Recent research on the long-term effects of parental divorce has provided few clear answers as to how experiencing a parental divorce while growing up may affect an individual's subsequent romantic love relationships. The purpose of the present study was to explore the relationship between parental divorce and young adults' romantic love relationships. The literature on the long-term effects of parental divorce has generally paid very little attention to subjects' perspectives on how their parents' divorce affected them. However, recent research on traumatic life events has shown that subjects' interpretations of an event are intimately related to how that event affects them. The meaning that a person creates about a traumatic life event has profound consequences for adjustment to that event. The present study used a written narrative method to solicit young adults' views of their own strengths and weaknesses in romantic relationships, and how these were influenced by their family experiences. In order to avoid unintentionally pressuring subjects to discuss parental divorce, subjects were not informed that the study was about parental divorce until after the data were collected. They were encouraged to write freely in response to three openended questions. The first asked them to describe their strengths and weaknesses in romantic relationships, the second asked them to explain how they came to be the way they are in romantic relationships, and the third asked them how their family experiences might have influenced their romantic relationships. Three times as many young adults with divorced parents reported having poor relationships with one or both parents than those with married parents. Students from divorced households also reported experiencing much more interparental conflict than students from the non-divorced group. Despite describing these negative family experiences, subjects with divorced parents reported feeling as successful in their romantic relationships as their peers with married parents. Much of their success seemed to be due to their insight, creativity, and motivation. By overlooking the personal understandings that adult children of divorce have about their parents' divorce, the literature on divorce might have overlooked a great deal of their strength and resilience.

In the last decade there has been a surge of interest in preservice teachers' thinking. By and large, research studies have focused on the final student teaching period of preservice teacher education. However, little is known about future teachers' perspectives on teaching and the self prior to student teaching. This study--based on social constructivism and dialectical approach to teacher socialization--examined the biographies, notions of identity, epistemological perspectives, and current views about teaching of 15 entering preservice teachers at a large state university, using qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews. Interview questions focused on participants' interpretation of their educational experiences, their perspectives of themselves as learners, and their ideas about teaching. The results are presented in relation to the three themes: images of the self, images of teachers and teaching, and towards the image of self as a teacher. Participants' perspectives of themselves as knowers as well as their social group memberships significantly affected their notions of themselves as teachers, their perceptions of their future students, and their priorities in teaching. The results indicate the importance of opportunities to experience mastery in the domains preservice teachers would teach like math, science, or writing, and the need for inquiry into metaphors describing teachers and images of teaching during teacher education. The case is made for including epistemology in the content of teacher education curricula.

Each year, corporate America spends millions of dollars on leadership training programs in an attempt to create more effective managers, but many specialists in this field have speculated that much of this effort is wasted. In the past ten years, a small group of researchers have been approaching this issue from a different perspective; they are looking at how leaders think and create meaning in their roles. The purpose of this study is to contribute to that growing body of research by: (a) exploring the connections between concepts of transformational and transactional leadership models as defined by James MacGregor Burns and Bernard Bass, double-loop learning, a managerial model, as defined by Chris Argyris, and social cognitive development as defined and measured by Robert Kegan and Lawrence Kohlberg; (b) investigating how workers experience a range of leadership models. Eight leaders in a mid-sized, natural food distribution company comprised the primary research sample; eighteen employees also participated in the study via informal interviews. The Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire was used to determine the range of transformational abilities and in addition, each leader was assessed using two social cognitive tools: Robert Kegan's subject-object interview and the Defining Issues Test created by James Rest to assess moral reasoning abilities. Workers were interviewed to see how they experienced their environment and themes were culled from their responses. The results of the study suggested a relationship between the cognitive developmental level of the leaders as measured by Robert Kegan's stages and their transformational leadership abilities. Four out of five leaders used transformational skills with a fairly high degree of frequency. Worker interviews seemed to reflect a substantial degree of satisfaction with the organization. Four themes were extrapolated from the employee interviews: company as community/family, lack of hierarchy, informal atmosphere, and freedom to voice opposition. The implication of the study suggests that the ability to practice transformational leadership is strongly connected to an individual's social cognitive complexity and when this kind of leadership is practiced, the employees reported positive effects.

The United States continues to present the highest rate of illicit drug use among adolescents and young adults in the industrialized world. Despite increasing attention to the problem, the lack of a coherent theoretical framework from which to conceptualize adolescent substance abuse has limited our therapeutic response. The main difficulty in developing a systematic model of inquiry and practice relates to the complexity and multidimensionality of the addictive process. This study investigated the issue of teenage substance abuse and addiction using an integration of cognitive-developmental and narrative theory. The dissertation was guided by the assumption that a clinically relevant understanding of the problem requires a holistic approach that explores the meanings of a person's lived experience rather than a reductionistic approach that identifies the complex interaction of external variables and precipitants. With this primacy on "local" knowledge, emphasis was placed on exploring the epistemology of addiction and how these meanings were conveyed through stories. Consequently, the fundamental task of the study was to identify the common themes in the stories of teenage drug users and integrate them into a local theory of adolescent addiction that would facilitate personally relevant treatment interventions. The sample population consisted of twelve consenting young people with histories of substance abuse who were selected from a public high school and a residential rehabilitation facility. Each subject participated in a structured interview based on Allen Ivey's Developmental Therapy. This cognitive-developmental approach provided a useful framework from which to assess and organize the complex cognitive dimensions that comprised the adolescents' experience. Narrative methods, on the other hand, were used to elicit common themes in their stories. Based upon this combination of approaches, this dissertation presented a theory of adolescent substance abuse that was "grounded" in the interview data. The theory represented a sequence of phases in the addictive process that emerged from the sample group's common experiences. The treatment implications of this integrated approach to addiction theory was then discussed with an emphasis on developing relevant interventions based on treatment matching according to the person's cognitive-developmental profile and unique story.

Each year in Massachusetts there are approximately 21,000 juveniles arraigned in court on criminal charges. If trends continue as they have over the past ten years, juvenile arrests for violent crimes will double by the year 2010 (DYS, 1996). This indicates a need to examine closely the current methods of rehabilitation and socialization of incarcerated youths. This study examines the experiences of eight ajudicated, incarcerated male adolescents to discover the meaning these offenders are making of their daily experience in a Massachusetts secure treatment unit and indicates whether this experience is congruent with the expressed goals and purpose of the Department of Youth Service. This study also expanded on the work of Kegan (1982) by investigating the applicability of his model of developmental stages in meaning making systems to incarcerated male adolescents. The qualitative approach of semi-structed interviewing was used in order to avoid imposing the ideas and standards of the psychological establishment as well as that of the experimenter's culture on the experience of the adolescents. Using Kegan's model, African-American, Caucasian and Hispanic subjects were found to be all functioning at the same developmental level. Qualitative analysis of the data revealed "trust" as a significant issue and identified the lack of the ability on the part of the subjects to take another's perspective as a major deterrent to the messages inherent in the program's stated goals and also to the actual methodology used by the staff. Case history material from the Department of Youth Services and Kegan's semi-structured, subject-object interviews provided a multi-dimensional understanding of the complex picture of the adolescents' experiences. Conclusions are drawn from the data leading to suggestions for better communication between incarcerated adolescents and those professionals in whose care they have been entrusted.

Agitated behavior is a widespread problem that adversely affects the health of nursing home residents and increases the cost of their care. Agitated nursing home residents are more likely to be physically or chemically restrained, to fall and to have a lower quality of life. Current strategies to reduce agitated behavior tend to be costly. This dissertation research examined a relatively inexpensive intervention to reduce the agitated behavior of cognitively impaired nursing home residents. The specific aim was to compare the effect of calming music or hand massage or a combination of calming music and hand massage on the level and type of agitated behavior over time. This four group, repeated measures design used the Progressively Lowered Stress Threshold model (Hall & Buckwalter, 1987) to test the effect of exposure to calming music and hand massage on agitation. This model proposes that in the context of agitation, the stress response can be altered and functionally adaptive behavior achieved by modifying environmental demands and controlling for factors that correlate with the perception of stress. Power calculations indicated that a sample size of 68 would be adequate to detect significant results. Subjects were randomly assigned to one of four intervention groups: (1) calming music, (2)hand massage, (3) calming music and hand massage simultaneously, or (4) control. Level of agitation was assessed during each of four ten minute observation periods, immediately before the intervention, during the intervention, immediately after the intervention, and at 60 minutes. Each of the experimental interventions produced a reduction in agitation that was greater than that achieved in the absence of any intervention. The benefit was sustained and increased over time. The level of increased benefit over tune was similar in each of the experimental intervention groups. When syndromes of agitated behaviors were examined separately, there were differential levels of reduction of physically aggressive, physically non-aggressive and verbally agitated behaviors. Results of this study provide information on an easily administered intervention that can improve the quality of life for nursing home residents and potentially decrease the cost of their care.

There are certain ways of reading to young children that are more effective than others in increasing language, vocabulary, and building early literacy skills. Dialogic reading is a method to enhance shared book reading by providing a context for dialogue and interaction between the adult and the child. Dialogic reading has been shown to have positive effects on young childrens’ early literacy and language skills. Thus far, parents and teachers have used these techniques in the home and school in one-on-one or small group settings. However, results have been variable due to inconsistent implementation. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of implementing dialogic reading techniques in a preschool setting via cross age tutoring by fifth grade students. Students in preschool and fifth grade were recruited from a school in Eastern Maryland. Fifth graders served as tutors and were trained to use dialogic reading techniques with preschool students in the same school. The tutoring dyads met three times a week for 30 minutes for 8 weeks.

Recent investigations of children's arithmetic strategy proficiency have revealed disparate results; some suggest that first grade boys are more accurate math-fact retrievers than are first grade girls, while others suggest first grade girls are the more accurate math-fact retrievers. The present study was designed to assess whether gender differences in math-fact retrieval do exist among kindergarten and first grade students and to assess the circumstances under which those differences might be observed. In two experiments, kindergarten and first grade children were asked to solve a series of simple addition and subtraction problems. Solution strategies were restricted and children were required to use either fact-retrieval or overt counting to solve the problems. Problems were presented in one of two modes, visual or auditory, via a laptop computer; half of the problems in each mode required the fact-retrieval strategy and half required the overt counting strategy. Performance was measured in terms of accuracy and solution time. No female advantages were observed on any of the tasks in either grade. When accuracy and time were collapsed to create composite proficiency scores, male advantages for the fact retrieval strategy and the visual mode of presentation were revealed in both grades.

Both animal and human studies suggest that cognitive bias toward negative information, such as that observed in major depression, may arise through the interaction of cortisol (CORT) and norepinephrine (NE) within the amygdala. To date, there is no published account of the relationship between endogenous NE and CORT levels and cognitive bias. The present study examined salivary CORT and salivary alpha-amylase (sAA), an indirect measure of NE, in relation to masked affective priming of words in young female participants. Women with higher salivary CORT showed increased priming to negative word pairs only when sAA was also high; when sAA was low, no effect of CORT on priming was observed. These results are in line with previous research indicating that increased CORT is linked to enhanced processing of negative information. However, our findings extend this literature in providing evidence that CORT predicts enhanced processing of negatively valenced information only in the presence of higher sAA.

While media have fast become an integral part of young children's daily lives, much remains unknown about how early media use may be influencing learning and development. The current study examined the relations between the amount of time young children spend viewing children's media, character familiarity, and their emerging gender knowledge. References to young children's media use in this report are referring to their viewing of children's shows on television and/or on DVDs. Television/ DVDs remain the predominant way most families view children's shows on a regular basis (Rideout, 2011). In the first phase of the study, parents responded to a survey on children's home media use and familiarity with animated characters. Surveys were distributed through 25 participating child care centers in Massachusetts. Parent survey responses helped determine the media-use measures for the study and the range of characters included in the testing phase with children, between 21 and 43 months (N =169). In phase two, children's character familiarity and gender knowledge of characters, people, and objects were examined through a series of four picture-identification tasks presented on a touchscreen computer monitor. The study revealed that young children are processing gender-based information from the characters they frequently see in children's media. Children with high levels of character familiarity significantly outperformed those with low levels on the gender knowledge of people and characters tasks. Results also found character familiarity to be predictive of children's gender knowledge. Although girls' and boys' overall familiarity with characters was comparable, girls (n = 84) were significantly more familiar with female and other-sex characters than boys. Boys (n = 85) were significantly more familiar with same-sex characters than girls. Another major finding revealed that children's media viewing did not directly contribute to their gender knowledge. However, media viewing was significantly related to and predictive of character familiarity. Together, the main findings provide new information revealing that young children's nascent ability to identify the sexes is mediated by their familiarity with the animated characters they see on screen. The results also reveal the significant contribution of media-based factors in children's gender-knowledge acquisition.