The purpose of this study was to examine the retraining and career development experiences of new and professional immigrants in Canada. The study intended to provide an in- depth perspective into the influence of immigrants’ optimism and self-efficacy on their retraining and career development experiences. Using a qualitative methodology, in-depth interviews were conducted and a grounded theory approach was employed to analyze the data. Central themes within participant narratives emerged and key results were introduced. Participants’ experiences included a myriad of barriers and challenges, yet many viewed this experience as a positive opportunity for growth and development. The results explored differences between optimists’ and pessimists’ retraining and career development experiences, as well as the role of self-efficacy within immigrants’ career development. Results have implications for career and vocational psychology literature, practice, and career counselling, and include suggestions for future researchers.

Although childhood maltreatment has been established as a risk factor for the development of problematic gambling, there are significant omissions in the literature regarding the investigation of mediating mechanisms underlying this etiological relationship. The purpose of the current study was to examine altered self-capacities (i.e., relationship difficulties, identity disturbances, and affect dysregulation) and gambling motives as mediating mechanisms underlying the link between childhood maltreatment and gambling, in a sample of emerging adults recruited from the community. It was hypothesized that childhood maltreatment would lead to impairments in the aforementioned self-capacities, which would subsequently predict greater endorsement of gambling motives. In turn, gambling motives were hypothesized to predict increased gambling frequency and gambling problems. The results revealed a pattern wherein altered self-capacities mediated the relationship between childhood maltreatment and gambling motives. However, gambling motives were not observed to mediate the relationship between altered self-capacities and gambling frequency or gambling problems.

The present study examined whether infants aged 3 to 9 months displayed an adult-like left visual field bias when processing dynamic faces. In Experiment 1 infants aged 6 to 9 months viewed videos of dynamic face stimuli. Eye tracking data revealed that these infants showed a left visual field bias by attending significantly more to the right side of the faces. In Experiment 2 a younger group of infants, aged 3 to 6 months, failed to demonstrate a group left visual field bias. Instead, some infants displayed a consistent left visual field bias whereas others displayed a consistent right visual field bias. To our knowledge, these findings provide the first eye-tracking evidence to suggest the existence of a left visual field bias in infancy.

Global life satisfaction is the evaluation of one’s life among important domains. Therefore, importance ratings should improve the relation between domain satisfaction and life satisfaction. However, this is not the case because studies have shown that importance ratings do not improve the model. This study examined the validity of importance and satisfaction measures using a multi-method approach. 316 participants were recruited in friendship pairs to fill out a series of questionnaires about themselves and their friend. Based on the self-informant agreement scores, there is some validity in importance and the satisfaction ratings. The importance measures for some domains also predicted people’s behavioural patterns. Indirect importance ratings were also extracted using regression and correlational analysis. In conclusion, there was also evidence for convergent validity of the direct and indirect importance measures. Therefore, people do think about the important domains to some extent when making a global life satisfaction judgment.

The present study is a novel investigation of neural mechanisms underlying reading development in bilingual children compared to monolinguals. We asked how do bilingual children learn to read when faced with phonological processing across two languages? Both behavioral measures and functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) were used to observe any similarities or differences in brain activity between bilingual and monolingual readers. The behavioral findings corroborate a bilingual reading advantage; bilinguals were faster and more accurate than monolinguals when reading words. fNIRS data showed bilinguals demonstrated greater activation in classic language areas as compared to monolinguals. Taken together, this research advances contemporary scientific controversy concerning types of processing underlying reading and its maturational development over time. Ultimately, this research may have translational significance in education to situate normative developmental reading milestones in bilingual children, which is vitally important in developing effective therapies for bilingual children at risk for reading disorders.

The purpose of this study was to examine the retraining and career development experiences of new and professional immigrants in Canada. The study intended to provide an in- depth perspective into the influence of immigrants’ optimism and self-efficacy on their retraining and career development experiences. Using a qualitative methodology, in-depth interviews were conducted and a grounded theory approach was employed to analyze the data. Central themes within participant narratives emerged and key results were introduced. Participants’ experiences included a myriad of barriers and challenges, yet many viewed this experience as a positive opportunity for growth and development. The results explored differences between optimists’ and pessimists’ retraining and career development experiences, as well as the role of self-efficacy within immigrants’ career development. Results have implications for career and vocational psychology literature, practice, and career counselling, and include suggestions for future researchers.

Although childhood maltreatment has been established as a risk factor for the development of problematic gambling, there are significant omissions in the literature regarding the investigation of mediating mechanisms underlying this etiological relationship. The purpose of the current study was to examine altered self-capacities (i.e., relationship difficulties, identity disturbances, and affect dysregulation) and gambling motives as mediating mechanisms underlying the link between childhood maltreatment and gambling, in a sample of emerging adults recruited from the community. It was hypothesized that childhood maltreatment would lead to impairments in the aforementioned self-capacities, which would subsequently predict greater endorsement of gambling motives. In turn, gambling motives were hypothesized to predict increased gambling frequency and gambling problems. The results revealed a pattern wherein altered self-capacities mediated the relationship between childhood maltreatment and gambling motives. However, gambling motives were not observed to mediate the relationship between altered self-capacities and gambling frequency or gambling problems.

Little is known about writing development among English as a second language (ESL) and monolingual children. The “simple view of reading” (Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Juel 1988) and “component” models (Joshi & Aaron, 2000) were used as theoretical frameworks in this investigation of story writing development of ESL and monolingual children from grades 4 to 6. This longitudinal study (a) compared the narratives composed by ESLs and monolinguals and (b) examined the nature of the language, cognitive, and reading variables that predict writing in these groups. Reading and writing skills were conceptualized in terms of lower order, word-level components, and higher order, text-level components. The study involved 57 monolinguals and 121 ESLs from various language backgrounds, who had attended English speaking schools since grade 1. Based on the Test of Written Language (TOWL, Hammill & Larsen, 1996) three aspects of narrative writing were analyzed: writing mechanics, writing syntax, and overall story quality. Monolinguals and ESLs were similar on the cognitive, linguistic, word- and text-level reading and writing measures, but ESL performance was lower on vocabulary and reading comprehension across all three grades. Narrative writing in monolinguals and ESLs alike was predicted by syntactic skills, word-level skills (decoding and spelling) and text-comprehension. Nonverbal reasoning and phonological processing significantly predicted writing performance for monolinguals only. Overall, writing mechanics, writing syntax, and story quality all grew significantly across grades. However, only story quality demonstrated significantly different patterns of growth across students, but this difference was not explained by any of the predictors. Importantly, despite having weaker vocabulary and reading comprehension skills, ESLs’ narratives did not differ from monolinguals on mechanics, syntax, and overall story quality. The findings have implications for assessment and instruction of writing in both groups, provide additional evidence that reading comprehension and writing skills share common underlying processes, and suggest that skills that determine reading success can be used to flag possible writing weaknesses in both groups. Despite the effect of L2 status on vocabulary and reading comprehension, ESLs demonstrated similar narrative writing skills to monolingual peers.

This study explored the lived experiences of girls with the socially constructed labels ‘tomboy’ and ‘girly girl’. Using a prospective, life history, qualitative methodology, girls between the ages of nine to fourteen years old were interviewed up to four times over five years for an extensive embodiment project. The present study investigated girls’ narratives of the ‘tomboy’/ ‘girly girl’ dichotomy to deepen an understanding of how gender discourses affect how girls learn to live in their bodies. A total of 87 interviews were collected from 27 girls representing diverse social and cultural backgrounds as well as different urban and rural Canadian locations. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed for themes using the constant comparison method from Grounded Theory. Examining the data from a feminist poststructuralist theoretical approach, three main dimensions emerged that described these girls’ experiences of living with these labels from childhood through adolescence. The first dimension described the shared cultural stereotypes of the ‘tomboy’ and ‘girly girl’ labels. The second dimension delineated the social outcomes in terms of the privileges and consequences associated with each label in childhood and in adolescence. The third dimension highlighted girls own negotiated self experiences and identities in relation to this gender dichotomy. Through its prospective design, this research uniquely delineated the complex range of experiences girls have within gender discourses and explored how labels work to control and restrict girls’ freedom to stay connected to their self and body.

Congenital hypothyroidism (CH) is a pediatric endocrine disorder caused by an insufficiency of thyroid hormone. Despite treatment following newborn screening, CH is associated with persisting memory weaknesses. Given animal research has shown thyroid hormone plays a crucial role in the development of the hippocampus, a brain structure required for normal declarative memory, it is possible that altered hippocampally-dependent processes underlie the memory weakness associated with CH. Previous studies of individuals with CH have found reduced memory abilities and left hippocampal volumes but no study has thoroughly assessed memory abilities or how the hippocampus functions to support memory. Thus, the present study compared individuals with CH and typically developing adolescents using clinical memory tests and two associative memory tasks shown in adults to activate the hippocampus during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Results indicated groups did not differ in memory accuracy on clinical measures or either fMRI task. However, fMRI revealed hippocampal activation differed between the groups when performing the associative memory tasks. The first task utilized a visuospatial paired associates novelty detection paradigm to show the CH group increased activation relative to controls in left hippocampus and recruited right hippocampus when controls did not. Since previous research suggested the left hippocampus and verbal memory were more vulnerable to the effects of CH, the second task utilized a verbal paired associates paradigm to demonstrate that when making old and new judgments about associations versus items, the CH group increased activation relative to controls in left hippocampus. Further investigation revealed that when recognizing old associations versus items, the CH group had increased bilateral posterior hippocampal activation whereas controls showed increased activation in right anterior hippocampus, a distinction noted in previous research with this paradigm which suggests individuals with CH may retrieve associations in a less flexible manner than controls. In addition, worse memory performance and increased hippocampal activation, particularly on the left, was predicted by severity of hypothyroidism experienced early in life. In conclusion, these studies demonstrate that early thyroid hormone insufficiency associated with CH alters the functioning of the hippocampus and engenders use of compensatory mechanisms to support associative memory functions.