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PubMed2001

How do mothers signal shared feeling-states to their infants? An investigation of affect attunement and imitation during the first year of life.

The present study examined how mothers signal shared feeling-states to their infants. Affect attunement and imitation were investigated cross-culturally in 39 mother-infant dyads from Sweden (N = 22) and the former Yugoslavia (N = 17) during the first year of life. Video-recordings of playful interaction between mothers and their infants were analysed using the Affect Attunement Protocol. A significant negative association between imitation and age was found, while there was a significant positive association between affect attunement and age. Single occurrences of affect attunement appeared already at two or three months of age, and by 6 months of age episodes of affect attunement were more common than imitation. Frequencies of imitation and affect attunement were similar cross-culturally and in terms of gender, although there was a significant interaction between age and gender. The results suggest that the signalling of shared feeling-states is not a static process. Mothers do not signal shared feeling-states in the same manner at different ages. Imitation is the most important process during the earliest months, but is superseded by affect attunement earlier than previously thought. The functional implications of this developmental variation are discussed.

Affect↗
PubMed2004

Sexual identity development in the context of compulsory heterosexuality.

This study analyzed the implications of sexual identity development for global, political, religious, and occupational identity development in 358 college students. Participants completed a written survey packet including the Extended Objective Measure of Ego Identity Status (EOM-EIS) and measures of sexual identity, physical/sexual preference, and emotional/affective preference. Data from the EOM-EIS suggest that having a sexual minority identity (lesbian, gay, bisexual, or "other" nonheterosexual identity) and reporting strong same-sex sexual or physical preferences are linked with more advanced global, political, religious, and occupational identity development. Heterosexual-identified participants were more likely to score high on identity foreclosure, moratorium, and diffusion, while sexual-minority-identified individuals scored higher on identity achievement. Individuals with strong same-sex physical/sexual preferences showed a pattern of results similar to those of sexual-minority-identified participants. Themes coded from a free-response question highlighted the finding that sexual-minority-identified participants more often viewed their sexual identity as salient and involving an effortful process. These individuals also stressed the importance of having support or modeling for their sexual identity.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1989

Parent, peer and personal determinants of adolescent drinking.

This study examined direct and indirect influences of parents and peers on adolescent drinking. One hundred and six adolescents, their parents and a same-sex best friend of the adolescent each completed measures that tapped actual and perceived drinking behaviour, and normative standards for alcohol use. Of methodological interest was that adolescents of both sexes provided accurate reports of their parents' and peer's drinking, as well as drinking norms. Path analyses revealed different effects for male and female adolescents. Strongest predictors of alcohol use for males were their perceptions of their father's and mother's drinking, and their father's actual drinking. Best friend's drinking was positively related to the adolescent males' perceptions of themselves as a drinker. The single predictor of their internalized norms was the perception adolescent males had of their friend's drinking. Significantly, the adolescent male's own norms predicted how much and what they drank. For adolescent females, how much they believed their best friend drank, and their friend's normative standards, were the strongest predictors of alcohol use. Father's drinking also influenced the drinking practices of daughters, but mothers had no impact on their daughters' alcohol use. In contrast to young males, females' personal preferences or liking of alcohol successfully predicted most of their drinking behaviour.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1989

Peers as perceived by drug abusers in their drug-seeking behaviour.

This paper is part of a major study in drug abuse. It attempts to investigate from the social learning perspective the importance of peers in the interpersonal relationship and in drug-seeking behaviour among a group of drug abusers including adolescents and adults. The subjects included 100 drug abusers randomly selected from those registered with voluntary organizations for treatment and rehabilitation, and 100 non-abusers individually matched for sex, approximate age, ethnic group, educational stream, and neighbourhood. A questionnaire was constructed to collect biosocial and drug-use data and 11 items of them common to those on the official record were used to check the veridicality of the responses of drug abusers. Exact agreement ranged from 83% to 100%. It is found that peers were identified significantly more by the drug abusers than by the non-abusers to be the person they most associated with, and that peer group influence is a strong motivator in the trigger mechanism of drug-taking.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1990

Do children of lone parents smoke more because their mothers do?

This short report examines the association between smoking behaviours of mothers and their 15 year old children, and whether there is a difference between families headed by a mother living alone or with a partner. It is based on data collected from a cohort of young people and their mothers (N = 967), resident in the West of Scotland. We found no evidence that children of lone mothers smoke more because their mothers do; the familial transmission of smoking behaviour, at 15, appeared to be less apparent in households headed by lone than cohabiting mothers.

Adolescent↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Rhythms and rhymes: developing communication in very young blind and multihandicapped children.

Communicative behaviours develop in early infancy. Blind and multihandicapped infants are at risk in developing social signal behaviours that serve the purpose of signalling the attention of adults and engaging adults in shared interactions and social routines. Primary intersubjectivity or adult-infant interaction has been shown to provide the matrix in which communicative behaviours are acquired. The social routine is one form of adult-infant interaction in which mutuality and shared attention to the same event is developed. The results of this study indicate that very young blind and multihandicapped children can develop intentional and communicative behaviours in the course of social routines based on traditional nursery rhymes. Of particular interest were the youngest subjects who were 15 months-2 years and 3 months at the start of the study. These subjects demonstrated a variety of social responses to interaction with adults. Their responsiveness was expressed in the modalities that were most accessible to them. The physically handicapped children used vocalization as a primary mode of communication, while the physically active depended on physical gestures and postures.

Blindness↗
PubMed1998

Parental health attitudes, illnesses and supports and the referral of children to medical specialists.

Parental illness and maternal health beliefs in the parents of a group of 40 children referred to a paediatric neurology service because of headaches were compared with illness histories and health beliefs in the parents of a matched group of 40 children presenting to the same service with recognized structural pathology, mainly epilepsy. The study focused on the mother's perceptions of her own health (current and past), on life events, social supports and on her beliefs about her own health and the validity of medical reassurance. Significant differences between the two groups were found in relation to: (a) the greater amount of illness experienced by both parents in the index group (i.e. parents of children with headaches), particularly the mothers, both as children and as adults; (b) the greater amount of illness present in the families of the index group in the 3 years prior to being seen by the neurologist; (c) the greater number of index mothers who had experienced the loss of their own mothers caused by death; (d) the greater tendency of the index mothers to express feelings of loneliness; (e) the greater proportion of index mothers who, in response to the Whiteley Attitudes to Health Questionnaire, expressed both (i) concern about serious disease in themselves, and (ii) reluctance to accept medical reassurance; (f) on the other hand, significantly more 'comparison mothers' complained of currently suffering 'many different symptoms'.

Adult↗
PubMed1980

Acquisition of social skills by mentally retarded adult training assistants.

Two moderately retarded adults were employed as assistant trainers with mentally retarded peers who were being trained in appropriate social behaviour. Using a multiple baseline across behaviours and subjects, it was found that the effective aspect of training was participating in and observing training of specific target behaviours rather than attention and social reinforcement for appropriate responses. Acquisition of target behaviours occurred in a short period of time and generalised to the natural environment (recreation hall).

Adult↗
PubMed1983

Structural characteristics of sensorimotor development among Down's syndrome infants.

The structural features of sensorimotor intelligence were examined among two groups of Down's syndrome infants administered the seven Uzgiris and Hunt scales of infant psychological development. Two measures of associative relationships (stage congruence and intercorrelations) among the subjects' performances on these scales were subjected to both hierarchical cluster analysis and factor analysis to discern the underlying structure of the data. The analyses yielded between two and four clustering networks of behaviours for each sample of infants. Moreover, the clustering and factor solutions for both samples were quite alike. Comparisons of the findings with those in other investigations showed that both Down's syndrome groups manifested patterns of organization very similar to structural networks for more heterogeneously formed groups of mentally retarded subjects. The need for better designed comparative studies is noted.

Concept Formation↗
PubMed1985

Establishing pre-language signalling behaviour with profoundly mentally handicapped students: a preliminary investigation.

The purpose of this investigation was to ascertain the effectiveness of a specific pre-language communication programming technique on the development of pre-language communication signalling behaviour in a group of profoundly mentally handicapped students. Results indicate that the procedure produced desired effects. Problems related to defining pre-language communication behaviours and communicative stimuli for this population, as well as issues pertaining to generalization, were discussed. Concluding comments stress the preliminary nature of the results and the need for future research in the validation of pre-language communication programming techniques.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1986

The effect of intensity of training on sensori-motor development in infants with Down's syndrome.

Twenty-four children with Down's syndrome involved in an early intervention programme were divided into matched intensive training (ITG) and control groups (CG), at a mean age of 42 weeks. Parents of children in the ITG were given exercises to carry out daily to train object permanence, imitation and span of attention. Parents of children on the CG were given general advice. All children were assessed on check lists in the three areas and on standard developmental tests. Results showed small short-term effects in favour of the ITG during the training but no long-term effects on development. It was suggested that the short-term effects were mainly due to improved stability of performance in the ITG.

Attention↗
PubMed1991

Rehearsal training and short-term free-recall of sign and word labels by severely handicapped children.

An experiment is reported in which eight severely handicapped children were taught to rehearse lists of five manual sign labels or five word labels during the delay periods of a short-term, free-recall task. The results showed that the rehearsal training had an overall facilitatory effect on recall and that this effect was more pronounced for signs than for words, especially in the recency portion of the serial position curve. Follow-up after 3 weeks showed that the differential facilitatory effect for signs was maintained. The findings are discussed in the context both of existing memory studies for signed stimuli and in terms of their implications for the use of signs in educational settings.

Attention↗
PubMed1991

Self-reinforcement in mildly mentally retarded adults: effects of motivational orientation and instructional demand.

The effects of external (environmental) and internal (cognitive) self-influences of self-regulatory behaviour were investigated in 60 mildly mentally retarded adults. External conditions were three demand conditions (stringent, variable, and lenient). The 'internal' variable was an individual differences one, motivational orientation: one-half of the subjects were relatively intrinsically motivated and the other half were relatively extrinsically motivated. Both external and internal self-influences affected performance on a motor/attention task. Subjects in the stringent-demand condition worked harder, set higher performance standards and arranged leaner schedules of self-reinforcement than did subjects in the lenient demand condition. Intrinsically motivated subjects worked harder, set higher performance standards, and arranged leaner schedules of self-reinforcement than did extrinsically motivated subjects over all demand conditions. Furthermore, intrinsically motivated subjects chose higher performance standards than had been demonstrated to them in the lenient-demand condition, and also arranged leaner schedules of self reinforcement over all demand conditions than had been demonstrated to them, compared to extrinsically motivated subjects. Internal self-system characteristics appear to interact reciprocally with external demand characteristics to reveal substantial individual differences in patterns of self-reward behaviour.

Activities of Daily Living↗
PubMed1995

Sentence imitation by adolescents and young adults with Down's syndrome and other intellectual disabilities.

Sentence imitation performance was evaluated longitudinally in 26 adolescents and young adults with Down's syndrome (DS), and 26 age- and IQ-matched non-DS individuals with other causes of intellectual disability (ID). In each of three annual assessments, the DS group began sentence repetitions more slowly and imitated sentences less accurately than the ID group. DS sentence repetition accuracy was equivalent to the ID group only for two-word sentences and was poorer for every other sentence length. Comparisons of sentence imitation and auditory digit span scores suggested that only ID subjects benefitted from the additional meaning and structure provided by sentences. Correlational analyses performed between each year's sentence imitation score and a set of language, memory and hearing measures revealed that sentence imitation was related to grammatical comprehension, auditory short-term memory and IQ in both groups, and to expressive language ability, speed of spoken word processing, speech discrimination and acoustic reflexes in the DS group only. A significant relationship between sentence imitation and middle-ear functioning was further supported by a categorical analysis in which DS subjects with bilateral abnormal tympanograms tended to perform more poorly on sentence imitation tasks than DS subjects with at least one normal tympanogram. It was concluded that sentence imitation is a task that is sensitive to the auditory-perceptual, cognitive and expressive difficulties evidenced by individuals with DS.

Acoustic Impedance Tests↗
PubMed2006

Verbal communication outcomes in children with autism after in-home father training.

BACKGROUND: This retrospective study examined the efficacy of in-home father training on the communicative outcomes of children with autism. The in-home training consisted of two components: (1) expectant waiting; and (2) imitation with animation. METHODS: Efficacy of parent training was examined by measuring the ratio of utterances produced by the parents to the utterances produced by the children and the number of verbal imitation by the parents. Outcomes of the children's verbal production were examined by measuring the number of (1) single word utterances; (2) different words produced; and (3) verbal response to questions. RESULTS: Following training there was a decrease in the ratio of parent to child utterances and an increase in (1) the use of imitation by the parents; and (2) the number of single words and different words produced by the children. DISCUSSION: Results of this study suggested that the parents had learned to wait for their children to communicate verbally during communicative interactions and to interact more efficiently with their children by using verbal imitation. Overall, the results of this study support the efficacy of parent training that focuses on promotion of social reciprocity, and have important implications for clinicians and future research.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Execution and observation of bringing a fruit to the mouth affect syllable pronunciation.

Kinematic analysis of lip and voice spectrum analysis were used to assess the influence of both execution and observation of arm-mouth-related actions on speech production. In experiments 1 and 2 participants brought either a cherry or an apple to their mouth and either pronounced the syllable BA (experiment 1) or emitted a nonspeech-related vocalization (experiment 2). In the other three experiments participants observed arm actions performed by the experimenter and pronounced the syllable BA. In experiment 3, they observed the action of bringing the cherry or apple to the mouth. In experiments 4 and 5, they observed a pantomime of the same action performed by the experimenter with his own arm (experiment 4) or with a nonbiological arm (experiment 5). The results showed that the formant 2 of the vowel 'a' increased when participants executed the bringing-to-the-mouth act with the apple or observed its execution or pantomime with the experimenter's arm (experiments 1, 3 and 4). In contrast, no modification in the vowel formants was found during a nonspeech-related vocalization (experiment 2) and during observation of an action with a nonbiological arm (experiment 5). Finally, the opening of the lips was larger when the participant brought the apple rather than the cherry to the mouth and pronounced BA (experiment 1). Taken together, the results of the present study suggest that the execution and observation of the bringing-to-the-mouth action activate a mouth articulation posture (probably due to the act of food manipulation with the mouth) which selectively influences speech production. They support the idea that the system involved in speech production shares and may derive from the neural substrate which is involved in the control of arm-mouth interactions and, in general, of arm actions.

Adult↗