Development of Adjustment Problems in Girls: What Syndromes Emerge?

The development of a broad spectrum of adjustment problems in girls was studied longitudinally from late childhood to early adulthood. A specific interest concerned how well the externalizing-internalizing distinction could explain the data. The sample consisted of about 500 Swedish girls, reasonably representative of the general population. Variable-oriented methods were complemented with person-oriented methods to study syndrome formation at the level of the individual. The results suggested a rather diversified pattern of multi-problem syndromes in late childhood, whereas the syndrome structure in early adolescence was organized around a differentiation between girls with externalizing adjustment problems and girls with peer problems. An externalizing syndrome was found to be stable between late childhood and early adolescence, increasing the risk of severe maladjustment in adulthood. Internalizing problems showed no clear-cut continuity with adult maladjustment. Results are discussed in relation to the externalizing-internalizing distinction, which to some extent is called in question.     

Predictors of parents' physical disciplinary practices.

OBJECTIVE: This study examined how childhood history of discipline (1) related to ratings of how severe and typical punishments were; and (2) predicted parents' use of discipline techniques. The influence of child culpability on these ratings was also investigated. METHOD: Ninety-nine New Zealand parents rated 12 physical discipline scenarios varying in discipline severity and perceived child culpability. Parents judged how severe and typical they considered the disciplines depicted in the scenarios and reported on how often they had experienced such discipline as children and how often they had used them with their own children. RESULTS: When the child was perceived to be at fault, parents rated the discipline depicted as less severe, considered the technique more typical, reported they had been similarly disciplined more frequently, and applied such discipline to their child more frequently. Childhood history of a discipline was related to the parent's use of that method, and the parents judged techniques they used with their own children as less severe and more typical of methods of discipline. History of discipline and severity judgments were the best predictors of parents' disciplinary practices. CONCLUSIONS: Although the findings support the cycle of violence theory, more complex potential pathways to abusive parenting, including the variables in this study, are proposed.     

The Validity of Comparative Educational Studies

What are the conditions that will allow for appropriate comparisons among groups" Should the concept of comparative validity be added to the lexicon of the psychometrician"     

Physiological effects of infant exposure to environmental tobacco smoke: a passive observation study

This study explored infant physiologic responses of exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) using a longitudinal passive observation study with a control group. Fifteen smoking and 15 non-smoking mothers were initially contacted in hospital maternity units, with home visits made when their infants were 2, 4, and 6 weeks old. Exposure to ETS was measured using infant urinary nicotine and cotinine levels. The physiologic effects of infant ETS exposure were measured by rectal temperature, pulse rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure, and oxygen saturation. The smoking mothers in this sample were poorer, had less education, and were less likely to be married than the mothers who did not smoke. At birth, the infants of smoking mothers had higher diastolic blood pressure than infants of non-smoking mothers (p < .008). Mothers who smoke cigarettes should be educated that maternal smoking behavior can affect an infant's cardiovascular function. Parents should also be counseled about the risks of smoking in close proximity and/or in an enclosed space with an infant, especially in a motor vehicle.     

The dolphin’s grammatical competency: Comments on Kako (1999)

Kako (1999) reviews the evidence for syntactic competencies in several animal species exposed to artificial language systems, emphasizing the importance of core syntactic properties such as argument structure and closed-class items. We present evidence from our dolphin studies for the acquisition of the closed-class functionality of demonstratives, prepositions, conjunctions, and locatives. Sensitivity to argument structure is also evidenced by wholly untrained and consistent interpretations of the dolphin to probes of anomalous syntactic structures. These results are generated within our comprehension-based paradigm, which enables us to provide convincing objective evidence for the development and generalization of concepts by the dolphin subject. Demonstrations of animal language competencies may illuminate certain aspects of human linguistic competence by suggesting that the particular modeled subsets can derive from general cognitive mechanisms, rather than language-specific ones.