Psychology Commons^™

Parenting Stress In Families With Children With Disabilities, Timothy B. Smith, Matthew N. I. Oliver, Mark S. Innocenti

Faculty Publications

Parenting stress is an important variable to consider in families with children with disabilities. This study evaluated 880 such families, using measures of child and family functioning. Results suggest that factors such as income, time available for interaction with the child, and social support predict parenting stress much better than do aspects of child functioning.

Language Acquisition In Children With Autism, Tina Taylor

Faculty Publications

By definition, children with autism have deficits in communication. Often, when parents notice that something is "different" about their child, it is that he does not acquire language at the same rate as his peers, that the child uses what language he has in an idiosyncratic fashion (e.g., repeating phrases from videos, using pronouns incorrectly), or that the child appears to understand only that language which might be reinforcing to him (e.g., not responding to "Look at Mommy," but responding to "Do you want a cookie?)" When these "red flags" are apparent, parents should beware of misguided advice such as …

Lexical Failure And Gesture In Second Language Development, Gale Stam

Faculty Publications

Second language acquisition can be defined as the acquisition of another language after the age of three or four (Klein, 1986). It involves the learning and mastery of the morphology, syntax, phonology, and lexicon of the new language. The process by which learners acquire a second language is complex, gradual, nonlinear, and dynamic (Larsen- Freeman, 1991). Depending on their stage of second language development, learners may have difficulty retrieving words, or they may not know words at all and exhibit lexical failure.

Butterworth and Hadar (1989, 1997) have proposed that iconic gestures arise when speakers have a lexical retrieval problem …

Granting Forgiveness Or Harboring Grudges: Implications For Emotion, Physiology, And Health, Charlotte Vanoyen-Witvliet, Thomas Ludwig, Kelly L. Vander Laan

Faculty Publications

Interpersonal offenses frequently mar relationships. Theorists have argued that the responses victims adopt toward their offenders have ramifications not only for their cognition, but also for their emotion, physiology, and health. This study examined the immediate emotional and physiological effects that occurred when participants (35 females, 36 males) rehearsed hurtful memories and nursed grudges (i.e., were unforgiving) compared with when they cultivated empathic perspective taking and imagined granting forgiveness (i.e., were forgiving) toward real-life offenders. Unforgiving thoughts prompted more aversive emotion, and significantly higher corrugator (brow) electromyogram (EMG), skin conductance, heart rate, and blood pressure changes from baseline. The EMG, …