A preliminary study of the cognitive and motor skills acquisition of young international adoptees

A better understanding of a child's developmental changes in the months following international adoption is needed. For the present study, an initial developmental assessment was completed within two months of an international adoption and compared with performance on the same measures six months later to explore the initial rate of developmental change. The children (8 boys and 18 girls) were adopted from six countries and ranged in age from 5 to 36 months at Time 1 (mean age = 14.77 months). Nineteen of the children (15 girls and 4 boys) spent the majority of their pre-adoptive life in an institution/orphanage. While roughly 60-70% of children had developmental scores within the range of mild to significant delay at Time 1, this incidence dropped to about 25-40% by Time 2. Generally, children from foster care (with scores within the normal range at Time 1) maintained their developmental trajectory at Time 2. Children from institutional care (with scores within the range of mild to significant delay at Time 1) improved greatly as a group and their mean developmental scores fell within the expected range of scores for their ages at Time 2. Clinical implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Psychologically Literate Citizens

Book Summary: This title examines what our students need to know to be psychologically literate citizens of the contemporary world, caring family members, and productive workers who can meet today\u27s challenges. It contains the expert opinions of a leading group on the topic, creates a powerful new model for educating psychologically literate citizens and provides a handbook of evidence-based practical pedagogy with substantive resource materials applicable to every campus and its faculty

Personalization in mother-child emotion talk across three contexts

An unexplored aspect of contextual variation in emotion talk is the extent to which the emotions mothers and children discuss relate to the child, mother, or another self. To establish the extent to which mothers and children personalize the emotions they discuss, we examined the emotion talk of 40 American mother–child dyads in three conversational contexts: reminiscing, book reading, and play. We found that both mothers and children talked about emotions directly relevant to the child mostly in the reminiscing context and about emotions relating to another self mostly in the book context. Interestingly, the discussion of personalized emotions did not significantly differ between the book and play contexts, but did for the independent emotions. The discussion of mothers' own emotions occurred with almost the same frequency in all three contexts. In addition, within-context analyses revealed that while mothers discussed the child's and their own emotions in the book and play contexts at about the same rate, children focused on their own emotions significantly more than on mothers' emotions in all three contexts. We contextualize the significance of the results in light of intervention programmes and future research