Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Merrill-Palmer Quarterly

The academic year 2004–2005 marks the 50th anniversary of the Merrill- Palmer Quarterly: A Journal of Developmental Psychology. This occasion provides an opportunity to celebrate the journal’s heritage, its long history of scholarly contributions to the human developmental sciences, and its current and future mission as a purveyor of scientific discoveries. Accordingly, the purpose of this article is to announce this important milestone and to provide an overview of some of the journal’s history, including the confluence of events, persons, institutional forces, and publication trends that brought about its creation and contributed to its longevity. The purview of this historical treatise is divided into four principal epochs: (1) the era preceding the inception of the Merrill-Palmer Quarterly; (2) the establishment of the Merrill-Palmer Institute and founding of the Quarterly; (3) the 1950s through the 1990s, when the Merrill- Palmer Quarterly became a repository for scientific research; and (4) the postmillennial Quarterly

Commentaries in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly: An Introduction to the July 2004 and October 2004 Issues

This occasion in the journal’s history provides a vantage point from which to appraise the scientific endeavors that have generated the contents of the Quarterly and its sister publications over the last half-century. To capitalize on this opportunity, two issues of this year’s Quarterly (i.e., July and October 2004) contain commentaries written by senior investigators whose research programs and accomplishments span many years within this epoch. Included in the content of these commentaries are historical analyses of pivotal accomplishments within various subdisciplines, appraisals of the contemporary status of specific areas of investigation, and visions of the future of scientific inquiry in the human developmental sciences

Creating Informal Play Opportunities: Are Parents\u27 and Preschoolers\u27 Initiations Related to Children\u27s Competence With Peers?

Preschoolers\u27 social competence may depend on the frequency with which informal play activities are initiated by parents\u27, children, and playmates. In this study, measures of children\u27s peer relations in informal and school contexts and the frequency of parents\u27, children\u27s, and peers\u27 play initiations were obtained with 83 preschool children and their families on 2 occasions. Frequent parent initiations were associated with higher levels of prosocial behavior, lower levels of nonsocial behavior and, among boys, greater peer acceptance in preschools. Children who were more initiating of informal peer contacts displayed less anxious behavior in school and were better liked by their classmates. Finally, the degree to which parents involved children in the process of arranging informal play activities was positively related to the frequency with which children initiated their own peer contacts

Psychology as a natural science in the eighteenth century

Psychology considered as a natural science began as Aristotelian "physics" or "natural philosophy" of the soul. C. Wolff placed psychology under metaphysics, coordinate with cosmology. Scottish thinkers placed it within moral philosophy, but distinguished its "physical" laws from properly moral laws (for guiding conduct). Several Germans sought to establish an autonomous empirical psychology as a branch of natural science. British and French visual theorists developed mathematically precise theories of size and distance perception; they created instruments to test these theories and to measure visual phenomena such as the duration of visual impressions. These investigators typically were dualists who included mental phenomena within nature

State of the climate in 2018

In 2018, the dominant greenhouse gases released into Earth’s atmosphere—carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide—continued their increase. The annual global average carbon dioxide concentration at Earth’s surface was 407.4 ± 0.1 ppm, the highest in the modern instrumental record and in ice core records dating back 800 000 years. Combined, greenhouse gases and several halogenated gases contribute just over 3 W m−2 to radiative forcing and represent a nearly 43% increase since 1990. Carbon dioxide is responsible for about 65% of this radiative forcing. With a weak La Niña in early 2018 transitioning to a weak El Niño by the year’s end, the global surface (land and ocean) temperature was the fourth highest on record, with only 2015 through 2017 being warmer. Several European countries reported record high annual temperatures. There were also more high, and fewer low, temperature extremes than in nearly all of the 68-year extremes record. Madagascar recorded a record daily temperature of 40.5°C in Morondava in March, while South Korea set its record high of 41.0°C in August in Hongcheon. Nawabshah, Pakistan, recorded its highest temperature of 50.2°C, which may be a new daily world record for April. Globally, the annual lower troposphere temperature was third to seventh highest, depending on the dataset analyzed. The lower stratospheric temperature was approximately fifth lowest. The 2018 Arctic land surface temperature was 1.2°C above the 1981–2010 average, tying for third highest in the 118-year record, following 2016 and 2017. June’s Arctic snow cover extent was almost half of what it was 35 years ago. Across Greenland, however, regional summer temperatures were generally below or near average. Additionally, a satellite survey of 47 glaciers in Greenland indicated a net increase in area for the first time since records began in 1999. Increasing permafrost temperatures were reported at most observation sites in the Arctic, with the overall increase of 0.1°–0.2°C between 2017 and 2018 being comparable to the highest rate of warming ever observed in the region. On 17 March, Arctic sea ice extent marked the second smallest annual maximum in the 38-year record, larger than only 2017. The minimum extent in 2018 was reached on 19 September and again on 23 September, tying 2008 and 2010 for the sixth lowest extent on record. The 23 September date tied 1997 as the latest sea ice minimum date on record. First-year ice now dominates the ice cover, comprising 77% of the March 2018 ice pack compared to 55% during the 1980s. Because thinner, younger ice is more vulnerable to melting out in summer, this shift in sea ice age has contributed to the decreasing trend in minimum ice extent. Regionally, Bering Sea ice extent was at record lows for almost the entire 2017/18 ice season. For the Antarctic continent as a whole, 2018 was warmer than average. On the highest points of the Antarctic Plateau, the automatic weather station Relay (74°S) broke or tied six monthly temperature records throughout the year, with August breaking its record by nearly 8°C. However, cool conditions in the western Bellingshausen Sea and Amundsen Sea sector contributed to a low melt season overall for 2017/18. High SSTs contributed to low summer sea ice extent in the Ross and Weddell Seas in 2018, underpinning the second lowest Antarctic summer minimum sea ice extent on record. Despite conducive conditions for its formation, the ozone hole at its maximum extent in September was near the 2000–18 mean, likely due to an ongoing slow decline in stratospheric chlorine monoxide concentration. Across the oceans, globally averaged SST decreased slightly since the record El Niño year of 2016 but was still far above the climatological mean. On average, SST is increasing at a rate of 0.10° ± 0.01°C decade−1 since 1950. The warming appeared largest in the tropical Indian Ocean and smallest in the North Pacific. The deeper ocean continues to warm year after year. For the seventh consecutive year, global annual mean sea level became the highest in the 26-year record, rising to 81 mm above the 1993 average. As anticipated in a warming climate, the hydrological cycle over the ocean is accelerating: dry regions are becoming drier and wet regions rainier. Closer to the equator, 95 named tropical storms were observed during 2018, well above the 1981–2010 average of 82. Eleven tropical cyclones reached Saffir–Simpson scale Category 5 intensity. North Atlantic Major Hurricane Michael’s landfall intensity of 140 kt was the fourth strongest for any continental U.S. hurricane landfall in the 168-year record. Michael caused more than 30 fatalities and $25 billion (U.S. dollars) in damages. In the western North Pacific, Super Typhoon Mangkhut led to 160 fatalities and$6 billion (U.S. dollars) in damages across the Philippines, Hong Kong, Macau, mainland China, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Tropical Storm Son-Tinh was responsible for 170 fatalities in Vietnam and Laos. Nearly all the islands of Micronesia experienced at least moderate impacts from various tropical cyclones. Across land, many areas around the globe received copious precipitation, notable at different time scales. Rodrigues and Réunion Island near southern Africa each reported their third wettest year on record. In Hawaii, 1262 mm precipitation at Waipā Gardens (Kauai) on 14–15 April set a new U.S. record for 24-h precipitation. In Brazil, the city of Belo Horizonte received nearly 75 mm of rain in just 20 minutes, nearly half its monthly average. Globally, fire activity during 2018 was the lowest since the start of the record in 1997, with a combined burned area of about 500 million hectares. This reinforced the long-term downward trend in fire emissions driven by changes in land use in frequently burning savannas. However, wildfires burned 3.5 million hectares across the United States, well above the 2000–10 average of 2.7 million hectares. Combined, U.S. wildfire damages for the 2017 and 2018 wildfire seasons exceeded $40 billion (U.S. dollars)

Genomic Relationships, Novel Loci, and Pleiotropic Mechanisms across Eight Psychiatric Disorders

Genetic influences on psychiatric disorders transcend diagnostic boundaries, suggesting substantial pleiotropy of contributing loci. However, the nature and mechanisms of these pleiotropic effects remain unclear. We performed analyses of 232,964 cases and 494,162 controls from genome-wide studies of anorexia nervosa, attention-deficit/hyper-activity disorder, autism spectrum disorder, bipolar disorder, major depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, and Tourette syndrome. Genetic correlation analyses revealed a meaningful structure within the eight disorders, identifying three groups of inter-related disorders. Meta-analysis across these eight disorders detected 109 loci associated with at least two psychiatric disorders, including 23 loci with pleiotropic effects on four or more disorders and 11 loci with antagonistic effects on multiple disorders. The pleiotropic loci are located within genes that show heightened expression in the brain throughout the lifespan, beginning prenatally in the second trimester, and play prominent roles in neurodevelopmental processes. These findings have important implications for psychiatric nosology, drug development, and risk prediction.Peer reviewe

Commentaries in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly: An Introduction to the October 2004 Issueors

This issue is the second in a two-part series that commemorates the 50th anniversary of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly: A Journal of Developmental Psychology. Like its July 2004 predecessor, this issue contains invited commentaries written by senior investigators whose research programs and accomplishments span many years within this epoch. Collectively, the content of these commentaries presents historical analyses of pivotal accomplishments within various subdisciplines of the human developmental sciences, and appraisals of the contemporary status and future directions of specific areas of investigation

Analysis and social validation of a group training package for pre-professionals with deficient job interview skills

The study involved training five job interview skills deficient male co-op engineering students to increase three components of their verbal behavior that are considered important in the job interview. A simultaneous replication multiple baseline design was used to demonstrate experimental control of the various phases of the training program over the subjects' frequency of 1) asking the interviewer job relevant questions 2) verbally expressing his enthusiasm 3) providing positive information about his education and experience. -- Each subject was videotaped while in structured interviews with a research assistant under conditions of 1) baseline 2) training on asking the interviewer job relevant questions 3) training on verbally expressing his enthusiasm 4) training on providing positive information about his education and experience. -- Two trained research assistants, who had no knowledge of the purpose of the study, viewed all the above-mentioned tapes of the subjects in a random order and observed the frequency of the three target behaviors and three untreated concomitant behaviors. The concomitant behaviors were frequency of 1) eye contact with the interviewer 2) speech disturbances in subject's verbalizations 3) gestures used by subject. -- In addition, one pre-training and one post-training interview was conducted in a different setting and with an unfamiliar, experienced interviewer for each subject. The pre- and post-training interview tapes were randomly arranged and two experienced personnel officers who had no knowledge of the purpose of the study were asked to view the tapes and rate the subjects on five subjective measures including likelihood of hiring the subject. -- The multiple baseline design provided for a test of experimental control over the three target behaviors and allowed for the demonstration of a substantial increase of the frequency of each target behavior upon the introduction of training. Overall, there was no change in the frequency of gestures or speech disturbances. The percentage of eye contact increased slightly following the first training session. Pre- to post-training improvements in interviews with an actual personnel officer were also noted in all five subjects. Two other personnel officers provided support for the social validity of the experimental training program by rating all subjects significantly higher following training on the five subjective measures including likelihood of hiring. Evaluation of the program by the five participants indicates that they all found the experience to be a valuable one. -- In a subsequent co-op engineering program open job competition, three of the participants were hired on the basis of their job applicant interviews and a fourth was selected as the preferred candidate for a position but could not accept because of the candidate's self-imposition of a geographical location restriction

The pattern of career transition

A multiple case study approach was used to investigate the pattern of experience in a career transition. The participants were five men and five women who had completed a career change. The participants were selected to represent a variety of occupations. The study produced ten rich, detailed narrative accounts of career transition. Each one is told from the perspective of the individual who went through the experience. The accounts were based on in depth descriptions of the experience, and a charting of the transition using terms drawn from relevant transition models. Each account was reviewed and validated by the case study participant, who was the subject of the narrative, and by an independent reviewer. A comparison of the individual accounts revealed a pattern of experience that was common to all ten cases of career transition. It can be best represented as a three phase process, with each phase involving a distinctive character and each subsequent phase building on the preceding one. Furthermore, in each case the career transition reflected a process that was cyclical rather than linear in nature. Several theoretical implications arise from this study. First, it supports those models that describe career transition as a three stage process. The common pattern bears a remarkable resemblance to the rites of passage process described by Van Gennep (1908/1960). Second, the accounts suggest that the meaning of one’s work can change over the course of one’s life and that a career change be considered a change in a person’s life path. Third, the accounts support rejecting the notion of career transition having to be a crisis or traumatic event. From a practical standpoint, the pattern of transition can serve as a guide for those who are going through a career transition and for those who counsel them.Education, Faculty ofEducational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department ofGraduat