Gestural development and its relation to cognition during the transition to language

Four Parisian-French infants, two male and two female, were observed bi-weekly at home with their parents or caretakers from 9 or 10 months until approximately 14 months. Their entire repertoire of communicative gestures was coded from videorecordings. Comment gestures, particularly pointing in a book and showing an object, increased after 11 months, and Request gestures involving the adult as an agent increased after 13 months. The appearance of these specific gestures followed the ability to perform object permanence tasks with visible displacements and means-ends tasks involving obtaining an object by pulling a string horizontally. More primitive Reach-request and Emotive gestures declined after 11 months. These findings are compared to those obtained from English-Canadian infants followed over the same age period.Portions of this paper were presented at the Vth European Conference in Developmental Psychology held in Seville in September, 1992. This research was supported by a fellowship to the first author from the Fondation Fyssen, Paris. The filming equipment was supplied by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Blvd. Raspail, Paris. We are very grateful to the French families for their cooperation and to Nurit Nadler and Grace Borzellino for their assistance in the coding of the gestures.     

Subhypergraph counts in extremal and random hypergraphs and the fractional <Emphasis Type="Italic">q</Emphasis>-independence

We study the extremal parameter N(n,m,H) which is the largest number of copies of a hypergraph H that can be formed of at most n vertices and m edges. Generalizing previous work of Alon (Isr. J. Math. 38:116–130, 1981), Friedgut and Kahn (Isr. J. Math. 105:251–256, 1998) and Janson, Oleszkiewicz and the third author (Isr. J. Math. 142:61–92, 2004), we obtain an asymptotic formula for N(n,m,H) which is strongly related to the solution α _q (H) of a linear programming problem, called here the fractional q-independence number of H. We observe that α _q (H) is a piecewise linear function of q and determine it explicitly for some ranges of q and some classes of H. As an application, we derive exponential bounds on the upper tail of the distribution of the number of copies of H in a random hypergraph.     

Simulation Study on Improved Shapiro–Wilk Tests for Normality

The article concerns tests for normality based on the Shapiro–Wilk W statistic. The constants in the test statistic are recalculated as those given in Shapiro and Wilk are incorrect. The empirical significance levels and power of improved tests have been evaluated in simulation study and compared to original ones. The improved tests were also applied to the multivariate case. In this case, we consider two implementations of the W statistic, the first one proposed by Srivastava and Hui and the other by Hanusz and Tarasinska. Empirical size of tests and their power have been compared to the Henze–Zirkler test.     

Financial instruments used by Polish municipalities in response to the first wave of COVID-19

Public Organization Review - Studies on the influence of COVID-19 on municipalities are scarce, although it was precisely municipalities that stood in the first line of combat. It is important to...     

Building Local Democracy: The Role of Western Assistance in Poland

This article argues that foreign assistance, as an external force, has played an important role in shaping the local democracy-building process in Poland. The local context, which is omitted from the transition debate, is considered, and the influence that U.S. public donors exercised at the local scale is highlighted. The article claims that the delayed commitment on the part of these donors to local democracy and to the building of self-governing capacities and participatory practices has undermined the stability and effectiveness of the reforms in Poland. It is shown how this process took place through three different constructs: initial lack of direct assistance; the form under which this assistance was provided; and the donors' selectivity of recipients, both in terms of social groups and of geographic areas. It concludes by outlining areas where changes of assistance delivery should be made both by the donors and recipient communities.     

Student degree program and attitudes toward gays and lesbians in the military: is there a connection?

Individuals routinely experience discrimination based on sexual orientation. Since the implementation of Don't Ask, Don't Tell in 1994, over 13,000 military personnel have been discharged from the U.S. military on the basis of sexual orientation. As helping professionals, social workers will often provide services to returning gay and lesbian veterans. Therefore, social work programs must ensure that students develop positive attitudes toward and understanding of the needs presented by this population. Little is known about whether a specific degree program can be a predictor of student attitude toward gay and lesbian individuals in the military. Eighty-nine graduate students completed the Attitudes Toward Homosexuals in the Military (ATHM) scale, and scores were compared between two graduate degree programs: Social Work and Business Administration. A statistically significant relationship was found between degree program and ATHM scores. Implications for policy, practice and research related to gay and lesbian veterans are discussed.     

An agenda for future research regarding the mental health of young people with care experience

Young people who are currently or were previously in state care have consistently been found to have much higher rates of mental health and neurodevelopmental difficulties than the general youth population. While a number of high-quality reviews highlight what research has been undertaken in relation to the mental health of young people with care experience and the gaps in our knowledge and understanding, there is, until now, no consensus, so far as we aware, as to where our collective research efforts should be directed with this important group. Through a series of UK wide workshops, we undertook a consultative process to identify an agreed research agenda between those with lived experience of being in care (n = 15), practitioners, policy makers and researchers (n = 59), for future research regarding the mental health of young people with care experience, including those who are neurodiverse/have a neurodevelopmental difficulty. This consensus statement identified 21 foci within four broad categories: how we conceptualize mental health; under-studied populations; under-studied topics; and underused methodologies. We hope that those who commission, fund and undertake research will engage in this discussion about the future agenda for research regarding the mental health of young people with care experience.     

The development of emotion regulation in adolescence: What do we know and where to go next?

Emotion regulation is critical for adolescent functioning. Theories on the subject have evolved rapidly in recent years and have led to a more contextualized and dynamic conceptualization of emotion regulation processes. In this paper, based on the distinction between emotion regulation strategies and abilities, we propose future directions for research on emotion regulation development in adolescence. We first present evidence that emotional, cognitive, and social changes that occur in adolescence are central in emotion regulation development. We then review empirical findings on emotion regulation development by tying them to their conceptual foundations. We discuss their limitations and argue that building better conceptual clarity is essential to study emotion regulation. Because current knowledge on recent concepts that emerged in adult-based models remains limited and contested in adolescence, we end this article by discussing new research perspectives to provide a better understanding of the topic. We stress the need for researchers in the field to adopt a more contextualized and person-oriented approach, to combine different time scales and methods, and examine the predictors of emotion regulation as well as its outcomes.     

Family well-being concerns of grandparents in skipped generation families

This study examined the family well-being concerns of grandparents in skipped-generation families. Co-resident grandparents who are responsible for raising their grandchildren completed surveys, focus groups, or individual interviews. Service providers to skipped-generation families also participated in individual interviews to provide an additional perspective to grandparents' concerns. Results indicated 5 levels of concerns: intrapersonal, interpersonal, organizational or institutional, policy, and societal. Concerns at different levels were interrelated and pointed to the need for multilevel interventions to help these families. Implications of the findings for future interventions with skipped-generation families are discussed.