Pamela Turbeville Speaker Series

This talk will focus on identification of autism spectrum disorders in infants and toddlers. The talk will summarize existing research and describe results from recent prospective and retrospective studies. Patterns of symptom onset, including regression, and the developmental course of first signs of ASD will be described. Red flags for early ASD will be identified and illustrated with extensive use of video. Recommended screening tools will be described and the stability and accuracy of early diagnosis discussed.

In the last two decades we have learned a great deal about the importance of positive early environments on developmental outcomes for children living in poverty. However, we have just begun to explore the multiple programming mechanisms and mediating processes that influence acquisition of these positive developmental skills. This presentation will examine the mechanisms of Early Head Start programming on the development of self-regulatory and language skills in children at 14, 24, and 36 months of age. We found relationships between family risks, parenting-related stresses, and parent–child interactions that contribute either independently or through mediation to the child’s acquisition of self-regulatory skills even when accounting for the influence of language development. EHS programming mechanisms will be discussed in order to better understand their implications for practice. Finally, the new Office for Head Start Parent, Family and Community Engagement Framework will be examined in order to illustrate ways in which research findings can guide system-wide development of programming elements that support parents in raising healthy children even in the face of adversity.

Adolescence represents a critical juncture in the development of violence in dating relationships. For many individuals, it is the developmental period during which youth participate in their first committed romantic relationships, and when an episode of dating violence is also first experienced. The unique manners through which micro- (individual, family, peer) and macro- (community, school, cultural) ecological systems interact, and the meaning these experiences hold for youth, is complex and calls for a mixed-method study design. Even less understood are culturally relevant risk and protective factors for teen dating violence (TDV) among Mexican American youth, a vulnerable and understudied population. This presentation will include a discussion of the overall goals of the MATR study, the identification of social and contextual risk and protective factors for TDV, and an introduction to building a high school-based intervention program for Mexican American teens. Mexican American adolescents (15-17 years) from an urban area in the Southwest participated in an online survey (N=214), a focus group (N= 13 groups, separated by 3 levels of acculturation), and a video-taped interaction task with their dating partner (N=25 couples). Protective factors for TDV perpetration and victimization included positive parent and best same-sex friend relationships; risk factors included antagonism and conflict in their dating relationships. Although research suggests that dating violence in adolescence is mutual, in this study of Mexican Americans, boys were more likely to be perpetrators and girls were more likely to be victims. The intersection of cultural values with perceptions of participating in a TDV prevention program will be discussed. Research findings, combined with input from our community partners, are coming together for the development of a culturally sensitive intervention for Mexican American populations, at a critical time in their development.

Self-regulation has two related aspects: the regulation of impulses and planning for the future. While self-regulation is an internal process, it responds to social settings and develops within a cultural context. Children are socialized, expliciely or implicitly, to conform to the behavioral norms of their culture. Both self-regulation and future orientation increase in adolescence, when adolescents envision their own near future as adults and modify their behavior in accordance with their goals. This talk will discuss the results of both ethnographic and cross-cultural research related to self-regulation.
 

Victimization is the experience of receiving overt and/or relational aggression from others, both of which are believed to have unique causes, correlates, and consequences. Research has found that distinguishing proactive and reactive aggression is useful in identifying different social-cognitive and psychosocial correlates among aggressors. What remains unknown is whether it is meaningful to distinguish between the different functions of aggression as experienced by their victims. Adapting the approach of Little and colleagues (2003) to disentangle forms and functions of aggressive behavior, this study provides the first attempt at disentangling the forms and functions of victimization to examine whether these distinctions are meaningful. Participants were 609 middle school students in 6th, 7th and 8th grades. We did find a meaningful distinction between overt and relational victimization after disentangling the forms and functions of victimization. However, this correlation was large and warrants further investigation. We also found no meaningful distinction between the functions of victimization after taking into account the different forms. Implications for future research directions, such as examining multiple reporters of the constructs involved or examining group difference (e.g., age, gender, ethnicity), will be discussed.

Child and adolescent victimization is associated with a range of behavioral and emotional adjustment indices across multiple domains. Despite this general statement, the distinction between overt and relational forms has raised two questions. First, to what extent are the two forms of victimization overlapping versus distinct experiences? Second, are the two forms of victimization differentially related to maladjustment? To provide answers to these questions, we performed a meta-analysis that assessed the magnitude of association between overt and relational forms of victimization, the magnitude of association between the different forms of victimization and adjustment indices (e.g., overt aggression, relational aggression, internalizing, externalizing, and prosociality), and possible moderators of these effect sizes (e.g., self-reports versus peer-reports). These findings will help clarify the value of distinguishing overt and relational forms of victimization.

The school environment is one of the most critical developmental contexts for adolescents because it informs both academic and occupational trajectories during the early years of life (Russell & McGuire, 2008). Recently, there has been more attention focused on understanding school climate because it can directly impact the well-being of students. School climate refers to the influence that the school environment and its culture has on students (McBrien & Brandt, 1997). Although a few recent large-scale studies comparing LGBT and non-LGBT youth have helped to identify factors that differentiate the school experiences and school outcomes of these two groups (e.g., Rostosky et al., 2003; Russell, Seif, & Truong, 2001), most studies have not taken into account the unique contextual factors that may impact academics for LGBT youth.Abstract: This research project aims to address this limitation in order to deepen our understanding of the relationship between school connectedness, as a dimension of climate, and educational outcomes for LGBT youth. We use data from the Preventing School Harassment (PSH) survey, which included 2,559 middle and high school students in the state of California. The data was collected in 2003, 2004, and 2005. The analyses for this particular paper only include the students who identified as lesbian, gay bisexual, transgender (LGBT), which was a sample of 860 individuals. In the sample, the majority of the participants were in the 11th or 12th grade, while nearly one quarter of the respondents were in the 10th grade and less than 20% were in the 5th-8th grades. For gender, 34% were male and 63% were female, and nearly 3% were transgender. For ethnicity, 39% reported white, 22% reported Latino, 4% reported Black, 15% reported Asian, and 15% reported other race. Students were asked to report on their grade-point average (GPA), their sense of school connectedness (e.g., “In my school, teachers really care about the students; all the students,” 1=not at all true to 4=very much true), their academic aspirations (e.g., “I plan to go to college or some other school after high school,” 1=strongly disagree to 4=strongly agree), teacher intervention in sexual orientation harassment (e.g., “How often do you hear teachers or staff stop others from making negative comments based on sexual orientation?” 1=never to 4=often), and school bullying (i.e., “During the past 12 months, how many times on school property were you harassed or bullied because you were gay, lesbian, or bisexual, or someone thought you were?”). We hypothesized that school connectedness would predict GPA and aspirations and that these associations would be moderated by teacher intervention. The results showed that school connectedness was positively associated with GPA and aspirations. In addition, teacher intervention was positively associated with GPA, but not aspirations. However, the moderation analysis showed that the interaction of teacher intervention and school connections was associated with aspirations, but not GPA. The significant moderation illustrates that teacher intervention has a stronger impact on aspirations for students with low school.

This talk examines economic hardship and its consequences across three generations of family members in the rural Midwest. Using prospective data gathered from parents (G1) and adolescents (G2) living in 556 families, we found that economic hardship experienced during adolescence significantly predicted economic hardship in early adulthood (age 25 - 27 years) and G2 economic hardship, in turn, was linked to developmental outcomes of their children, the third generation (G3). Continuity of economic hardship from

 

G1 to G2 was partially mediated by five factors: peers, personality, parents, extracurricular activities, and educational attainment. The talk examines each mediator in detail. The processes observed for G1 and G2 appear to be replicating for G2 and G3. Implications for policy and future research will be discussed.

 

Friday, January 29, 2010
3pm-4:30pm MCPRK 402

"The Social Impact of Disabilities Upon Indigenous Women"

Bodil Landstad, Ph.D.
Nord Trondelag University College (HINT) in Norway

Marianne Hedlund, Ph.D.
Mid Sweden University

Friday, February 19, 2010
3pm-4:30pm MCPRK 402
Public reception to follow

 

"Conceptualizing and Modeling Contextual Effects in Longitudinal Studies"

Todd Little, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology
University of Kansas

Friday, April 2, 2010
3pm-4:30pm MCPRK 402

"Intimate Partner Violence and Life History Strategy"

A.J. Figueredo, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology
University of Arizona

Friday, April 9, 2010
3pm-4:30pm MCPRK 402

"Attachment and Resource Control Strategies: Possible Origins of Social Dominance and Interpersonal Power Differentials"

Patricia Hawley, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology
University of Kansas

Friday, April 23, 2010
3pm-4:30pm MCPRK 402

"Kids' Court School: Implications for Reducing Court-Related Stress"

Rebecca Nathanson, Ph.D.
Departments of Education and Law
University of Nevada: Las Vegas