Brief Report: Attitudes About Responding to Survey Questions Concerning Childhood Sexual Abuse by Hispanic Female College Students

In no studies have research participants been asked how they feel about answering questions concerning childhood sexual abuse. We have performed searches from two different search engines again and have found nothing published which specifically addresses this question in the way we have. A questionnaire about childhood sexual abuse was administered to a sample of Mexican-American female college students. Over 32% reported positive histories of childhood sexual abuse before age 18. These subjects were more uncomfortable (37%) than those who did not experience childhood sexual abuse when answering questions about childhood sexual abuse (12%; p < 0.00001), but they were not more uncomfortable in answering questions about alcohol or drug use. Women who were sexually abused in childhood also readily disclosed childhood sexual abuse histories despite revealing discomfort about being asked questions concerning childhood sexual abuse. Our findings support concerns by researchers that childhood sexual abuse is neglected because researchers have an unwarranted perception about how fragile sexually abused subjects are as subjects.     

Life-Span Pretend Play in Two Communities

Two studies sought to determine if pretend play has occurred throughout the lifespans of two communities of young Western adults. First, 10 improvisers were asked to define the words “play” and “pretend,” recount episodes of pretend play in their early childhood, elementary school, adolescence, and adulthood, and relate the benefits of their engagement in pretend play. Second, 49 graduate students answered open-ended and dichotomous-response questionnaire items modeled after the first study. In both studies, participants offered meanings of pretend and play that align with definitions of children's play and offered personal, life-span episodes and benefits of pretend play.     

The Play‐Learning Binary: U.S. Parents’ Perceptions on Preschool Play in a Neoliberal Age

Although many studies have examined parental decision‐making patterns in regard to early childhood care and education, few studies have examined how parents’ perceptions on play influence those patterns. This study explores parental perceptions regarding play in early education and the broader socioeconomic context within which these perceptions emerge. Twenty parents of preschool‐aged children completed questionnaires comprised of ratings and open‐ended questions. Findings indicate that the parents in this study defined play and learning in binary terms as opposed to mutually constitutive processes. Subsequently, while parents rated play as important, they also described it as peripheral to, and less important than, the acquisition of literacy and numeracy skills. This study argues that this binary thinking is an outgrowth of neoliberalism and ultimately undermines child well‐being.     

Performing on a Wider Stage: Developing Inner-City Youth Through Play and Performance

This article reports on an ethnographic study of a youth leadership program that utilizes play and performance to support the development of inner-city youth. Participant observation and focus groups were used to learn about young people’s experience participating in the program and how they perceive its effect on their lives. The findings demonstrated that approaching the activities in the program as performances provided participants a way to practice being who they are not, a language for understanding their own development, and a way to become creators of developmental environments for themselves and others.     

Sharing of emotional memories with a listener: differences between adolescents and emerging adults

Research demonstrated a strong influence of personal narratives on emotions linked to memories. However, few studies considered shared narratives and the role of listener’s behavior, especially in adolescence and emerging adulthood. This paper aims to explore the impact of listening attitude on emotions related to memories in adolescents and emerging adults. A total of 157 participants were asked to choose a memory: in the experimental conditions (Attentive Listening, AL vs. Detached Listening, DL), they narrated it to a listener, in the Control Group, they internally reflected about it. Emotions linked to memory at the first time, to narrative/reflection, and to memory after 15 days were measured, as well as the perception of listener’s behavior. Results showed that participants perceived the differences of the listening, although adolescents perceived less listener’s detached stance. Moreover, among adolescents, positive emotions increased after narrative for both experimental conditions, instead, among emerging adults, only AL condition participants increased their positive emotions. Moreover, adults maintained the positive effects of narrative also after 15 days. Authors discussed the role of an empathic context and the adolescent egocentrism in shared narratives about personal memories.     

Animal Abuse as Dirty Play

Animal abuse by children is generally regarded as an impulsive psychological act without instrumental benefit. This research takes a sociological approach to the topic, exploring the deliberate harm of animals as a particular kind of unsavory or dirty play that is part of adolescent socialization. Interviews were conducted with twenty‐five college undergraduate students who admitted to abusing animals earlier in their lives. Respondents considered their prior acts a form of everyday play having serious and thrilling overtones. At a deeper level, their abuse was an extraordinary form of play in that they also were appropriating adult culture. Because their appropriations stemmed from a wider culture racked with inconsistencies about the proper treatment of animals, respondents' presentations of self were split between those who no longer spoke of abuse as fun and admonished themselves for having done this and those who still clung to the idea that harming animals was fun and were seemingly untroubled by their former acts.     

The Impact of Sound in Modern Multiline Video Slot Machine Play

Slot machine wins and losses have distinctive, measurable, physiological effects on players. The contributing factors to these effects remain under-explored. We believe that sound is one of these key contributing factors. Sound plays an important role in reinforcement, and thus on arousal level and stress response of players. It is the use of sound for positive reinforcement in particular that we believe influences the player. In the current study, we investigate the role that sound plays in psychophysical responses to slot machine play. A total of 96 gamblers played a slot machine simulator with and without sound being paired with reinforcement. Skin conductance responses and heart rate, as well as subjective judgments about the gambling experience were examined. The results showed that the sound influenced the arousal of participants both psychophysically and psychologically. The sound also influenced players’ preferences, with the majority of players preferring to play slot machines that were accompanied by winning sounds. The sounds also caused players to significantly overestimate the number of times they won while playing the slot machine.     

Do Socially Anxious Children Show Deficits in Classifying Facial Expressions of Emotions?

Studies with socially anxious adults suggest that social anxiety is associated with problems in decoding other persons' facial expressions of emotions. Corresponding studies with socially anxious children are lacking. The aim of the present study was to test whether socially phobic children show deficits in classifying facial expressions of emotions or show a response bias for negative facial expressions. Fifty socially anxious and 25 socially non-anxious children (age 8 to 12) participated in the study. Pictures of faces with either neutral, positive (joyful) or negative (angry, disgusted, sad) facial expressions (24 per category) were presented for 60 ms on a monitor screen in random order. The children were asked to indicate by pressing a key whether the facial expression was neutral, positive, or negative, and to rate how confident they were about their classification. With regard to frequency of errors the socially anxious children reported significantly more often that they saw emotions when neutral faces were presented. Moreover, reaction times were longer. However, they did not feel less certain about their performance. There is neither an indication of an enhanced ability to decode negative facial expressions in socially anxious children, nor was there a specific tendency to interpret neutral or positive faces as negative.     

Being Confined within? Constructions of the Good Childhood and Outdoor Play in Early Childhood Education and Care Settings in Ireland

This study is based on a study of the experience of the outdoors in early childhood education and care settings in Ireland. Central to the analyses are the inter‐linkages drawn between constructions of a ‘good’ childhood, and children’s ‘need’ for outdoor play, as well as the contradictions which arise around competing discourses of safety and protection versus play and autonomy in the structuring of children’s everyday lives. The findings indicate that the outdoors is increasingly marginalised in young children’s everyday experiences. Conclusions are drawn with reference to the implications for the development of real and meaningful outdoor play experiences for children in early childhood education and care settings.     

Play,Games and Interaction: the Contexts of Childhood Socialization*

Classical and contemporary theories of childhood play are reviewed and evaluated. A symbolic interactionist conception of play, games, work, and socialization is offered. Naturalistic data drawn from the observation of children ages three to eight years are presented to support a processual model of socialization and interaction in early childhood.     

Posttraumatic Play: Towards Acceptance and Resolution

Many children who experience trauma demonstrate it through posttraumatic play (PTP). This type of play is seen by professionals as a repetitive reenactment of the traumatic event within the child’s play. Reliving the event in this way may serve to retraumatize the child and lead to other psychiatric or behavioral problems. This article examines the issues surrounding childhood trauma and PTP. It uses a case study to illustrate the phases of a play therapy approach that incorporates Ericksonian principles, in order for the child to achieve resolution and acceptance. The countertransference issues that a clinician may encounter also are discussed. Editor's Note: This article is the recipient of the Judith Mishne Memorial Award for Excellence in Clinical Social Work Theory and Practice.     

Metaphors we experiment with in multimodal ethnography

In this paper, we argue for a view of analysis as an embodied practice and review others’ testimonies of carrying out multimodal ethnography. This review suggests that metaphors are key for communicating what happens to us in the course of the research and our subsequent sense-making practices. We identify four metaphors for communicating data collection and analytic practices: composing, meandering, plundering and time travel. We then turn to our own multimodal fieldwork with children in middle childhood, to think about the experiences and emergent metaphors that shaped our practice on an international study looking at the relationship between childhood and public life. Children’s play was instructive in our own formation as multimodal ethnographers. We provide examples of the ways in which children recruited us into their play, the ways in which play taught us about what matters to children, and finally, how we took play into our own analytical practices.     

Latino and African American Non-Custodial Fathers

Abstract

This study examines the perspectives of 30 Latino (n = 17) and African American (n = 13) low-income non-custodial fathers regarding their role as fathers and the child support system. Using an ethnographic approach, these non-custodial fathers (NCFs) were asked about their own childhood and background, their relationship with their own fathers, their relationship with their non-custodial child(ren), and their views of the child support system. The cultural portrait that emerges is one of a group of fathers who express a strong desire to be positive role models to their children and to play a significant role in their lives. Notwithstanding their negative feelings toward the child support enforcement system, they need to increase their knowledge regarding the process in order to clarify both their responsibilities and their rights. Implications for social work policy and research are included.     

Hard Jobs and Good Ambition: U.S. Army Generals and the Rhetoric of Modesty

This article examines the accounts given by U.S. Army general officers explaining their success. Based on interviews with sixty‐two generals, I describe the ways in which these officers—whose profession renounces careerism and self‐aggrandizement—fashion explanations of their success (and the success of their colleagues) as being due to selfless service. Even as they have reached the zenith of success in their field, these men and women are not free to admit to personal ambition or to a desire for promotion. Their accounts of their success emphasize their good fortune, hard work, and love of the service. Eschewing personal ambition, they cite as their primary responsibility the well‐being of the soldiers under their command. When asked directly about their extraordinarily successful careers, they almost uniformly acknowledge their willingness to accept the “hard jobs” the organization has asked them to assume. When asked about ambition, they routinely distinguish between good and bad ambition, a distinction that aligns almost perfectly with that between unit and self. Although they are warriors, specialists in the art of war, this is a group that is also practiced in modesty. I think I've had good ambition. (Division Commander, Interview #53)     

Maternal Punitive Reactions to Children's Negative Emotions and Young Adult Trait Anger: Effect of Gender and Emotional Closeness

The current study tested whether young adult's recollected reports of their mother's punitive reactions to their negative emotions in childhood predicted anger expression in young adulthood and whether emotional closeness weakens this association. Further, a three-way interaction was tested to examine whether emotional closeness is a stronger protective factor for young women than for young men. Results revealed a significant three-way interaction (gender × emotional closeness × maternal punitive reactions). For young men, maternal punitive reactions to negative emotions were directly associated with increased anger expressions. Maternal punitive reactions to young women's negative emotions in childhood were associated with increased anger in adulthood only when they reported low maternal emotional closeness. Findings suggest that maternal emotional closeness may serve as a buffer against the negative effects of maternal punitive reactions for women's anger expression in young adulthood.     

Play in Mexican‐American mothers and toddlers is frequent,multimodal, and rich in symbolic content

Play offers rich opportunities for toddlers to develop motor, social, cognitive, and language skills, particularly during interactions with adult caregivers who may scaffold toddlers to higher levels of play than toddlers achieve on their own. However, research on play has narrowly focused on children from White, middle‐income backgrounds, leaving a dearth of knowledge about dyadic play in diverse cultural communities. We videorecorded 222 Mexican‐American mothers playing with their 2‐year‐old toddlers with a standard set of toys. Play behaviors were coded as nonsymbolic or symbolic (play type) and as expressed through manual, verbal, or multiple channels (play modality). Play between toddlers and mothers was frequent, high in symbolic content, and toddler play closely corresponded with mother play in type and modality: Toddlers’ nonsymbolic play related to mothers’ nonsymbolic play; toddlers’ symbolic play related to mothers’ symbolic play; toddlers’ manual play related to mothers’ manual play; and toddlers’ multimodal play related to mothers’ multimodal play. Play in Mexican‐American mothers and toddlers is frequent, multimodal, and symbolically rich, offering new directions for future research and practice.     

Beyond Social Constructionism: A Structural Analysis of the Cultural Significance of the Child Star

This article challenges the dominance of social constructionist theories of childhood by presenting a structural analysis of the child star as a recurrent, universal feature in the myths and legends of the world. The article argues that by conceptualising our understanding of children and childhood as being due solely to the socio‐historical context in which they live, an important dimension of childhood may be overlooked. Through looking at media stories about child stars throughout the twentieth century, this article uses a psychoanalytic Jungian framework to explore deeper similarities and patterns in cultural story telling about children over different cras and social contexts.     

Childhood cancer survivors' experiences in school re-entry in South Korea: Focusing on academic problems and peer victimization

Childhood cancer survivors are confronted with numerous problems when they return to school after the completion of treatment. This study investigates the school re-entry experiences of childhood cancer survivors in South Korea. In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with 31 childhood cancer survivors who were between 15 and 39 years old and had completed all cancer treatments at the time of the study. Participants reported being excited about school re-entry, but also being fearful and concerned about their academic performance and peer relationships. The participants' school re-entry experiences were mostly impacted by their relationships with their peers and teachers. They expressed having had psychosocial problems related to school re-entry, such as feeling a sense of loss and a lack of social skills. Our study findings emphasize a critical need for supporting childhood cancer survivors, both academically and socially, in their transition to school.