Christopher E. Lalonde

Cultural Continuity as a Hedge against Suicide in Canada's First Nations:

This research report examines self-continuity and its role as a protective factor against suicide. First, we review the notions of personal and cultural continuity and their relevance to understanding suicide among First Nations youth. The central theoretical idea developed here is that, because it is constitutive of what it means to have or be a self to somehow count oneself as continuous in time, anyone whose identity is undermined by radical personal and cultural change is put at special risk of suicide for the reason that they lose those future commitments that are necessary to guarantee appropriate care and concern for their own well-being. It is for just such reasons that adolescents and young adults - who are living through moments of especially dramatic change - constitute such a high-risk group. This generalized period of increased risk during adolescence can be made even more acute within communities that lack a concomitant sense of cultural continuity which might otherwise support the efforts of young persons to develop more adequate self-continuity-warranting practices. We present data to demonstrate that, while certain indigenous or First Nations groups do in fact suffer dramatically elevated suicide rates, such rates vary widely across British Columbias nearly 200 aboriginal groups: some communities show rates 800 times the national average, while in others suicide is essentially unknown. Finally, we demonstrate that these variable incidence rates are strongly associated with the degree to which British Columbias 196 bands are engaged in community practices that are employed as markers of a collective effort to rehabilitate and vouchsafe the cultural continuity of these groups. Communities that have taken active steps to preserve and rehabilitate their own cultures are shown to be those in which youth suicide rates are dramatically lower.

False belief understanding goes to school: On the social-emotional consequences of coming early or late to a first theory of mind

Abstract This research report describes a search for possible relations between childrens developing theories of mind and aspects of their social-emotional maturity conducted by comparing the performance of 3-year-olds on measures of false belief understanding with teacher ratings of certain of their social-emotional skills and behaviours. The intuitions guiding this exploratory effort were, not only that a working grasp of the possibility of false belief would prove broadly predictive of social-emotional maturity, but also that such associations would be missing in the specific case of those preschool behaviours largely governed by a simple mastery of social conventions. As a step toward evaluating these possibilities a group of 40 preschoolers were given a battery of six measures of false belief understanding. The preschool teachers of these same children then completed a 40-item questionnaire covering a wide variety of markers of social-emotional maturity. Half of these items (termed “Intentional”) fe...

Children's understanding of interpretation

The prevailing view in the study of childrens developing theories of mind is that the 4-year-olds newfound understanding of false belief is the single developmental milestone marking entry into an adult “folk psychology.” We argue instead that there are at least two such watershed events. Children first develop a “copy theory” that equates the mind with a recording device capable of producing either faithful or flawed representations of reality and according to which mental states are determined entirely by the flow of information into the mind. Only later, in the early school years, do children come to appreciate, as do adults, that the mind itself can contribute to the content of mental states. This later-arriving “Interpretive Theory of Mind” allows an appreciation of the capacity for constructively interpreting and misinterpreting reality. The main finding from the six studies reported here is that children who otherwise demonstrate a clear understanding that beliefs can be false (and so deserve to be credited with a theory of mind), can nevertheless fail to appreciate even the most basic aspects of interpretation: that despite exposure to precisely the same information, two persons can still end up holding sharply different opinions about what is the self-same reality. What these studies reveal is that an interpretive theory of mind is different from, and later arriving than, an appreciation of the possibility of false belief, and contrary to competing claims, this interpretive theory actually makes its first appearance during, but not before, the early school years.

Cognitive Control in Children Stroop Interference and Suppression of Word Reading

The development of cognitive control and its relation to overcoming Stroop interference was assessed in a sample (N = 65) of elementary-school children. Subjects alternately performed Stroop color-naming trials and word-reading trials. In separate blocks, the colored Stroop items were non-color words (incongruent condition) or rows of asterisks (neutral condition). Younger children showed both larger Stroop interference in error rates and a greater slowing of word reading in the incongruent condition compared with older children. We conducted analyses of response time distributions that assessed the degree of word-reading suppression applied by younger and older children. Surprisingly, these analyses indicated that younger children engaged in stronger suppression than older children. We propose that greater Stroop interference among younger children is not due to lack of ability to suppress word reading, but instead is the result of a failure to consistently maintain the task set of color naming.

Cognitive influences on cross-language speech perception in infancy

Abstract Previous research has shown that young infants can discriminate both native and nonnative phonetic contrasts with ease. By 10 to 12 months of age, however, infants—like adults—typically have difficulty discriminating consonant contrasts that are not used to distinguish meaning in their native language. Although the timing of this change in speech perception has been firmly established, little is currently known about the processes or mechanisms involved in this selective and adaptive reorganization in nonnative phonetic discrimination. This study was designed to determine if there is a relation between age-related changes in speech perception performance and other developing cognitive abilities. A total of 40 8- to 10-month-old infants were tested on a nonnative consonant discrimination task and then on two additional tasks (a visual categorization task and an object search task) in an attempt to determine whether changes in nonnative consonant perception coincide with changes in these other areas of cognitive/perceptual functioning. The results indicate that changes in task performance occur in synchrony across all three tasks, and that this synchrony is not explained by simple age effects. These findings suggest that domain-general cognitive/perceptual competencies may influence developmental changes in speech perception by the end of the 1st year of life.

Children's Persistence With Methylphenidate Therapy: A Population-Based Study

Objective: To examine persistence with methylphenidate (MPH) therapy among children and youth in the general population. Method: We conducted a retrospective analysis of longitudinally organized, individual-specific anonymous data from linked prescription and health databases covering the population of British Columbia for 1990 through 1996. No prescriptions being filled for 4 months indicated cessation of one bout of therapy. Results: Among 16 945 identified MPH patients aged 19 years or under, overall duration of therapy was 584 days, and the average number of prescriptions received was 6.6. One-third of patients received 2 or fewer prescriptions, while 18% followed a chronic, continuous course. Among patients receiving more than 2 prescriptions, 50% of discrete therapy bouts lasted 4 months or less, and one-third of cases had multiple bouts of therapy (range 2 to 6 bouts). Younger age (that is, children aged 0 to 8 years, vs those aged 10 to 19 years), male sex, and receipt of initial prescription from a psychiatrist were associated with greater persistence. Conclusions: Enormous variability in persistence with MPH therapy and often-occurring low rates of persistence raises questions about the diligence with which MPH patients are selected, prepared, and followed in the general population. Special attention to the needs of older children and to the needs of girls is required, and discontinuities during childrens therapy courses require explication.

The Problem of Self-Continuity in the Context of Rapid Personal and Cultural Change

This chapter will begin by focusing attention upon the under examined problem of just how it is that persons of different ages and life circumstances differently undertake to “conserve” or otherwise vouchsafe their own persistent and continuous identity in the face of evident personal change, and end by reporting upon an ongoing program of research meant to bring out the serious—even life threatening—consequences of failing to repeatedly negotiate ways in which to count successive editions of one’s self as “numerically identical” instances of one and the same person. More specifically, we mean not only to write in some detail about those age graded difficulties commonly experienced by young persons as they go about the routine business of trying to make sense of their own personal persistence in time, but also to lay out a series of research findings meant to show that an understanding of such self-continuity issues may prove essential to our own theoretical efforts to explain a variety of important social problems, including the alarmingly high rates of suicidal behaviors especially evident among young persons whose family or cultural life is also undergoing radical change.

Body Image Perceptions: Do Gender Differences Exist?

Despite the large volume of research on body image, few studies have directly compared body image perceptions of men and women. Do men and women experience body image dissatisfaction in the same ways? Do similar factors predict negative body image perceptions in men and women? Is body image dissatisfaction associated with the same consequences regardless of gender? This study investigated these questions. One hundred ninety-seven undergraduate students completed an online survey that assessed their body image experiences and self-perceptions (i.e., body esteem, body mass index, self-esteem, sociocultural and situational factors, and body image perceptions in sexual contexts). Data analysis compared the responses of male and female participants. Several gender differences were found; body dissatisfaction was more common and felt more strongly in women, yet men were also clearly affected by body dissatisfaction.

Developing Clinically Suitable Measures of Social Cognition for Children: Initial Findings from a Normative Sample

Our understanding of childrens social competence has increased tremendously over the past two decades. There is increasing evidence to suggest that social–cognitive impairments are not restricted to children on the autistic spectrum, but rather may be associated with a host of developmental and acquired neurological conditions including learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder, traumatic brain injury, and stroke. Although many investigators have begun to bridge the gap between clinical practice and research by applying experimental tasks to clinical populations, few tools are available for the clinical evaluation of social competence, particularly in children. This study marks a series of first steps in the development of measures suitable for the assessment of children between 6 and 12 years of age. The results of the study provide data for a number of experimental tasks that have been adapted with clinical practice in mind. A discussion of the developmental progressions and the relationships among the measures is also included.

Injury hospitalizations due to unintentional falls among the Aboriginal population of British Columbia, Canada: incidence, changes over time, and ecological analysis of risk markers, 1991-2010

Background Aboriginal people in British Columbia (BC) have higher injury incidence than the general population. Our project describes variability among injury categories, time periods, and geographic, demographic and socio-economic groups. This report focuses on unintentional falls. Methods We used BC’s universal health care insurance plan as a population registry, linked to hospital separation and vital statistics databases. We identified Aboriginal people by insurance premium group and birth and death record notations. We identified residents of specific Aboriginal communities by postal code. We calculated crude incidence and Standardized Relative Risk (SRR) of hospitalization for unintentional fall injury, standardized for age, gender and Health Service Delivery Area (HSDA), relative to the total population of BC. We tested hypothesized associations of geographic, socio-economic, and employment-related characteristics with community SRR of injury by linear regression. Results During 1991 through 2010, the crude rate of hospitalization for unintentional fall injury in BC was 33.6 per 10,000 person-years. The Aboriginal rate was 49.9 per 10,000 and SRR was 1.89 (95% confidence interval 1.85-1.94). Among those living on reserves SRR was 2.00 (95% CI 1.93-2.07). Northern and non-urban HSDAs had higher SRRs, within both total and Aboriginal populations. In every age and gender category, the HSDA-standardized SRR was higher among the Aboriginal than among the total population. Between 1991 and 2010, crude rates and SRRs declined substantially, but proportionally more among the Aboriginal population, so the gap between the Aboriginal and total population is narrowing, particularly among females and older adults. These community characteristics were associated with higher risk: lower income, lower educational level, worse housing conditions, and more hazardous types of employment. Conclusions Over the years, as socio-economic conditions improve, risk of hospitalization due to unintentional fall injury has declined among the Aboriginal population. Women and older adults have benefited more.