Prosocial and Aggressive Behavior: A Longitudinal Study

Developmental theorists have made strong claims about the fundamental prosocial or aggressive nature of the human infant. However, only rarely have prosocial behavior and aggression been studied together in the same sample. We charted the parallel development of both behaviors from infancy to childhood in a British community sample, using a two-construct, multimethod longitudinal design. Data were drawn from the Cardiff Child Development Study (CCDS), a prospective longitudinal study of a volunteer sample of parents and their firstborn children. A sample of 332 mothers was recruited from National Health Service (NHS) prenatal clinics and general practice clinics in Wales, UK, between Fall of 2005 and Summer of 2007. Potential participants represented the full range of sociodemographic classifications of neighborhoods. Participating families were divided about equally between middle- and working-class families, were somewhat more likely to have sons than daughters, and the majority (90%) were in a stable partnership. In response to standard categories recommended for use in Wales at the time, the majority (93%) of mothers reported themselves as Welsh, Scottish, English, or Irish; most others named a European or South Asian nationality. Of the 332 families agreeing to participate, 321 mothers (M_age = 28 years) and 285 partners (M_age = 31 years) were interviewed during the pregnancy and 321 of the families contributed data at least once after the child's birth. After an initial home visit at 6 months, data collection occurred in four additional waves of testing when children's mean ages were approximately 1, 1.5, 2.5, and 7 years. Data collection alternated between family homes and Cardiff University. Of those families seen after the child's birth, 89% were assessed at the final wave of testing. Data collection ended in 2015. Methods included direct observation, experimental tasks, and collection of reports from mothers, fathers, other relatives or family friends, and classroom teachers. Interactions with a familiar peer were observed at 1.5 years. Interactions with unfamiliar peers took place during experimental birthday parties at 1 and 2.5 years. At 7 years, parents were interviewed, parents and teachers completed questionnaires, and the children engaged in cognitive and social decision-making tasks. Based on reports from parents and other informants who knew the children well, individual differences in both prosocial behavior and aggression were evident in children. Both types of behavior showed stability across the second and third years. The association between prosocial behavior and aggression changed over time: at 1.5 years, they were not significantly related (the association approached zero), but they became negatively correlated by 3 years. Different patterns were seen when children played with familiar versus unfamiliar peers. At 1.5 years, when children were observed at home with a familiar peer, prosocial behavior and aggression were unrelated, thus showing a pattern of results like that seen in the analysis of informants' reports. However, a different pattern emerged during the experimental birthday parties with unfamiliar peers: prosocial behavior and aggression were positively correlated at both 1 and 2.5 years, contributing to a general sociability factor at both ages. Gender differences in prosocial behavior were evident in informants' reports and were also evident at the 1-year (though not the 2.5-year) birthday parties. In contrast, gender differences in both prosocial behavior and aggression were evident by 7 years, both in children's aggressive decision-making and in their parents' and teachers' reports of children's aggressive behavior at home and school. By age 7, children's aggressive decision-making and behavior were inversely associated with their verbal skills, working memory, and emotional understanding. Some children had developed aggressive behavioral problems and callous-unemotional traits. A few (12%) met diagnostic criteria for conduct disorder or oppositional-defiant disorders, which had been predicted by early angry aggressiveness and lack of empathy for other people. Taken together, the findings revealed a gradual disaggregation of two ways in which children interact with other people. Individual differences in both prosocial behavior and aggression revealed continuity over time, with gender differences emerging first in prosocial behavior, then in aggression. Restrictions in the participant sample and the catchment area (e.g., all were first-time parents; all were drawn from a single region in the United Kingdom) mean that it is not possible to generalize findings broadly. It will be important to expand the study of prosocial behavior and aggression in other family and environmental contexts in future work. Learning more about early appearing individual differences in children's approaches to the social world may be useful for both educational and clinical practice.     

Grouping Continuous Data in Discrete Intervals: Information Loss and Recovery

Information loss occurs when continuous data are grouped in discrete intervals. After calculating the squared correlation coefficients between continuous data and corresponding grouped data for four population distributions, the effects of population distribution, number of intervals, and interval width on information loss and recover), were examined.     

Modulatory mechanisms in Pavlovian conditioning

Pavlovian conditioning has traditionally been thought to involve the acquisition of excitatory and inhibitory associations between a conditioned stimulus (CS) and an unconditioned stimulus (US). Recent research, however, has encouraged the view that Pavlovian learning may also encompass a higher order modulatory mechanism, in which animals use information about another stimulus to control responding to the CS. Positive modulators signal a positive relationship between the CS and the US, whereas negative modulators signal that the CS-US relationship is not in force. In both cases, the modulatory control appears to be orthogonal to the modulator’s direct associations with the US. This article reviews and evaluates the literature on this Pavlovian modulatory mechanism.     

Poor Performance in Mathematics: Is there a basis for a self‐worth explanation for women?

The self‐worth theory of achievement motivation holds that in situations in which poor performance is likely to reveal low ability, certain students (known as self‐worth protective students) intentionally withdraw effort in order to avoid the negative implications of poor performance in terms of damage to self‐worth. In this study, evidence of self‐worth protection was sought where it is perhaps least likely to be seen: in women in mathematics, where the negative effects of stereotype threat are suggested. Links between self‐worth protection and performance on three maths tasks (a computational task, an algebraic task, and the Tower of Hanoi, a game‐like task tapping into mathematical skills yet devoid of mathematical signs and symbols) and a verbal task (a remote associates task) were examined in an intellectually evaluative situation (following failure) and in an intellectually non‐evaluative situation (following success). Relative to low maths self‐worth protective students, high maths self‐worth protective students performed poorly on both mathematical tasks, but not on either the Tower of Hanoi or the remote associates test. Collectively, findings are consistent with the conclusion that a self‐worth explanation can be applied to the poor performance of women in mathematics. Critical eliciting conditions appear to be mathematical signs and symbols and the presence of evaluative threat.     

Potentiation of taste by another taste during compound aversion learning

Two experiments with rat subjects examined whether a saccharin taste could potentiate the conditioning of an aversion to a salty taste when the two stimuli were presented together prior to lithium-induced illness. In Experiment 1, a 0.1% (w/v) saccharin solution potentiated conditioning of a very dilute (0.03%) NaCl solution, but had no demonstrable effect on two stronger NaCl solutions (0.6% and 1.2%). In Experiment 2, the 0.1% saccharin solution again potentiated the 0.03% NaCl target, but weaker and stronger saccharin concentrations (0.033% and 0.3%) did not. The ability of a taste to potentiate a secondtaste is not consistent with theories that assume that potentiation is unique to compounds composed of tastes and other, functionally different, nontaste cues. Potentiation may occur when the target stimulus is weakly conditionable on its own and when the particular combination of target and potentiator facilitates perceptual integration of the compound.     

Avoiding the Issue of Gender in Japanese Science Education

This paper describes how the patriarchal structure of Japanese society and its notions of women, femininity, and gendered stereotypes produced strong cultural barriers to increasing the participation of females in science education. Baseline data on attitudes toward science and the perceptions of gender issues in science education, academic major and career choice were collected from 175 university students (124 female, 51 male). Students responded to a Likert scale that included the option “I don't understand the question”. All respondents took advantage of the option for items related to gender issues. On some items up to 67% of the males responded that they did not understand the question. Females in science choosing this option did not exceed 19%. In Japan, gender is an invisible, pervasive construct that impacts females' participation in science and science education. In other ways, attitudes toward science among Japanese students mirrored those found in the United States and in other countries. Respondents held the most favorable views of science when they were in elementary school and females preferred biology while males preferred the physical sciences. The exception to the Western pattern of liking science and science teachers is that male non-science majors rather than female non-science majors reported poor academic performance in elementary school, declining attitudes in middle school, and they held the most negative attitudes toward their science teacher and science subjects.     

Developmental Disabilities and the Concept of School Readiness

This paper reviews the concept of school readiness as it applies to children with disabilities. It is argued that children with disabilities are of two primary types: normative and non-normative. The majority of children in special education are in the non-normative category, whose definition is based on failures in children's early encounters with the educational system. Classification of such children as "not-ready for school" is a function of bureaucratic definition, teacher variability, and the child's ethnicity and social class. The authors have taken the position that children in both disability categories should be considered appropriate for regular general education and that the readiness concept which appears to be most appropriate for children with labeled special needs is actually not appropriate for any child.     

Constructing a Long Spoon for Comparative Education: Charting the career of the 'New Zealand model'

This article seeks to put forward one tentative basis on which comparative education might profit from an engagement with 'globalisation', and to circumvent the danger that that engagement will lead to a shift in purpose, from 'how to make education better' to 'how to make education do better'. It uses the example of the career of the New Zealand model of neo-liberalism and new public management to expose, from the perspective of how a 'localism' becomes globalised, something of the nature of the processes, discourses and mechanisms of globalisation and of the subjects who drive them. The article examines the local conditions that enabled the development and installation of the New Zealand model, the discursive and formal characteristics that made it desirable and possible for it to be incorporated at a global level, and the means through which this was done. It concludes by drawing some possible theoretical and methodological implications of the career of the New Zealand model for the relationship between comparative education and globalisation.     

Narrative Engagement and Vicarious Interaction with Multiple Characters

This study investigates how audience members relate to and vicariously interact with multiple characters while viewing a narrative. Under the framework of the theory of situation models, we applied a real-time thought-listing technique that incorporated Twitter and focused on three debuting TV dramas to explore how the participants followed multiple characters while watching prime-time television dramas. We examined 3,274 tweets across the three TV series and found that monitoring a greater diversity of characters is associated with an increased number of questions asked and more accurate predictions of future events. The participants who made more accurate predictions had higher narrative engagement. In addition, the participants who had more thoughts about the self tracked a greater diversity of characters and made more accurate predictions about the plot. The results are discussed in terms of the developing literature on narratives in mass communication and entertainment research.     

Using micro-sensor data to quantify macro kinematics of classical cross-country skiing during on-snow training

Abstract

Micro-sensors were used to quantify macro kinematics of classical cross-country skiing techniques and measure cycle rates and cycle lengths during on-snow training. Data were collected from seven national level participants skiing at two submaximal intensities while wearing a micro-sensor unit (MinimaxX^?). Algorithms were developed identifying double poling (DP), diagonal striding (DS), kick-double poling (KDP), tucking (Tuck), and turning (Turn). Technique duration (T-time), cycle rates, and cycle counts were compared to video-derived data to assess system accuracy. There was good reliability between micro-sensor and video calculated cycle rates for DP, DS, and KDP, with small mean differences (Mdiff% = ?0.2 ± 3.2, ?1.5 ± 2.2 and ?1.4 ± 6.2) and trivial to small effect sizes (ES = 0.20, 0.30 and 0.13). Very strong correlations were observed for DP, DS, and KDP for T-time (r = 0.87–0.99) and cycle count (r = 0.87–0.99), while mean values were under-reported by the micro-sensor. Incorrect Turn detection was a major factor in technique cycle misclassification. Data presented highlight the potential of automated ski technique classification in cross-country skiing research. With further refinement, this approach will allow many applied questions associated with pacing, fatigue, technique selection and power output during training and competition to be answered.