Adolescent conduct problems exact serious social as well as personal cost. One of the most effective programs for the treatment of serious conduct problems in adolescents is multi-systemic therapy (MST). However, much remains unknown about the conditions under which MST is most effective. This study examined potential moderators of treatment outcomes in MST. One hundred and sixty-four participants from the Weiss, Han, Catron, Harris, Ngo & Caron (2009) data set were used to identify moderators of MST treatment effects. Analyses identified a number of significant moderators, including child age and child race, with older children and Euro-American children benefiting more from MST. Adolescents from better functioning families also gained more from MST, with 9 out of 10 significant moderators related to family or parent functioning supporting this idea. Implications suggest that MST therapists should (a) focus additional attention on cultural factors and (b) consider preparing families more for therapy as MST may not be sufficiently successfully targeting low functioning families. Future studies should (a) examine additional moderator effects, such as the marital / adult partner relationships, and (b) include potential mediators of moderator effects, such as perceived racial discrimination, to determine if such factor underlie observed moderators effects.

The inconsistency of babies ability to reveal displaced speech comprehension in previous research can be accounted for by the relative difficulty of the task and the strength of underlying mental representations of referents. In the current study we investigated how the nature of babies object representations affects displaced speech comprehension. We found that 12-month-old babies are more likely to comprehend absent reference to new objects than to familiar objects. We showed that this is not due to novelty preference, but due to the interference from objects prior spatiotemporal history. Finally, we found that if an object representation is clear from any interfering location information babies are more likely to display comprehension when the referent is accessible to them than when it is not.

People act on efferent knowledge of how to get a motor job done, and incorporate afferent feedback to fine tune their performance. The main purpose of this study is to access the role played by the auditory and motor systems in the skillful control of singing for trained-singers, instrumentalists and people with little or no musical training. In particular, the study investigates how effectively people can sing simple familiar tunes based on their motor knowledge, under conditions when auditory feedback is masked and not available. Trained-singers, instrumentalists and non-musicians sang Happy Birthday repeatedly under two different normal feedback and two different masking conditions. The four conditions resulted from crossing two variables: singing from memory vs. singing along with the song; and singing with normal feedback vs. singing without with an auditory mask (Babble-Mask and Song-Mask). Performances were scored according to relative & absolute pitch, tempo and rhythmic accuracy; implications with respect to the nature of memory representations for musical pitch and time were discussed.

The efficacy of Behavioral Parent Training (BPT) for treating child conduct problems is well-documented. There are nonetheless, however, several significant limitations with BPT including effect sizes that generally are in the small to moderate range, and certain sub-groups for whom the efficacy of BPT appears relatively limited. There may be a variety of factors underlying these limitations, one of which may be that parental affective reactions during challenging parent-child interactions interfere with parents motivation or ability to implement the newly learned adaptive parenting behaviors. There have been a few attempts to modify BPT to address the limitations mentioned above, but to date no studies have focused on how the recently learned parenting behaviors are influenced by parental affective reactions to challenging child behaviors. To provide an empirical foundation for modifications to increase the efficacy of BPT, the proposed study will assess relations among parent affect, parent behavior, and child behavior problems, under evocative parent-child interactions (i.e., interactions wherein the childs behavior likely is aversive to the parent) and non-evocative interactions. Specifically, the study will determine (a) whether the quality of parenting behaviors deteriorates during evocative vs. non-evocative parent-child interactions, (b) whether parental affective responses to challenging child behaviors are correlated with child behavior problems, (c) whether parenting behaviors during evocative situations are more highly correlated with child behavior problems than parenting behaviors during non-evocative situations , and (d) whether there is a hierarchy of parental factors influencing parents behavior toward their children, such that situation-specific factors are more highly related to parenting and child behaviors than are trait-like factors.

One community sample (N = 607) of youths generated self-reported responses to body dissatisfaction, from which the Adolescent Responses to Body Dissatisfaction (ARBD) inventory was constructed. A second similar sample (N = 830) completed this measure as well as measures of coping, body dissatisfaction, body mass index, depressive symptoms, and disordered eating behaviors. Evidence of seven ARBD factors emerged: Avoidant Responses, Distraction/Cognitive Shift, Focus on Weight Loss, Self-Affirmation, Lifestyle Strategies, Social Comparison, and Self-Presentation and Appearance Efforts. Subscales based on these factors provided evidence of convergent, discriminant, construct, and incremental validity. Sex and ethnic differences were also evident. The ARBD provides a window into potentially healthy and unhealthy ways in which adolescents cope with body dissatisfaction.

Graduate students in top science and engineering programs have potential for remarkable accomplishment in science and engineering. Yet few studies have examined how their careers develop after graduate school and what can be done to maximize their potential. In this study, students in top science, engineering, and mathematics graduate programs (367 men, 347 women) were assessed and tracked longitudinally for 16 years. Participants classified as especially accomplished and/or creative in science and engineering (56% of men and 41% of women) demonstrated profiles of cognitive abilities, vocational interests, and lifestyle preferences that differed from those of the other participants. Quantitative ability, investigative and social vocational interests, spouse's income, and parenthood all contributed uniquely to predicting noteworthy accomplishments in science and engineering, with fathers being more likely than mothers to be highly accomplished. Participants who were highly accomplishing in science and engineering were more satisfied with their careers than the remaining participants but equally satisfied with their lives. These findings reveal that there are multiple paths to attaining a fulfilling life.

Cardiovascular responses to acute stress have been examined for mediation and moderation of the stress-illness relation, but few studies of functional abdominal pain (FAP) have evaluated cardiovascular responses with none examining this factor in the relation of psychosocial stress and health outcomes. Adolescents and young adults (Mean age = 19.50, SD = 3.36) with a history of childhood FAP (n = 239) and healthy controls (n = 127) self-reported background life stress and health status (perceived general and mental health, somatic symptoms, functional disability). Cardiovascular response via blood pressure was assessed for two laboratory stressors. Results showed that individuals with a history of FAP in childhood had significantly higher background life stress and poorer health in adolescence and young adulthood. Childhood FAP demonstrated cardiovascular blunted reactivity and poorer recovery following laboratory stressors than healthy controls. Childhood FAP with low cardiovascular reactivity and higher background stress had poorer perceived general health compared with healthy controls. FAP is associated with a long-term vulnerability to stress and poorer health.

Children consider others prior behavior to evaluate whether they are likely to provide accurate information in the future. Prior research has demonstrated that the ability to complete a goal in action or language is viewed as an indication that one should be trusted to provide additional information (Koenig, Clement, & Harris, 2004; Koenig, & Harris, 2005; Pasquini ,Corriveau, Koenig, & Harris, 2007; Rakoczy, Warneken, & Tomasello, 2009). The present studies describe two additional indicators of trustworthiness that children and adults use to assess source reliability. Children and adults identified which of two actors completed a goal by the use of action (Study 1) or language (Study 2) most efficiently and then subsequently trusted the efficient actor to provide accurate information about new words. In both studies individuals who were considered efficient at completing goals were trusted to provide label but not tool information. This suggests that learning in some domains may rely more heavily on testimony, while observations may be more important in other domains. In Study 1, preschoolers considered the relative expediency with which two actresses reached a goal to determine who would be more likely to provide accurate label information. In Study 2, monolingual adults, and Spanish-English bilingual 6-year-olds and adults, considered whether two storybook characters adhered to pragmatic norms in different contexts. Adults who were able to identify the characters who adhered to pragmatic norms trusted label information provided by the norm adhering characters. Bilingual children were able to identify which character adhered to the pragmatic norms but they did not selectively trust the norm adhering individuals as sources of label information.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University OF MICHIGAN.

The aim of this study was to compare the neuromotor development of preterm and full-term infants over the first year of life. Thirty-six preterm infants born at less than 37 weeks gestation and who were neurologically normal at 12 months of age were evaluated on a variety of neuromotor assessments at term, and three, six, nine and twelve months adjusted age. The results were compared to a cross-sectional group of fifteen full-term infants, evaluated on the same reflex and motor assessments. Preterm infants performed significantly more poorly than the full-term infants, with particular lags noted at term and at three and twelve months of age. No significant differences were found between groups of preterm infants born at (i) 24-26, (ii) 27-29, and (iii) $ geq$30 weeks gestation. The differences between the preterm and full-term infants were attributed to factors associated with preterm birth and the evaluation procedures.