Magister Artium - MA / This minithesis provides an ethnographic account of the life world of older people in the community of Belhar in the Cape Peninsula, which was historically categorised as a 'coloured' community during the implementation of the Group Areas Act. By content analysing newspaper articles published in the early 1980s and specifically during the implementation of the Group Areas Act I found that many of the residents reported that they lived in fear of their lives, in what was once known as a 'prestige suburb'. At the present time the community of Belhar is an intensely gang-infested area. From preliminary research done by myself at a senior citizen centre in Belhar, the high incidence of violence was a recurring theme throughout discussions with older people. In fact when I posed the question Why do you come to the centre five days a week? to a group of older people they answered without hesitation It is unsafe for an older person to be alone during the day. Answers like these to many of the questions that I posed would almost always be followed with Things were better then. It also was apparent that the older people in this community remember (or perhaps reconstruct) the past in the context of their present living situation. This became the leading theme in my study and is also the background against which I had formulated my research questions. However this study not only focused on the impact of the high incidence of violence on the community of older people but also essentially looked at elderly residents; everyday lived experiences in Belhar. The research sample consisted of twenty elderly residents and four key informants. The latter provided mainly infrastructural data on the community. Primary data was collected by using ethnographic techniques of inquiry which included participant observation and unstructured interviews. Results revealed that older people occupy a liminal space both in the community and in their households. I also found that the elderly stroke victim is twice silenced and marginalized due to the constraints brought on by their chronic illness and their status as an older person in the community. / South Africa

The development of children’s language skills during the preschool years plays a crucial role in subsequent reading and school success. Some children may enter kindergarten with oral language skills that lag behind their peers’. Two such groups are children from low-socioeconomic status (SES) families and those who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH). Study 1 considered parents’ linguistic input during interactions with their Head Start pre-kindergarten children in two conversational contexts. The first, shared storybook reading, has featured prominently in early language interventions but proven less efficacious among low-SES samples. The second, shared reminiscing, offers a theoretically promising setting in which to promote child vocabulary skills but lacks empirical support. This study examined features of parental language known to relate to children’s vocabulary, including parents’ quantity of speech, lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, and intent to elicit child language. Parents’ and children’s expressive vocabulary knowledge was also considered. Forty parent-child dyads’ conversations during storybook reading and shared reminiscing were audiorecorded, transcribed, analyzed, and coded. Paired t-tests revealed that, while parents talked more during book reading, they used greater levels of syntactic complexity and language-eliciting talk during shared reminiscing. Parents’ own vocabulary knowledge was related to their children’s but not to linguistic input in either context. Study 2 considered the oral narrative skills of DHH preschoolers relative to language-matched hearing children. School-age DHH children often experience delays in the development of narrative skills compared to their hearing peers. Little is known about the narrative abilities of DHH children during the preschool years. This study examined 46 DHH and 58 vocabulary-matched hearing preschoolers’ overall language production, lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, and narrative comprehension skills. DHH children produced a similar number of words and demonstrated similar levels of narrative understanding compared to their hearing peers. However, DHH children’s narratives contained significantly less complex syntax. Gains in lexical diversity differed by group, with DHH children demonstrating less growth over the course of the school year despite making more gains on a standardized measure of vocabulary. Implications for instruction, assessment, and future research are discussed for both low-SES and DHH children.

The graying of America as a sociological and health care phenomenon continues to dictate the demand for creative and innovative interventions that can directly influence the quality of life of nursing home residents. Creative Reminiscence is a program that fosters the active reliving of the past through narration, such as in story-telling, and the use of creative art expression to uncover meaningful life events or valuable life experiences. The purpose of this study was to investigate and describe the meaningful life events elicited by the experience of Creative Reminiscence using a phenomenographic approach. Existing (archived) data-transcribed interviews, poetry and painting on planters that were obtained from 20 participants of the Creative Reminiscence program entitled Le Jardin de Sante were analyzed. Five variations of meaningful memories evoked by Creative Reminiscence were identified. These are described as follows: (a) memories that rejuvenate the elder's sense of connectio n; (b) memories that revive the elder's sense of love and intimacy; (c) memories that restore the elder's sense of being; (d) memories that reassert the elder's sense of control; and (e) memories that reinstitute the elder's sense of purpose. In a caring interaction with Creative Reminiscence, the nursed are able to transcend, moving back in time (past) to appreciate segment(s) of their lives, with triumphs and disappointments that give meaning to their inner conflict/human struggle (present), and integrate a sense of confidence and acceptance of their lives to sustain well-being and a sense of wholeness. This research highlights the similarities and differences in the description of memories by the nursing home residents evoked during Creative Reminiscence. / The results of the study support Erikson's notion of the circular nature of the life cycle, wherein there is an inherent need at the last stage of life to re-integrate ascendant psychosocial themes.Taking into account the meaning that nursing home residents ascribe to their experiences provided data on strategies nurses and caregivers can use effectively to help these elders transcend despair. Further research is recommended using a more diverse sample and in more diverse geographical locations. Current standardized instruments may be revised to quantify effects on the ascendant psychosocial themes. / by Germina Emily Risos Rio. / Thesis (D.N.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2008. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2008. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the relationships among accepting and reminiscing the past, attachment dimensions, and autobiographical memory. University students (N=182) participated to the study (105 women, 77 men). The relationships among attachment anxiety, avoidance, accepting and reminiscing the past, and autobiographical memory were examined within the context of emotionally charged memories and the phenomenological properties of the recalled autobiographical memories, such as the recollection, coherence, and persistence of the reported memories. Results revealed that attachment anxiety significantly predicted the visceral reactions to emotional memories, the vividness and negative valence of the recalled memories, overall the affective aspects of autobiographical memories. Results also indicated that attachment anxiety was a reliable predictor of accepting the past. The interaction between attachment anxiety and avoidance has also a predictive effect on the specifity of memory (specifity of the memory to the person) and vividness, When the patterns of the interaction effect were examined, it was observed that individuals with high attachment anxiety and avoidance (i.e. fearful attachment) reported high scores in specifity, vividness, and cognitive properties of the recalled memories than individuals with low anxiety and high avoidance (i.e., dismissive attachment), suggesting that dismissing individuals repress their memories and fearful hyperactivate them. Attachment avoidance has a significant predictive effect on recollection. Examination of the effect of the accepting the past on the phenomenological properties of autobiographical memory indicated that accepting the past significantly predicted positive and negative valence, perspective, and visceral reactions. Partially supporting the hypotheses, these results suggested that attachment anxiety, but not avoidance has a consistent effect on the affective aspects of autobiographical memory. Findings were discussed on the basis of the literature on both attachment and autobiographical memory.

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This dissertation presents three studies that examined the effects of diverse cultural backgrounds on maternal socialization strategies and how these were related to the development of their pre-school aged children. Specifically, the investigations focused on mother-child discourses about past events when children were three and four years of age. The present work systematically applied the ecocultural approach by investigating relatively homogenous samples, which were selected based on population parameters and sociodemographic characteristics. These sociocultural contexts represented three different cultural models: (1) the model of psychological autonomy (urban middle-class families from Western societies), (2) the model of relational adaptation (rural farming families from no-Western societies), and (3) the model of autonomy-relatedness (urban middle-class families from non-Western societies). We could demonstrate that the three cultural models manifest in mother-child reminiscing: both, how mothers and children reminisced -the structure- and what they talked about -the content. Mothers of the psychological autonomous contexts structured conversations with many elaborations and evaluations in order to actively involve the child to participate. On the content level, conversations were child-centered, with many child references and talk about personal judgments and opinions. Consequently, children were more expressive and self-centered in these contexts. Thus, conversations mirror the socialization strategy and social roles associated with the cultural model of psychological autonomy: The mother treats the child as a quasi-equal interlocutor and reinforces the child to express her- or himself. Mothers of relational adapted contexts structured conversations rather rigidly by using many repetitions, and few elaborations and evaluations. On the content level, they focused more on social contexts than on the child compared to the autonomous contexts. Accordingly, children contributed less information to conversations and showed a greater focus on social contexts. Thus, conversations mirror the socialization strategy and social roles associated with the cultural model of relational adaptation: The mother is the expert and the child the adaptive apprentice. There was greater heterogeneity for conversational structure and content of mothers and children from autonomous-related contexts. However, overall they mirrored the hybrid orientation in their cultural emphases. The different reminiscing styles and thematic foci were thus meaningful within the different sociocultural environments and fostered children’s cultural development of becoming a competent societal member. Furthermore, we could also demonstrate variations within the elaborative style of mothers all valuing autonomy. Thus, when looking at more specific categories, differences also existed among cultural contexts with the same cultural model. Children’s internalization of the respective cultural orientation was also mirrored in another, adult independent task we conducted: children’s self-drawings. Children of autonomous contexts drew themselves bigger -pronounced and space-demanding- whereas children of the relational contexts drew themselves smaller -mirroring greater self-effacement. Drawings of children from the autonomous-related contexts were intermediate in size. Correlation patterns among maternal and child variables varied across the different cultural contexts. Thus, the studies support the notion that psychological processes have to be considered and interpreted in relation to the sociocultural context in which they unfold. This refers to level-oriented (mean differences) as well as functional (correlation based) analyses: Becoming a competent member of a specific cultural context requires very different skills within universal domains, such as mother-child discourse. Additionally, in this process the effect of socialization strategies on the adults’ part may vary across different sociocultural contexts. Results are also discussed in light of practical implications for culture sensitive intervention programs.

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Little is known about how maternal positive affect (PA) relates to maternal patterns of emotion socialization about positive emotions. The current study examined the hypothesis that mothers’ self-reported PA, independent of their negative affect (NA), is associated with increased and more appropriate modeling of verbal and nonverbal expressions of positive emotions in mothers. I examined associations between self-reported maternal PA and behaviors during video-taped discussions of times when the mothers and children were happy in 53 healthy mother-child dyads. These tapes were coded using standard observational coding schemes. Results suggest that mothers with higher ratings of PA, independent of NA, positively predicted levels of observed maternal positive involvement and communication while reminiscing. Maternal PA was unrelated to observed dyadic mutual enjoyment, positive emotion words and teaching during mother-child reminiscing. Results add to the existing literature on positive psychology in important ways. Theoretical implications for understanding positive emotions are discussed.

It is widely believed among developmental psychologists that old age is a distinct developmental stage with unique goals, struggles and opportunities for growth. Achieving integrity involves making sense of disparate aspects of one's life and seing life as one complete whole, rather than bits and pieces of a puzzle. Integrity is achieved when each part of the puzzle is put into place, forming one complete picture.