Patterns of physiological stress response and family climate of stress in children attending Head Start

The repeated activation of physiological stress systems in response to the chronic stress associated with poverty in early childhood signals environmental instability, leading to changes in patterns of physiological response that appear to prepare children for future stress. Consistent with an ecological model, poverty creates environmental instability across children's developmental contexts. Families differ in their psychological distress in response to poverty related stressors. Such differences in response (reflective of parental psychological wellbeing) may intensify or buffer the child's perception of environmental instability. This dissertation study tested the hypothesis that children show distinct profiles of physiological response (Sympathetic Nervous System and Hypothalamic Pituitary Adrenal axis activity) when challenged with a socially evaluative stressor using a sample of 156 children attending a Head Start preschool program. Latent profile analysis results confirmed the existence of 4 distinct profiles: Multisystem Responder, Low sAA Activity, Heightened sAA Responder, and Moderate sAA Responder. Multinomial regression analyses suggested family level stressors (parenting stress, poverty-related stressors, and their interaction) predicted profile group membership, in addition to caregiver employment status and gender. Results and implications for research and intervention are further discussed

Links between maternal parenting characteristics and the development of preschool peer play competence

Peer play is a salient context for examining social competence in preschool children. Play experiences in preschool consisting of positive, prosocial and reciprocal exchanges between peers has been associated with positive adjustment throughout development, particularly for children at risk for poor developmental outcomes associated with poverty. Given the importance of peer play, this study examines child and parenting factors that may be associated with children's peer play skills, based on models of parenting in low-income African American families. Specifically, this study examines a) the relation between emotion regulation abilities of children and peer play in the classroom and b) the influence of parenting factors, including maternal warmth and harsh discipline, on the relation between preschooler's emotion regulation and peer play competence. Using a sample of 137 African American mothers and their children attending a Head Start early intervention program, results showed that as hypothesized, emotion regulation and lability at the beginning of the preschool year were related to peer play interaction and peer play disruption at the end of the year. Study hypotheses relating parenting characteristics to the relationship between emotion regulation and peer play competence were not supported. Additional findings and implications for future research and practice are discussed

Implementation of a culturally adapted treatment to reduce barriers for Latino parents.

Literature to date has not yet included a comprehensive examination of barriers to participation in treatment for Latino populations, incorporating the role of acculturation. This study reports on the process of developing and implementing a culturally adapted treatment for promoting parent involvement by Latino parents in Head Start preschool programs and examines engagement factors affecting participation in the treatment. Results show that Latino parents with higher native cultural competence perceived more benefits to the treatment and reported fewer barriers than parents with lower native cultural competence. Also, the total number of barriers to participation that parents perceived before treatment was negatively associated with treatment participation, above and beyond the influence of acculturation factors, parent perceptions of economic stress, and perceived program benefits. Results are discussed in terms of how to establish effective community-based mental health and educational outreach programs to promote engagement with Latino families. The importance of using bidimensional models of acculturation within research designs with Latino populations and ideas for future research are discussed

Familism Through a Developmental Lens

This article reviews an emerging literature examining the effects of familism across childhood and adolescence. Familism has been described as a Latino cultural value that emphasizes obligation, filial piety, family support and obedience, and its effects have been documented as primarily protective across childhood and adolescence. This review seeks to organize and critique existing research using a developmental science framework. Key tenets of this perspective that are highlighted in the review are close consideration of how familism develops within an individual across time, manifests itself at different points in development, and impacts child, adolescent, and family functioning. Forty-four articles were examined and categorized with results showing that the protective influence of familism is most evident during the period of adolescence. Consideration of expressions of familism and the impact of familism on outcomes during earlier and later periods of development is offered as a recommendation for deriving a more complete understanding of the function of familism in Latino families

The Importance of Home-School Communication as a Tool for Engaging Latino Parents

 This article discusses a study that examined multiple types of parent involvement with a sample of Latino immigrant parents whose children were enrolled in Head Start. Findings suggest that cultural factors, parental efficacy, and parents’ ability to communicate with the school impacted parent involvement. The results suggest that Head Start programs can promote parent involvement among Latino immigrant populations by incorporating cultural values and offering services, such as ESL classes, to increase interest and facilitate communication. The importance of helping parents overcome language barriers and providing specific information about the types of involvement at home and school to parents is also discussed

Examining the Role of Self Efficacy and Communication as Related to Dimensions of Latino Parent Involvement in Head Start

This study reports data on a sample of Latino immigrant parents and their associated levels of parent involvement in Head Start. Parent involvement was defined and measured as parent behaviors supporting educational and developmental outcomes occurring in the home and community setting (home involvement), the school context (school involvement), and also the home-school relationship (home-school conferencing). Latino parents reported the highest levels of parent involvement at home, followed by home-school conferencing, and then school involvement. Differences in parents’ comfort and ability to communicate with the school were found to significantly predict all three dimensions of parent involvement. Parent self efficacy was negatively related to levels of school based involvement and also parents’ endorsement of the importance of a Latino identity. Communication and parent self efficacy were positively related. Overall, the results suggest that our understanding of factors that promote parent involvement for Latino preschool children is only emerging; moreover, results may differ from those obtained with samples of older Latino children and their parents. Implications of this study for the implementation of Head Start best practices, including promoting teacher-invited parent involvement and greater awareness and recognition of the amount of home involvement being provided by Latino families, are discussed in this paper

Item familiarity and controlled associative retrieval in Alzheimer's disease: An fMRI study

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is characterised by altered recollection function, with impaired controlled retrieval of associations. In contrast, familiarity-based memory for individual items may sometimes be preserved in the early stages of the disease. This is the first study that directly examines whole brain regional activity during one core aspect of the recollection function: associative controlled episodic retrieval (CER), contrasted to item familiarity in AD patients. Cerebral activity related to associative CER and item familiarity in AD patients and healthy controls (HC) was measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging during a word-pair recognition task to which the process dissociation procedure was applied. Some patients had null CER estimates (AD–), whereas others did show some CER abilities (AD+), although significantly less than HC. In contrast, familiarity estimates were equivalent in the three groups. In AD+, as in controls, associative CER activated the inferior precuneus/posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). However, during associative CER, functional connection between this region and the hippocampus, the inferior parietal and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) was significantly higher in HC than in AD+. In all three groups, item familiarity was related to activation along the intraparietal sulcus (IPS). In conclusion, whereas the preserved automatic detection of an old item (without retrieval of accurate word association) is related to parietal activation centred on the IPS, the inferior precuneus/PCC supports associative CER ability in AD patients, as in HC. However, AD patients have deficient functional connectivity during associative CER, suggesting that the residual recollection function in these patients might be impoverished by the lack of some recollection-related aspects such as autonoetic quality, episodic details and verification