<p> If society recognizes that it is mutually beneficial for individuals and communities to invest in school interventions that will lead to a more productive society, then early investment in intentional self-regulation (ISR) attributes may be a cost-beneficial strategy in regard to subsequent secondary-, post-secondary, and career successes, especially when early investment is complimented by continued investment in ISR through secondary school. In Chapter 1, I explain why ISR attributes should be a focus of educational curricula and interventions. I review several studies that have identified measures and tools that can be used to evaluate and improve ISR attributes among elementary school-aged youth, and how ISR attributes relate to academic success in elementary school students. In Chapter 2, I discuss the rationale for using longitudinal data from 959 participants in the Character and Merit Project (CAMP) to analyze the characteristics of ISR, as operationalized by Selection, Optimization, and Compensation (SOC) factors, and the outcome of interest, self-perceived academic success. I describe the findings of longitudinal analyses aimed at evaluating the utility of the Chase (2014) two-factor model of SOC, and how this two-factor model related to self-perceived academic success across the elementary school years. I used growth mixture models, cross-tabulation analyses, and tests of the equality of means to determine how SOC factors related to self-perceived academic success trajectory class membership. Chapter 3 explains the implications of the findings, as well as potential limitations. I conclude with a discussion of the possibilities for future studies of ISR and academic success, as well as the implications for educational policy and practice, within and after the elementary school years.</p>

<p> Short-term longitudinal study of mother-infant feeding interactions is rare in the infant obesity, growth, eating disorder, and attachment research. Beginning at birth through 3 months of age, this case-study replication series utilized archival data of 12 mother-infant pairs videotaped during weekly bottle-feeding sessions in their homes. Measures included infant weight and length and amount of food ingested. Videotapes were scored according to five infant and nine maternal observed feeding behaviors scaled on the Interaction Rating Scale - Feeding Ratings, a global measure of mother-infant feeding interactions. Study hypotheses proposed that the more optimal the mothers&rsquo; or infants&rsquo; behaviors, the larger the weight or BMI of the infant or the more food the infant ingested at a feeding session. Spearman rank-order correlation time-point analyses on 69 feeding observations showed statistically significant relationships. All combined infant behavior ratings as well as specific infant behavior ratings of State Rating, Physical Activity, and Gaze Behavior were significantly related to larger infant weight or infant BMI. Regarding maternal behavior ratings, statistically significant negative correlations were found between Persistence in Feeding and infant weight, Contingent Vocalization and BMI, and Gaze Behavior and amount of food ingested. These results have implications for further theorizing about the early antecedents of pediatric obesity in particular, but also for the development of caregiver-infant attachment in general.</p>

<p> This dissertation seeks to formulate an integral psychology framework to better understand the nature and unfoldment of postformal, or postconventional, characterizations of individual consciousness evolution. To this end, an extensive critical evaluation and problematization of the disparate theoretical literatures indicated that while the egocentric and cosmocentric dimensions have been taken into account by various models, the psychocentric, or more specifically, the evolutionary soul dimension and its role in postconventional development has been largely overlooked. </p><p> With this background, there appeared to be hardly any substantial signs of agreement in the extensive and rapidly expanding literatures on human development. Such division has resulted in increasingly heated disagreements and debates concerning controversies of shape, goals, and, particularly, direction (e.g., structural-hierarchical versus spiral-dynamic models). Further, it was found that egocentric and cosmocentric biases bring to the fore a related set of problems that, in present-day formulation, can be summarized as the issue of epiphenomenalism along with the problem of identifying a facilitative agent (an ontological reference point that might help explain the how and why of stage change), which has apparently all but escaped developmental psychologists. </p><p> As a dialogue partner, the study adopts Sri Aurobindo and the Mother&rsquo;s rich integral acumen concerning the psychic being as an alternative assumption ground to both reveal and challenge some of the taken-for-granted assumptions found to underlie much of the ongoing theoretical debate. The guiding purpose of this dissertation, then, has been to advance the fields of both Western and integral yoga psychologies by contributing new and unique pathways to postconventional development&mdash;an integral psychology framework that places the deeper inmost source of evolution at the very center of a comprehensive whole person vision of human growth and development.</p>

This study explored infants’ sensitivity to speaker reliability in verb labeling. Past research has focused primarily on nouns (Koenig & Echols, 2003). The participants in this study were 32 24-month-old infants. Visual stimuli included a group of intransitive verbs that should be familiar to 24-month-olds such as jumping, turning, and waving. These stimuli were shown on a television display. Half of the participants were in a True Labeling Condition, in which they heard labels that correctly matched the familiar actions. The other half of the participants were in a False Labeling Condition, in which they heard familiar labels that did not correspond with the familiar actions they saw. The amounts of time that infants looked at action, labeler, and parent were compared across true and false conditions using t-tests. I expected to find that infants have similar expectations about how labels map to referents for verbs and for nouns, such that they expect speakers to apply consistent labels to both. As a result, infants were expected to look longer to the “false” than “true” labeler. Contrary to predictions, infants failed to look longer at the action in the true condition than the false, or to the speaker in the false condition as compared to the true. The comprehensive results for the studies did not indicate that infants expect accurate labels for actions from humans who are intending to refer, as did previous research with objects. / text

No description available.

The purpose of this project was to investigate four markers of early cognitive development in preterm and fullterm infants with uncomplicated pre- and peri-natal medical histories. These included object memory, location memory, memory and manual search, and inhibitory control of reaching. In addition, the relation between behavioral organization at term and the development of these abilities was investigated. For all test sessions, the PT infants were tested at corrected age (age since expected due date) rather than chronological age (age since birth). The Assessment of Preterm Infant Behavior (APIB) was used to measure regulation of attention, orientation to visual stimuli, motor functioning, and modulatory abilities at 2 weeks corrected age. At 2.5, 4.5, and 6.5 months corrected age, each infant was tested on Visual Paired Comparison and Visual Search. At 8.5, 10.5, and 12.5 months of corrected age each infant was tested on A-not-B and Object Retrieval. Successful performance on VPC and VS is thought to depend on the functional development of the object vision and spatial vision systems, respectively. Successful performance on A-not-B and OR depends on the functional integrity of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. FT infants evidenced better performance on all domains of functioning measured by the APIB. While the infants did not evidence object memory at any age tested, which was attributed to difficulty of task demands, they did evidence location memory at all ages tested. There was not a direct effect of PT birth on VPC or VS performance. However, there was an indirect effect of PT birth, mediated by APIB performance, on attention behaviors during both tasks. There was not a direct effect of PT birth on A-not-B or OR performance. However, there was an indirect effect of PT birth, mediated by APIB performance, on the development of OR abilities. These findings indicate that group differences in behavioral organization at 2 weeks of age differentially predict rates of development on some cognitive tasks. Finally, the overall pattern of results indicates that uncomplicated PT birth does not alter the functional development of the neural systems studied.

Two hierarchical regressions were posed to examine the relative contribution of several predictor variables on retention test performance. The retention test encompassed content from a beginning graduate level statistics class. Cross-sectional methodology was employed to include students who had taken the course sometime during a twenty-two year interval. This study had a unique opportunity to examine long term remembering in an ecological setting where the content area and the teaching had been stable. Grade, from the original course, was the strongest predictor in both hierarchical models. Other independent variables which had significant impact on retention test performance were number of continuing classes in statistics and number of classes in research design and methodology. Rehearsal frequency as well as rehearsal recency were significant predictors. The level of original learning and what one does during the retention interval are more important than the length of the interval itself. The effect of spaced vs. mass practice, as defined by the length of the acquisition interval, was examined. Subjects who took the course over a 15 week semester session outperformed subjects who had the 5 week summer session. In this study, the rate of decline was affected by the subject's age at the time of the retention test. This indicates increasingly rapid forgetting during adult development and has implications for the maintenance of marginal knowledge.

<p> Children in foster care are a vulnerable population, having experienced abuse, neglect or other loss. For some children, foster care is a temporary stop on the way to reunification with their families; others never return home. Every year tens of thousands of children in the foster care system are "emancipated," or age out of the foster care system. Research suggests poor outcomes for former foster youth, who exhibit higher rates of homelessness, joblessness, poverty, alcohol and substance abuse, and mental health diagnoses than their age-matched peers. Most prior research on foster youth has focused on negative outcomes, although several qualitative studies have examined the experiences of youth in foster care, and one study has examined youth experience of self-reliance during the aging out process. The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand better the experience of former foster youth who have aged out of care. Using the Foley Life Story Interview (FLSI), this study sought to elicit the experience of aging out foster youth with attention to how they found hope for the future; this is the first study to date that has examined the experience of former foster youth, the aging out process, and their experiences of hope through the lens of positive youth development, which holds that contexts can be altered to improve youth outcomes, and how such changes in context may actually create changes within the person.</p>

<p> This study examined cultural differences in children's collaborative processes and explored the relationship between these collaborative processes and the children's collaboration in household work. 30 6- to 10-year-old sibling pairs from Mexican-heritage and middle-class European-heritage backgrounds participated in the study. Home visits were conducted using a planning task where dyads planned five grocery-shopping trips using a model store, first creating individual plans and then working together to create a combined plan. After participants completed their individual plans, the research assistant asked them to work together and help each other to make the shortest route to pick up all the items on their shopping list. Using 10-second segments, data were coded in four main categories; fluid ensemble, coming to agreement, one child leads activity, or dividing separate roles (which had several subcategories). Mexican Indigenous-heritage siblings collaborated as an ensemble in a higher proportion of segments than middle-class European-heritage siblings, who spent more segments dividing roles. Specifically, when European-heritage pairs were dividing roles they spent a higher proportion of segments being <i>bossy </i> to their sibling with the sibling <i>implementing</i> their plan, and ignoring their sibling while working on the plan. There was a positive relationship between siblings' collaboration at home and collaboration in the planning task. Siblings who were reported to collaborate with initiative in household work, based on mothers' reports, were more likely to collaborate as fluid ensemble with their sibling in the planning task. In contrast, children that were reported to do household work only when adults managed their chores were more likely to collaborate by being bossy to their sibling or by ignoring their sibling while working on the plan. Findings may help us better understand how cultural practices contribute to children's tendencies to collaborate with others in different contexts, including in the classroom setting where collaboration might be discouraged or managed by adults.</p>

<p> Despite the rapidly expanding body of literature relating to electronic nicotine delivery system (ENDS) use, notable gaps in the available literature are apparent. Many different models and types of ENDS are available, such as electronic cigarettes, electronic hookahs, and newer-generation ENDS devices (vapes/mods). Yet, the scientific community has been slow to identify and investigate different ENDS products other than &ldquo;e-cigarettes.&rdquo; The current project serves to bring a level of specificity to ENDS research that has not yet been seen in the published literature. The current study used a multi-site, cross-sectional, experimental design to test 1) whether endorsement of ENDS usage is affected by the language used in measurement, and 2) whether the perceived risk associated with ENDS differs by product type. Lifetime ENDS use was significantly affected by the specific terms used in measurement within a sample of 546 undergraduate students. When presented with response options for multiple ENDS types, lifetime use was 17% greater than when asking about e-cigarettes alone. Significant perceptual differences between ENDS devices were apparent. E-hookahs and vapes/mods were seen as significantly less harmful to use during pregnancy, less harmful to one&rsquo;s health, and less addictive than either cigalike e-cigarettes or conventional tobacco cigarettes. Together, these findings suggest using generic, single-item measures that only ask about e-cigarettes are problematic.</p>