The vicissitudes of measurement: a confirmatory factor analysis of the Emotional Autonomy Scale

This study examined the factor structure of the Emotional Autonomy Scale (EAS) as proposed by Steinberg and Silverberg. Participants were from three independent samples of adolescents in grades 6 (n = 1,842), 8 (n = 1,769), and 10 (n = 1,232), with each sample consisting of three ethnic groups: African American, European American, and Mexican American. None of the confirmatory factor analyses for these samples supported the factor structure proposed by Steinberg and Silverberg. From the three models tested, the EAS is best described by the four originally proposed factors, combined with two method factors, one consisting of the positively worded scale items and one consisting of the negatively worded scale items. Results show that the EAS exhibits poor construct validity and behaves quite differently for the different grade and ethnic groups. The strong impact of method variance on the factor structure is discussed. Although various alternative solutions to the psychometric problems in the EAS are proposed, the most credible solution may be to reexamine the conceptual foundations of emotional autonomy and develop better measures of those concepts for adolescents.     

Reaction to videocolposcopy in the assessment of child sexual abuse.

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to clinically assess children's reactions to videocolposcopy with real-time observation of magnified anogenital images (VCO), and to evaluate whether these reactions are affected by patient or other characteristics such as response to preparation, disclosure of child sexual abuse (CSA), or examination findings. METHOD: Consecutive cases of children ages less than 18 years referred to a children's hospital clinic for nonemergent evaluation of suspected CSA during 1997 through 1999 were studied. We noted the child's response with clinical observation before and after videocolposcopy, and used the Genital Examination Distress Scale (GEDS) after evaluation. We compared these responses to patient gender, age, ethnicity, pubertal status, disclosure of child sexual abuse (CSA), and physical examination findings using univariate and regression analyses. RESULTS: Two hundred twenty-seven children (mean age 7.2 years, range 0-17) underwent videocolposcopy, of whom 55.1% disclosed sexual abuse and 17.2% had a positive examination. More than 80% were female, prepubertal, and non-Hispanic White. Most (85%) watched their examination on the monitor and were either cooperative or enthusiastic before and after videocolposcopy. Fewer very young children (ages 0-3 years) or female adolescents (13-17 years) watched the monitor. Summed GEDS scores were strongly correlated with observed responses after the procedure (p = .01), and children with CSA disclosure were three times more likely to watch the monitor and five times more likely than those without disclosure to have improved comfort. Other patient characteristics were not significantly associated with patient reaction to VCO. CONCLUSIONS: Most children are interested in watching their anogenital examination using magnified real-time images obtained during videocolposcopy and tolerate the procedure well. The GEDS is highly correlated with subjective clinical observation. While some children may particularly benefit from participating in their examination by using VCO, long-term effects of the evaluation and any relationship of a child's reaction to videocolposcopy with their history of sexual victimization remain to be established.     

Writing Characteristics of Students with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder: A Meta‐Analysis

Students with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorders (ADHD) frequently experience significant difficulty mastering basic academic skills. This meta‐analysis focuses on one specific potential area of learning difficulties for these students: namely, writing. To identify the extent and depth of the potential writing challenges faced by students with ADHD, we conducted a meta‐analysis comparing the writing performance of grade 1 to 12 students with ADHD to their normally achieving peers. We located 44 papers, yielding 45 studies with 87 effect sizes. The average weighted effect sizes showed that students with ADHD obtained lower scores than their normally achieving peers for writing quality (–0.78), output (–0.64), number of genre elements (–0.69), vocabulary (–0.76), spelling (–0.80), and handwriting (–0.62). Contrary to expectations, moderator analyses found that neither study quality nor the source from which ADHD students were drawn (i.e., school/community vs. clinic/hospital) accounted for variability above sampling error alone.     

Evaluation practices for college students with LD

To examine current practices in the use of psychoeducational evaluations for service delivery, we surveyed 91 service providers to college students with learning disabilities. The three purposes of the survey were to determine (a) whether service delivery decisions are based on information from psychoeducational evaluations, (b) which sections of the psychoeducational report are most useful in making service delivery decisions, and (c) the respondents' satisfaction with the tests and measurements for service delivery. The findings supported the common belief that data from psychoeducational evaluations serve as the primary basis for both eligibility and specific accommodation determinations. Respondents reported that all sections of the psychoeducational evaluation written report were useful, with the least useful section being test scores and the most useful being the summary of cognitive strengths and weaknesses. However, the section used most often for service delivery decisions was the professional's recommendations.     

A study of multimodal motherese: the role of temporal synchrony between verbal labels and gestures

This study examined European American and Hispanic American mothers' multimodal communication to their infants (N = 24). The infants were from three age groups representing three levels of lexical-mapping development: prelexical (5 to 8 months), early-lexical (9 to 17 months), and advanced-lexical (21 to 30 months). Mothers taught their infants four target (novel) words by using distinct objects during a semistructured play episode. Recent research suggests that young infants rely on temporal synchrony to learn syllable-object relations, but later, the role of synchrony diminishes. Thus, mothers' target and nontarget naming were coded for synchrony and other communication styles. The results indicated that mothers used target words more often than nontarget words in synchrony with object motion and sometimes touch. Thus, "multimodal motherese" likely highlights target word-referent relations for infants. Further, mothers tailored their communication to infants' level of lexical-mapping development. Mothers of prelexical infants used target words in synchrony with object motion more often than mothers of early- and advanced-lexical infants. Mothers' decreasing use of synchrony across age parallels infants' decreasing reliance on synchrony, suggesting a dynamical and reciprocal environment-organismic relation.     

The similarity of siblings' attachments to their mother

Do siblings develop similar attachment relationships with their mother? Attachment theory suggests that brothers and sisters growing up in the same family are likely to relate in similar ways to their parents, at least when parental attachment representations and interactive styles remain stable across time. In the current study, sibling attachment data from three research groups (from Pennsylvania State University, Leiden University, and the University of Western Ontario) have been pooled to assemble a sufficiently large sample of observations (N = 138 sibling pairs) for a detailed comparison of sibling attachment relationships. Spacing between the births, differences in maternal sensitivity, and gender of siblings were examined as possible sources of concordance of nonconcordance. Attachment security (including disorganized attachment) of each sibling was assessed with the Strange Situation procedure between 12 and 14 months after birth. Maternal sensitivity was observed with the same rating scale in a laboratory play session in one of the studies and in home observations in the others. Sibling relationships were found to be significantly concordant when classified as secure/nonsecure (62% concordance, p < .01, 1-tailed, intraclass correlation = .23) but not when further subcategorized. Maternal insensitivity to both siblings (shared environment) was associated with concordance of sibling nonsecurity. Siblings of the same gender were more likely to form concordant relationships with their mother (68%; p < .01, 1-tailed, intraclass correlation = .37) than those of opposite gender. Same-sex sibling concordance was comparable to the concordance found for monozygotic twins in earlier studies. Genetic factors may, therefore, play a relatively small role in the development of attachment.     

Children's Difficulties in Text Comprehension: Assessing Causal Issues

In this article we consider the difficulties of children who have a specific reading comprehension problem. Our earlier work has shown that good and poor comprehenders differ, in particular, in their ability to make inferences, integrate information in text, understand story structure, and monitor their understanding. We outline some studies that illustrate the poor comprehenders' problems and present two studies that use a comprehension-age match design to explore the direction of causality between comprehension skill and other abilities. We also present data from the first and second stages of a longitudinal study, when the children were 7 to 8 and 8 to 9 years old. Multiple regression analyses show that a number of factors predict significant variance in comprehension skill even after "general ability" factors such as IQ and vocabulary have been taken into account. These findings suggest that, not only can children have comprehension problems in the absence of word recognition problems, but that distinctly different skills predict variance in word recognition and variance in comprehension. The data support the view that single-word reading skills and the ability to build integrated text representations make independent contributions to overall reading ability. We discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of children's problems in text comprehension, for deaf readers, and for remediation.     

Do infants see emotional expressions in static faces?

To determine whether young infants discriminate photographs of different emotions on an affect-relevant basis or on the basis of isolated features unrelated to emotion, groups of 17-, 23-, and 29-week-olds were habituated to slides of 8 women posing either Toothy Angry, Nontoothy Angry, or Nontoothy Smiling facial expressions and were then shown 2 new women in the familiarized expression and in a novel Toothy Smiling expression. At all 3 ages, recovery to the novel Toothy Smiling faces occurred only after habituation to Nontoothy faces (whether smiling or angry), not after habituation to Toothy Angry faces, indicating that infants had been responsive to nonspecific features of the photographs (presence or absence of bared teeth) rather than to affectively relevant configurations of features. In a second experiment, 2 older age groups (35 and 41 weeks) also proved to be insensitive to affect-related aspects of still faces, though more so for angry than for happy expressions. It is suggested that the young infant's difficulty in extracting emotional information from static stimuli may be attributable to the absence of the critical invariants (dynamic, multimodally specified) that characterize naturalistic expressions of emotion.