<p> Over 50% of mental disorders have an onset in childhood, and mental health issues during adolescence impact adult psychological, social, and occupational functioning. Parents serve as the primary gatekeepers to child mental health resources, and as such factors that influence parental help-seeking were discussed, and a manualized psychoeducational program for parents was developed with the aim of addressing these barriers. The program was developed based on the need for evidenced-supported school-based programs that target parental knowledge, competence, and access to community resources while simultaneously decreasing stigma toward children with mental health difficulties. A quantitative pilot study was conducted as a means to examine change in parent perception of knowledge of social skills in youth before and after receiving the preventative program. It was hypothesized that parent perception of their knowledge post-presentation would be negatively correlated with parental age, and positively correlated with education and household income. Bivariate correlations indicated that parent age, ethnicity and sex, as well as highest level of education were not significantly associated with perceived knowledge of social skills post-presentation. The implications for program development, including the possibility of adding manual versions based on parental education level were considered, and study limitations were discussed. </p><p>

<p> This study used qualitative methods to investigate the phenomenon of nonparticipation of Somali parents in their child&rsquo;s school-based autism treatments including the lack of follow through at home. Semi-structured interviews with open-ended questions were used to engage six (<i>n</i> = 6) Somali parents in a discussion about their perceptions, experiences, understandings, and feelings about their child&rsquo;s school-based autism treatments. Upon analysis eight major themes emerged in relationship to the research questions. These themes were: (1) parents reported schools were not providing treatments, (2) felt child was not receiving a proper education, (3) felt schools were not helping prepare child for future, (4) reported schools ignored or were unaware of their child&rsquo;s strengths, (5) reported they had not received any instruction for treatment follow through at home, (6) would prefer different treatment options, (7) did not feel school providers were sensitive to their needs or the needs of their child, (8) reported experiencing racism from school-based providers and administrators. In addition, four unsolicited themes emerged from the data. These additional themes were: (1) noticed symptoms and sought medical/professional help early in child&rsquo;s development, (2) reported symptom onset in relationship to vaccines, (3) declined further vaccines after symptom onset, (4) reported a lack of trust in researchers, research institutions, and research results. It was an unexpected result that the parents in this sample would differ from other studies. Parents in this sample reported highly Americanized complaints about the type, timing, duration, quality, and expectations of their child&rsquo;s school-based ASD treatments. These results highlight the need for a better understanding of acculturation levels, the need to enhance communication between schools and Somali parents, and a need to rebuild trust in this vulnerable population. </p><p>

Syntactically ambiguous sentences offer an insight into how sentences generally are processed, by examining how readers recognise and reanalyse the ambiguity. However, it is only more recently that the comprehension product of syntactic analysis has been adequately tested, demonstrating that ambiguities are not always fully processed. This work has led to the good-enough approach to language processing and comprehension (e.g., Ferreira &amp; Patson, 2007), which argues that sentence processing is merely good enough for the current task, and that our comprehension may not exactly match the content of what has been read. The work presented in this thesis set out to examine what it means for syntactic ambiguity processing to be good enough, by monitoring patterns of eye movements as people read sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity. Comprehension questions probed the extent to which the syntactic ambiguity had been resolved. Across six experiments, it was demonstrated that both online sentence processing and comprehension are influenced by the presence of an extrinsic memory load, the presence or absence of comprehension questions, the length of texts being read, and the age of participants. Eye movement patterns were more superficial if the task permitted it; similarly, syntactic ambiguities were misinterpreted more commonly as the task demands increased. The results support a good-enough, adaptive sentence processing system, where initial misinterpretations can linger in the product of syntactic analysis, and which is affected by task demands and individual differences.

<p> Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a developmental disorder that is defined by deficits in communication, socialization, and cognitive abilities that make it more challenging for individuals to form and maintain relationships. Previous research has found that mothers with children with ASD-related symptoms report increased maternal stress and decreased maternal self-efficacy and maternal empathy. However, this research mainly examined the medical side of ASD, omitting the emotional aspect that is frequently and importantly associated with child developmental and behavioral outcomes. Alternatively, parent-child connectedness is a way to understand how parents feel emotionally connected to their children. The aim of this study was to understand how ASD-related behaviors and symptomology influenced maternal connectedness to their children, and evaluating maternal stress, maternal self-efficacy, and maternal empathy as mediating variables. Mothers (N = 125) of children between 3 and 5 years of age reported on their children&rsquo;s ASD-related symptomology, maternal stress, maternal self-efficacy, maternal empathy, and parent-child connectedness. The results showed a negative effect of ASD behaviors on maternal feelings of parent-child connectedness. Maternal stress, maternal self-efficacy, and maternal empathy were tested as mediating variables and the findings demonstrated how these parenting dimensions contributed to the negative relationship between ASD symptomology and parent-child connectedness. The results are discussed regarding the possible factors influencing the parent-child connectedness, as well as implications for further research in the field of Infant Mental Health.</p><p>

<p> This research study aimed to examine Orthodox Jewish couples in context of attributions and marital attributions to address gaps in the literature regarding Orthodox Jews as a multicultural group in general, and their experiences of marriage in particular. A cross sectional design was utilized to consider the impact of both an individual's and his or her partner's cognitions on relationship satisfaction among marrieds. It was hypothesized that religiosity has a positive influence on optimism, marital attributions, and marital satisfaction, and that both actor and partner effects will be present for optimism and marital attributions. Specifically, marital satisfaction would be influenced positively by an individual's higher optimism scores and positive marital attributions as well as his or her partner's optimism and marital attributions, respectively. A total of 70 couples (<i>N</i> = 140) completed the survey and were included in analysis. Regression data indicated that religiosity was related to optimism, marital attributions, and marital satisfaction together, <i> R²</i> = .081, <i>F</i>(3, 130) = 3.82, <i> p</i> = .012, but pathways did not indicate statistical significance for individual predictors. The data did not indicate a statistically significant actor or partner effects of optimism on marital satisfaction for husbands or wives. Actor effects for marital attributions on marital satisfaction were found for Orthodox Jewish husbands (&beta; = &ndash;0.10, <i>SE</i> = 0.02, <i>p</i> &lt; .01) and wives (&beta; = &ndash;0.07, <i> SE</i> = 0.03, <i>p</i> &lt; .01) but no partner effects were found, perhaps indicating a proximity effect.</p><p>

No description available.

Little is known about how children develop their concepts of the future. However, future time perspective (FTP) is considered important in the development of abilities such as planning, goal setting, and the delay of gratification. FTP has also been related to mental health in adults and academic achievement in adolescents. This study explored FTP, defined as the ability to temporally locate and organize future events, and compared participants' ability to locate and organize the same events with respect to their past occurrences. There were 167 participants from four grade levels with average ages of the groups ranging from 7.4 to 10.5 years of age. Participants located five recurrent events on four timelines representing; a past(day), a past(year), a future(day), and a future(year). Participants also took tests to assess their knowledge of conventional time (i.e., clocks and calendars). Hypotheses were proposed that: (a) participants would show a general developmental improvement on all tasks, (b) participants would perform better on day-scale than year-scale timelines, (c) participants would perform better on past than future timelines, and (d) knowledge of conventional time would be used by older participants to structure year-scale, but not day-scale, timelines. Results supported the first two hypotheses but, contrary to expectations, participants performed better on future than past timelines. The author proposed that location of sequences in the past is more cognitively challenging because it moves counter to the unidirectional flow of time; events that are more distant from the present are earlier in the sequence. Results supported the hypothesis that more sophisticated representations of conventional time are needed for location of events in longer durations, and that such representations are developmentally acquired, but a causal relationship could not be established. Participants relied heavily on event schemas in locating events; these schemas helped participants produce a correct sequence but often with the incorrect start of the sequence given the instructions regarding use of the present as a reference point. Results also suggested that children might have a different concept of the relationship between the present and the past and future than that of adults.

Objective: The present study evaluated the effectiveness of a parenting program designed specifically for hyperactive preschoolers. Method: Participants were 31 preschool-aged children whose parents were randomly assigned to a treatment or waitlist group. Parents who were assigned to the treatment group took part in a 14-week parenting program that involved teaching parenting strategies to manage hyperactive and disruptive behavior as well as emotion socialization strategies to increase children's emotion regulation. Results: The present study's findings were mixed. There were significant changes on a number of measures of child functioning and parent behavior for families who took part in the parenting program, but these findings were tempered by several nonsignificant findings. Compared to control families, families who participated in the parenting program evidenced significant changes in mothers' reports of child inattentive and hyperactive/impulsive symptoms, observations of mothers' positive parenting and negative affect, and mothers' self-reported verbosity, punitive reactions, and minimizing/discouraging reactions. Moreover, parent training fathers reported decreases in child inattentive and hyperactive/impulsive symptoms. However, treatment families did not significantly differ on mothers' ratings of child lability/negativity and internalizing behavior; audiotaped child behavior; or mothers' self-reported overreactivity, laxness, expressive encouragement, and emotion- and problem-focused reactions. Conclusions: Results provide some support for the effectiveness of the parenting program for reducing ADHD symptoms in preschool-aged children.

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the viability of a computer-based assessment system, called the System for the Assessment of Reading Competencies, to aid in the description and diagnosis of reading difficulties. The practical need for such a system, the theoretical bases that serve as its foundation, and the evidence for the system's validity are presented. Currently, there is little relation among diagnosis, assessment, remediation, and instruction in reading. The lack of integration of these areas and the need for assessment instruments that provide sufficient information for diagnosis and remediation led to this system's development. The present study involved the implementation and initial validation of the system. The system is a computer-based, componential, reading assessment instrument that is based on an information processing model of reading. One-hundred-and-twelve second, third, fourth, and fifth grade students were administered Sentence Verification Technique (SVT) Tests of listening and reading comprehension in addition to several computer tasks. These tasks included a response time measure, letter matching, word naming, pseudoword naming, category matching, syntactic analysis, and sentence comprehension. Both response times and response accuracies were collected on each task. The results were analyzed to examine the reliability and validity of the assessment system. The results showed that the assessment battery was reliable. Further, the results showed that the system successfully discriminated between students in different grade levels and between students of differing abilities within the same grade. The results showed a developmental trend such that the largest differences between ability groups were on the lower level tasks for second graders and on the higher level tasks for third and fourth graders. It was concluded that the evidence supports the reliability and validity of the system as a measure of reading ability, and further that the system has potential as a diagnostic instrument. It was also concluded that measures of response time may discriminate between ability groups even when measures of response accuracy do not. The development of a remedial component to the assessment system is discussed as a direction for future research.

No description available.