argued that such connections do exist. Given such a premise, it has been contended that career counseling does serve as a therapeutic modality as it provides dislocated, unhappy, maladjusted or underemployed workers information, support, encouragement, and skills that increase personal competence, facilitate hope, and reduce feelings of being a social isolate of little worth or dignity. Skill building or psychoeducational approaches can deal directly with such matters as anger management, assertiveness, planfulness, interpersonal competence, openness to constructive supervision. These are matters of educating people for choice, for purpose, and for development, approaches which help people to create reality and make meaning for themselves within the context of work and career. As such they are therapeutic ways of engendering mental health.     

Maternal DHA and the development of attention in infancy and toddlerhood

Infants were followed longitudinally to document the relationship between docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) levels and the development of attention. Erythrocyte (red-blood cell; RBC) phospholipid DHA (percentage of total fatty acids) was measured from infants and mothers at delivery. Infants were assessed in infant-control habituation at 4, 6, and 8 months augmented with psychophysiological measures, and on free-play attention and distractibility paradigms at 12 and 18 months. Infants whose mothers had high DHA at birth showed an accelerated decline in looking over the 1st year and increases in examining during single-object exploration and less distractibility in the 2nd year. These findings are consistent with evidence suggesting a link between DHA and cognitive development in infancy.     

"必要的张力":发展型心理教育与心理发展

心理教育的核心旨趣是促进和实现人的心理发展.正确认识心理教育与心理发展相互依存、相互促进的辩证关系,树立科学的心理发展观,保持心理发展与心理教育之间的适当张力,是建构发展型心理教育范式的需要.     

Genetic and environmental covariation between verbal and nonverbal cognitive development in infancy

Despite cognitive neuroscience's emphasis on the modularity of cognitive processes, multivariate genetic research indicates that the same genetic factors largely affect diverse cognitive abilities, at least from middle childhood onward. We explored this issue for verbal and nonverbal cognitive development in infancy in a study of 1,937 pairs of same-sex 2-year-old twins born in England and Wales in 1994. The twins were assessed by having their parents use a measure of productive vocabulary (the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory) and a novel measure of nonverbal cognitive abilities (Parent Report of Children's Ability). Verbal and nonverbal development correlated .42. A multivariate genetic analysis indicated that genetic factors were responsible for less than half of this phenotypic correlation. Moreover, the genetic correlation between verbal and nonverbal abilities was only .30, which indicates that genetic effects on verbal and nonverbal abilities are largely independent in infancy. These multivariate genetic results suggest that genetic effects on cognitive abilities are modular early in development and then become increasingly molar. The implications of this result for theories of cognitive development are discussed.     

小学生心理健康教育及心理潜能开发

文章针对小学生心理健康教育及心理潜能开发这一课题的提出、界定与表述、目标与内容、对象与范围、原则与策略、研究工作与阶段推进、研究方法与措施、研究成果与思考几个方面进行阐述。