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The purpose of the present study was to compare the parenting attitudes of AfricanAmerican, European American (native to the United States), Asian American, Asian-Indian, and Hispanic mothers (immigrant population who were not natives of the United States). Research has indicated that parents develop their parenting styles based on their cultural socialization, family background, personality style, and personality of their children (Belsky, 1984). One hundred and eighty two mothers participated in the study. The parenting attitudes of the mothers were measured using the Adolescent-Adult Parenting Inventory (AAPI, Bavolek, 1984), a 32 item assessment. I way ANOVA performed on each of the 4 subscale scores of the parenting attitudes indicated that the five cultural groups differed in their parental attitudes. Post-hoc Tukey tests for ethnic group differences in the parental attitude subscale scores yielded significant results for 16 of the 40 pairwise comparisons. These results suggest that some groups of ethnic mothers place stricter expectations, demands and control on their children.

Apoptotic-cell clearance is dependent on several macrophage surface molecules, including CD14. Phosphatidylserine (PS) becomes externalised during apoptosis and participates in the clearance process through its ability to bind to a novel receptor, PS-R. CD14 has the proven ability to bind phospholipids and may function as an alternative receptor for the externalised PS of apoptotic cells. Here we demonstrate that CD14 does not function preferentially as a PS receptor in apoptotic-cell clearance. Compared with phosphatidylcholine and phosphatidylethanolamine, PS was the least active phospholipid binding to human monocyte-derived macrophages and showed no specificity for soluble or membraneanchored CD14. Significantly, PS-containing liposomes failed to inhibit CD14-dependent uptake of apoptotic cells by macrophages. PS exposure was, however, found to be insufficient for either CD14-dependent or CD14-independent apoptotic-cell uptake by phagocytes. The additional features that enable apoptotic-cell clearance are derived from mechanisms that can be divorced temporally from those responsible for the morphological features of apoptosis.

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This study examined preschool children's abilities to maintain the use of a newly learned organizational study-recall strategy in tasks administered immediately after training and 3 and 7 days after training. Thirty-six 4-and 5-year-olds were assigned to training and control conditions after performing study-recall tasks in a baseline session. Training included demonstration and practice in using the strategy, encouragement to apply the strategy in new tasks, a rationale for strategy use, feedback about strategy effectiveness, and incentive for effortful performance. Subjects in training groups showed marked increases in study-sorting, group-naming, and category self-cuing activities in posttraining tasks. The majority of the training subjects were able to remember and sequentially perform at least 3 of the 4 instructed strategy activities in the immediate and 3-day posttraining sessions. Training also served to improve recall, but recall improvements were modest relative to posttraining gains in study-strategy activities.Previous findings that children failed to apply mature rehearsal and organization strategies after using them successfully in an instructed or cued-recall condition (e.g., Bjorklund, Ornstein, & Haig, 1977;Keeney, Cannizzo, & Flavell, 1967;Lange, 1973) suggested that younger age groups of children may be unable to transfer their learning of mature mnemonic strategies and unable to benefit from strategy instruction (for reviews and discussion, see Belmont, Butterfield, & Ferretti, 1982;Borkowski, 1983;Brown, Bransford, Ferrara, & Campione, 1983). These findings were consistent with more general theoretical views that young children are preoperational and nonstrategic and lack the logical/causal reasoning skills that enable flexible applications of knowledge and skills across tasks and stimulus domains (cf. Brown et al., 1983).Recently, it has been argued that children's strategy-transfer failures do not reflect an inherent inability to transfer cognitive skills, but rather are due to the use of deficient instructional procedures that lack the metacognitive and motivational elements necessary to promote strategy use in younger samples, that is, what Borkowski, Carr, and Pressley (1987) have termed an instructional deficiency. This view is supported by findings that children benefit from cognitive-strategy training (e.g, Bjorklund & Harnishfeger, 1987;Rabinowitz, 1984) and that under some instructional conditions, normally achieving elementary-age school children maintain the use of mature memory strategies and metacognitive skills after training (e.g., Carr, We wish to express our sincerest thanks to the children, parents, and teachers of the Child Care Education Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro for their assistance and participation in the study; to Peter Ornstein and lab-mates Brian Cox, Trisha Folds, Marianna Footo, Diana Larus, and Bob Nida for their helpful suggestions for the design and procedures of the study; and to Rob Guttentag and Fred Morrison for their helpful...

Background Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is associated with hyper- and/or hypo-sensitivity to sensory input. Spontaneous alpha power, which plays an important role in shaping responsivity to sensory information, is reduced across the lifespan in individuals with ASD. Furthermore, an excitatory/inhibitory imbalance has also been linked to sensory dysfunction in ASD and has been hypothesized to underlie atypical patterns of spontaneous brain activity. The present study examined whether resting-state alpha power differed in children with ASD as compared to TD children, and investigated the relationships between alpha levels, concentrations of excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters, and atypical sensory processing in ASD. Methods Participants included thirty-one children and adolescents with ASD and thirty-one age- and IQ-matched typically developing (TD) participants. Resting-state electroencephalography (EEG) was used to obtain measures of alpha power. A subset of participants (ASD = 16; TD = 16) also completed a magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) protocol in order to measure concentrations of excitatory (glutamate + glutamine; Glx) and inhibitory (GABA) neurotransmitters. Results Children with ASD evidenced significantly decreased resting alpha power compared to their TD peers. MRS estimates of GABA and Glx did not differ between groups with the exception of Glx in the temporal-parietal junction. Inter-individual differences in alpha power within the ASD group were not associated with region-specific concentrations of GABA or Glx, nor were they associated with sensory processing differences. However, atypically decreased Glx was associated with increased sensory impairment in children with ASD. Conclusions Although we replicated prior reports of decreased alpha power in ASD, atypically reduced alpha was not related to neurochemical differences or sensory symptoms in ASD. Instead, reduced Glx in the temporal-parietal cortex was associated with greater hyper-sensitivity in ASD. Together, these findings may provide insight into the neural underpinnings of sensory processing differences present in ASD.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between family functioning and parenting styles. Data were collected in 1996 from 151 mothers of first‐ or third‐grade children using established self‐report assessments. Based on the findings, the researchers concluded that balanced family types were positively related to authoritative parenting and negatively related to authoritarian parenting.

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