Parental affect profiles predict child emotion regulation and classroom adjustment in families experiencing homelessness

Parenting shapes the development of emotion regulation skills in early childhood, laying a key foundation for social-emotional adjustment. Unfortunately, high adversity exposure may disrupt parental emotion socialization practices and children's regulatory development. The current study used variable- and person-centered approaches to evaluate links among parental emotion expressiveness, children's observed emotion regulation, and teacher-reported adjustment among 214 4- to 6-year-old children experiencing homelessness, an indicator of high cumulative risk and acute adversity. Structured parent-child interaction tasks were recorded on site in emergency shelters over the summer and micro-socially coded for parent and child expressions of anger, positive affect, and internalizing distress. We anticipated that parental modeling of predominantly negative emotion expression would be associated with more child dysregulation during parent-child interaction and worse adjustment at school, as reported by teachers the following school year. Preliminary analyses indicated that children's observed difficulty downregulating anger was associated robustly with teacher-reported social-behavioral problems. Latent profile analysis was used to identify three patterns of parental emotion expression characterized by above-average expression of positive affect, internalizing distress, and anger. Parents’ likelihood of membership in the elevated anger profile significantly predicted children's observed difficulty down-regulating anger and higher social-behavioral problems at school. In addition to ongoing efforts to reduce poverty-related risk, supporting adaptive anger regulation in parents and young children may be important for enhancing resilience among families experiencing homelessness and similar conditions of high cumulative risk.     

Is that all there is? The concept of care and the dialectic of critique

Recognition of the usefulness of critical social analysis for gerontology has been increasing just as a range of new problems, ranging from globalization to the anti-aging movement, are posing fresh questions about ideology, legitimation and inequality for the study of aging. Such problems and questions represent the negative moment of critique in the theory–practice dialectic. As is generally true of critical theory, in critical gerontology it is rare to find research that reflects a positive movement toward emancipatory change. Yet gerontology is one of the fields that offers special opportunities for critiquing the status quo of aging and elders in society, envisioning new possibilities for aging and developing practices that produce positive change. This paper describes the movement of our own thinking and work, away from a primary focus on analysis and critique and toward an embrace of the possibilities of generating and sustaining change in organizational care settings. We argue that principles of critical developmental and social theory can be used to reframe the concept of care, and we describe briefly how the methodology of action research can be applied in efforts to create new opportunities and possibilities in the everyday experience of elders in long-term care. In our work, we are learning how a constructive theory–practice dialectic can be initiated when critical principles are applied to a practical and urgent domain — the domain of interpersonal care within long-term care institutions for elders.     

Attitudes of welfare recipients toward marriage and childbearing

The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) put the need for attitudinal change at the center of efforts to help welfare recipients become economically independent, avoid out-of-wedlock childbearing, and embrace marriage. In this paper, we focus specifically on attitudes, analyzing both differences in values and attitudes between welfare recipients and other women on the cusp of reform, as well as the effects of TANF reforms in two states on the attitudes and behaviors of women subject to the reforms. National data reveal few differences in values and attitudes between welfare recipients and other women once background characteristics are held constant. A majority of both groups believes that prospective parents should marry, but single parents can raise a child as well as married parents. Personal aspirations for marriage and further childbearing also are fairly similar. These similarities may be one reason that the literature has shown TANF to have limited effects on marriage and childbearing. A second set of analyses investigates the degree to which welfare recipients in Delaware and Indiana report that reforms affected their aspirations for marriage and childbearing. Self-reported impacts are greater for fertility than marriage attitudes. Even among those who report their attitudes were affected by reform, recipients appear to have difficulty acting on their marital and childbearing desires, dampening any effects on behavior. These findings reinforce the current sense among researchers and policy makers that more direct reforms are needed to have a substantial effect on marriage and out-of-wedlock childbearing.     

Indexing stance: Reported speech as an interactional evidential1

The notion of linguistic stance as a non‐grammaticalized form of evidentiality is here explored through an investigation of reported speech in English interaction. Reported speech is found to be one of a variety of resources with which speakers lay claim to epistemic priority vis‐à‐vis recipients. Such resources are not identifiable as stance markers independently of the sequential contexts in which they appear; sequential position is shown to be central in providing at once a constraint on what can be said and a resource to exploit in saying it. Resources dependent on sequential position to index stance are deemed to be interactional evidentials to distinguish them from the well‐documented stand‐alone evidentials. Interactional and stand‐alone evidentials, as forms of deixis, are directed to the orientations of epistemic authority and accountability respectively; their distinct means of marking evidentiality are grounded in the motivation to be explicit with regard to accountability and inexplicit with regard to authority.     

Alternative Routes to State Breakdown: Toward an Integrated Model of Territorial Disintegration

A theoretical strategy is proposed to integrate competing models of state breakdown by conceptualizing key concepts in these models at a more abstract level. The demographic model, which asserts that rapid population growth can bring about state breakdown when economic and political institutions are too rigid, is extracted from Goldstone's work. The geopolitical model, which argues that deteriorating geopolitical condition can bring about state breakdown if the state is too weak and the economy too unproductive, is extracted from Skocpol's and Collins's works. The competing models are conceptualized as alternative and interacting routes to state breakdown where changing population pressure and geopolitical condition may generate integrative or disintegrative tendency depending on state power and productivity. A model describing four dimensions of state power—economic, military, political, and administrative—is constructed to incorporate various conceptualizations of the state in the state breakdown literature. Also integrated in the model is a third alternative route suggesting that rapid market development can generate disintegrative tendency if state power is too low. The synthesized model allows us to see that disintegrative/integrative tendency produced by one route may intensify or alleviate that generated by another route.     

Shake,Rattle, and … One or Two Objects? Young Infants' Use of Auditory Information to Individuate Objects

Most research on object individuation in infants has focused on the visual domain. Yet the problem of object individuation is not unique to the visual system, but shared by other sensory modalities. This research examined 4.5‐month‐old infants' capacity to use auditory information to individuate objects. Infants were presented with events in which they heard 2 distinct sounds, separated by a temporal gap, emanate from behind a wide screen; the screen was then lowered to reveal 1 or 2 objects. Longer looking to the 1‐ than 2‐object display was taken as evidence that the infants (a) interpreted the auditory event as involving 2 objects and (b) found the presence of only 1 object when the screen was lowered unexpected. The results indicated that the infants used sounds produced by rattles, but not sounds produced by an electronic keyboard, as the basis for object individuation (Experiments 1 and 2). Data collected with adult participants revealed that adults are also more sensitive to rattle sounds than electronic tones. A final experiment assessed conditions under which young infants attend to rattle sounds (Experiment 3). Collectively, the outcomes of these experiments suggest that infants and adults are more likely to use some sounds than others as the basis for individuating objects. We propose that these results reflect a processing bias to attend to sounds that reveal something about the physical properties of an object—sounds that are obviously linked to object structure—when determining object identity.     

ETHNIC DIFFERENCES IN ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT BETWEEN VIETNAMESE AND CAMBODIAN CHILDREN: Cultural and Structural Explanations

Many Vietnamese and Cambodians fied war and communist takeover and entered the United States as part of the largest refugee resettlement program in the country's history. Both of the refugee groups traveled a great cultural distance and face similar barriers in adjusting to the United States. Despite these similarities in settlement, the two groups are adapting differently; this is made evident in their children's academic achievement. While the children of Vietnamese refugees seem to be successfully catching up to the children of other more established Asian immigrants, Cambodian children are trailing. Using the 1992 and 1996 data from the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study, I combine cultural and structural explanations of educational achievement and immigrant adaptation to explain differences in academic achievement between Vietnamese and Cambodian children.     

Child,Caregiver, and Temperament Contributions to Infant Joint Attention

Little is known about variables that may contribute to individual differences in infant joint attention, or the coordination of visual attention with a social partner. Therefore, this study examined the contributions of caregiver behavior and temperament to infant joint attention development between 9 and 12 months. Data were collected from 57 infants using a caregiver–infant paradigm, an infant–tester paradigm, and a parent report of infant temperament. Nine‐month measures of caregiver scaffolding and infant initiating joint attention (IJA) with testers were significantly related to 12‐month infant IJA with testers. A temperament measure of positive emotional reactivity was related to 9‐month IJA, and a measure of negative emotional reactivity was related to 12‐month IJA. Temperament and caregiver scaffolding measures, however, were not associated with the development of infant responding to joint attention. These results further the understanding of the multiple processes that contribute to joint attention development in infancy, and support the hypothesis that initiating and responding measures tap different aspects of joint attention development.