Senate appropriations committee issues Labor‐HHS bill

The Senate Committee on Appropriations last week released its FY 2020 recommendations for the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies (Labor‐HHS) Appropriations bill.     

What works for children — the political issues

Recent developments in United Kingdom politics are described that have had an impact on the development of evidence‐based policy for children. The notion of ‘what works’ is examined closely, leading to a suggestion that evaluators should, more appropriately, be concerned with ‘what is worth doing’ for children. The paper develops the idea of ‘robustness’ as a guiding principle for evaluation design and the interpretation of evidence so that valid conclusions can be drawn in a changing policy environment. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Repositioning in the global apparel value chain in the post‐MFA era: Strategic issues and evidence from Sri Lanka

This article examines structural adjustment in the world apparel trade following the abolition of Multi‐Fibre Arrangement (MFA) quotas through a case study of the apparel industry in Sri Lanka. The evidence suggests that, in a quota‐free global market, individual exporting countries have room for carving out a niche in specific products. The Sri Lankan apparel industry has managed to maintain growth dynamism through specialization in intimate apparel and upmarket casualwear. The expansion of the industry and its adjustment to MFA abolition was aided by an easily trainable domestic workforce and collaborative actions of industry associations and the government, with foreign buyers playing a pivotal role in linking the Sri Lankan firms to the global value chain.     

Coregulation and the Quality of the Relationship in Full‐Term and Very Low‐Birthweight Preterm Infant‐Mother Dyads During Face‐To‐Face Interactions

Interactions with parents build the foundation for infants' social–emotional development. This study investigated coregulation of the interaction and quality of relationship between mothers and their 6‐month‐old full‐term (n = 43) and very low‐birthweight/preterm (VLBW/preterm; n = 44; ages corrected for prematurity) infants. The objectives were to examine (1) how coregulation changed following a perturbed interaction, (2) how coregulation differed between full‐term and VLBW/preterm infant–mother dyads, and (3) the association between coregulation and relationship quality. Coregulation was coded using the Revised Relational Coding System (Fogel et al., 2003). Quality of the relationship was measured using the Emotional Availability scales (Biringen et al., 2014; Carter et al., 1998). Dyads participated in the Still‐Face (SF) procedure (Tronick et al., 1978) consisting of two natural and one SF period where mothers assumed a neutral expression, refraining from interacting with their infants. Following the SF period, dyads engaged in more symmetrical and more disruptive patterns of coregulation. While full‐term dyads engaged in more sequential‐symmetrical, VLBW/preterm dyads engaged in more resonant‐symmetrical coregulation. These results suggest that VLBW/preterm dyads may show more emotional reactivity in their interactions than full‐term dyads; however, in both groups infant responsiveness and parenting stress influenced the types of coregulation exhibited.     

Intersensory Redundancy and 7‐Month‐Old Infants' Memory for Arbitrary Syllable‐Object Relations

Seven‐month‐old infants require redundant information, such as temporal synchrony, to learn arbitrary syllable‐object relations (Gogate & Bahrick, 1998). Infants learned the relations between 2 spoken syllables, /a/ and /i/, and 2 moving objects only when temporal synchrony was present during habituation. This article presents 2 experiments to address infants' memory for these relations. In Experiment 1, infants remembered the syllable‐object relations after 10 min, only when temporal synchrony between the vocalizations and moving objects was provided during learning. In Experiment 2, 7‐month‐olds were habituated to the same syllable‐object pairs in the presence of temporal synchrony and tested for memory after 4 days. Once again, infants learned and showed emerging memory for the syllable‐object relations 4 days after original learning under the temporally synchronous condition. These findings are consistent with the view that prior to symbolic development, infants learn and remember word‐object relations by perceiving redundant information in the vocal and gestural communication of adults.     

Abstract Rule Learning for Visual Sequences in 8‐ and 11‐Month‐Olds

The experiments reported here investigated the development of a fundamental component of cognition: to recognize and generalize abstract relations. Infants were presented with simple rule‐governed patterned sequences of visual shapes (ABB, AAB, and ABA) that could be discriminated from differences in the position of the repeated element (late, early, or nonadjacent, respectively). Eight‐month‐olds were found to distinguish patterns on the basis of the repetition, but appeared insensitive to its position in the sequence; 11‐month‐olds distinguished patterns over the position of the repetition, but appeared insensitive to the nonadjacent repetition. These results suggest that abstract pattern detection may develop incrementally in a process of constructing complex relations from more primitive components.     

Effective Techniques: The Career‐in‐Culture Interview: A Semi‐Structured Protocol for the Cross‐Cultural Intake Interview

The authors introduce the Career‐in‐Culture Interview (CiCI), a flexible, semistructured interview protocol designed for the career counseling intake session. The contents of the CiCI are based on recent theoretical advances in multicultural counseling and on the social cognitive model of career development. The authors describe a pilot evaluation of the interview and present guidelines for using the CiCI in practice.     

Theory and the School‐to‐Work Transition: Are the Recommendations Suitable for Cultural Minorities?

The special June 1999 issue of The Career Development Quarterly that dealt with school‐to‐work transitions was an admirable attempt to link theory to practice. However, both the theories used and the practices suggested failed to take into account the special concerns of cultural minorities. Suggestions for improving theory and practice to make them more culturally sensitive are made in this reaction.     

Cross‐Race Preferences for Same‐Race Faces Extend Beyond the African Versus Caucasian Contrast in 3‐Month‐Old Infants

A visual preference procedure was used to examine preferences among faces of different ethnicities (African, Asian, Caucasian, and Middle Eastern) in Chinese 3‐month‐old infants exposed only to Chinese faces. The infants demonstrated a preference for faces from their own ethnic group. Alongside previous results showing that Caucasian infants exposed only to Caucasian faces prefer same‐race faces (Kelly et al., 2005) and that Caucasian and African infants exposed only to native faces prefer the same over the other‐race faces (Bar‐Haim, Ziv, Lamy, & Hodes, 2006), the findings reported here (a) extend the same‐race preference observed in young infants to a new race of infants (Chinese), and (b) show that cross‐race preferences for same‐race faces extend beyond the perceptually robust contrast between African and Caucasian faces.     

Infants' Sensitivity to the Depth Cue of Height‐in‐the‐Picture‐Plane

Five‐ and 7‐month‐old infants' sensitivity to the pictorial depth cue of height‐in‐the‐picture‐plane was assessed. Infants were presented with 2 objects, 1 higher than the other, and their reaching was recorded under monocular and binocular viewing conditions. The results showed that both age groups reached significantly more to the lower, apparently closer object under monocular view and that they reached equally to the 2 objects under binocular view. The results suggest that both 5‐ and 7‐month‐old infants are sensitive to the depth information provided by height‐in‐the‐picture‐plane. Demonstration of pictorial depth sensitivity at 5 months has implications for the mechanism underlying the onset of sensitivity to this type of depth information.