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Teachers are subject to multiple stressors in their profession and often experience significant distress, which has been found to be linked with harsh and punitive behaviors. These behaviors have been found to influence students negatively, particularly those with vulnerable temperaments. Prior research has also found such negative teacher behavior to be associated with hierarchical social structures in classrooms. While many researchers have attributed this hierarchical structure to teacher modeling—normalizing negative displays of behavior or treating favored students preferentially—student personality may also be a factor. Students high in neuroticism have been found to be particularly vulnerable to stress and often withdrawn. Students high in extraversion, however, have been found to be sociable and to experience positive emotions more frequently. Some evidence suggests these students may also be more likely to form transitive friendships, in which person A is friends with person B, person B is friends with person C, and person A is also friends with C, creating more cohesive networks of friends. It is possible that one reason hierarchical classroom social structures emerge in classrooms in which teachers display negative behaviors is that students higher in extraversion support each other and help maintain each other’s positive emotions, while students higher in neuroticism are more likely to withdraw and experience more negative emotions. Students higher in extraversion may be more likely to occupy higher-status positions in the classroom social structure both because they have more frequent contact with one another, and because other students are more likely to hope to befriend those who are happier and have more friends. The current study will simulate fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms to investigate the relationship between teacher behavior, student personality, student emotions, and student social network structure. Results suggest that extraversion is associated with a greater likelihood of being embedded in transitive triads and greater popularity in the friendship social network. However, there is little evidence that neuroticism is associated with students’ position in the student social network or that teacher behavior is related to the structure of student social networks

Learning to read accurately and efficiently relies on proficiency in earlier-developing communication skills, which includes processing and producing speech. It remains unknown to what extent differences in speech production and underlying neural mechanisms for speech production may be related to variability in the development of skilled reading and in reading outcomes. This thesis presents a series of studies which leverage the large scale, open-source longitudinal dataset from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study to characterize functionally-defined cortical networks for speech in school-age children and investigate the relationship between speech network connectivity and reading skill development. The first study demonstrates the feasibility of using a task-based adult atlas of cortical speech regions to define functional networks for speech production in task-free pediatric functional MRI data. Resting-state subnetworks in our school-age sample (9–10 years old) broadly align with those established in the task-based atlas, demonstrating the potential for examining speech networks in large-scale datasets that have collected resting-state MRI data. The second study models single-word reading skill in relation to the mean connectivity of functional speech networks and finds that stronger intrinsic connectivity of subnetworks containing higher-level associative regions is initially predictive of single-word reading skill, but that the effect is no longer significant when controlling for nonverbal IQ and vocabulary skill. The third study compares the mean connectivity of functional speech networks with single-word reading outcomes two years later and observes that good readers had significantly stronger connectivity in the higher-order subnetwork surrounding (though not containing) the core sensorimotor regions for speech, compared to poor readers. All together, these findings provide justification for further study in this area and leave open the possibility for functional neural correlates of speech production to inform mechanisms of reading development.

Thesis PlanB (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Stout, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.

<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> Mothers&rsquo; socialization has been shown to impact prosocial tendencies in children. Discussions during joint book reading may provide a context to observe mothers&rsquo; strategies for evoking emotions. More specifically, mother-child talk about emotions, cognitive states, and inductive reasoning may enhance children&rsquo;s perspective taking about characters experiencing diversity. However, mothers may differ in their amount and type of talk if the characters in the story are from an in-group or out-group. While not all mothers may engage in these strategies during book reading, evoking sympathy in children has been shown to predict children&rsquo;s prosocial attitudes and behaviors toward others in need. The goal of this study was to explore mothers&rsquo; discourse strategies during a joint book reading task with first and second graders. Moreover, this study aimed to test whether reading and discussing a story about an in-group or out-group member differed and whether certain differences increased donating behavior and prosocial attitudes and from pre- to post-tests. In the main results, children&rsquo;s donations did not significantly increase from pre-test to post-test as hypothesized nor did donations differ between the in-group or out-group story condition. However, children&rsquo;s prosocial attitudes toward both in-group and out-group children improved equally from pre-test to post-test. Also as hypothesized, maternal discourse differed between story conditions. More specifically, there was an interaction between child gender and story condition where mothers with daughters used more emotion talk and cognitive state talk when discussing out-group members than did mothers with sons. Exploratory analyses revealed that mothers who used more emotion talk and inductive reasoning had children with lower prosocial attitudes when averaged across time of measurement toward both the in-group and out-group. Alternatively, children&rsquo;s trait sympathy predicted higher average donations and prosocial attitudes. Finally, children&rsquo;s civic identity scores predicted children&rsquo;s average prosocial attitudes and maternal discourse variables (i.e., emotion words, cognitive state words, and number of inductive sequences). Future research should continue to investigate the relationship between children&rsquo;s civic identity and maternal discourse, as this was the first study to explore the two. In conclusion, inducing sympathy in children may be an effective strategy for fostering more favorable attitudes toward other people in need regardless of their group identification. Additionally, individual child characteristics may predict children&rsquo;s inclination to help others in need; however, aspects of mothers discourse may hinder such prosocial tendencies with children if they induce personal distress.</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

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