Elyse Brauch Lehman

The Social and Emotional Adjustment of Young, Intellectually Gifted Children.

Since Terman’s longitudinal investigation of gifted children, there have been numerous additional studies comparing the gifted with their average IQ peers on intellectual, academic, and achievement criteria (e.g., Flanagan & Cooley, 1966; Gallagher & Crowder, 1957; Klausmeier & Check, 1962; Klausmeier & Loughlin, 1961; Terman, Baldwin, & Bronson, 1925). Much less attention has been paid to how the intellectually-gifted child may compare to his/her chronological or mental age mates on social and emotional adjustment characteristics. This is in spite of the fact that several early theorists (Jung, 1954; Lombroso, 1891) suggested that the gifted may be predisposed to emotional instability. More recent studies have unanimously rejected this assumption ~nd consistently find no evidence of greater emotional disturbance in gifted populations (Kennedy, 1962; Ramaseshan, 1957, Warren & Heist, 1960; Wrenn, Ferguson, & Kennedy, 1962). These studies as well as others (Haier & Denham, 1976; Lucito, 1964; Milgram & Milgram, 1976) have, in fact, found gifted students scoring higher than their average IQ peers on such traits as self-sufficiency, dominance, independence, originality, nonconformity, positive self-concept, and internal locus of control. Most of this research, however, has been done with high school or college-aged students and has used same-aged peers or normative data as the comparison group. Only one study thus far has attempted to compare younger gifted children with an older population as well as their chronological age mates. Lessinger and Martinson (1961) found a group of gifted eighth graders to be much more similar in their responses on the California Psychological Inventory to both a group of gifted high school students and the general adult population than they were to their same-aged peers. The present study attempted to focus on the emotional and social development of the younger gifted child. Since gifted children have frequently been found to function intellectually and academically several years ahead of their chronological peers, it might be hypothesized that in the emotional and social spheres of their lives they will also be more similar to their mental age mates. This hypothesis .

Forgetting rates in modality memory for young, mid-life, and older women.

A mixed-modality (visual and auditory) continuous recognition task, followed immediately by a final recognition test, was administered to young (18-23 years), mid-life (38-50 years), and older (60-74 years) women. Subjects gave recognition responses for both the words and their presentation modality. Although older adults remembered less information about input mode than did the two younger groups, the age decrement was not the result of faster forgetting of such information by the elderly. When a ceiling effect at the initial lag was taken into account, forgetting rates for both words and input mode were comparable across the adult life span.

Memory for modality: Evidence for an automatic process

Three experiments were conducted to explore the “automatic” encoding of information about presentation modality and the use of such information during word retrieval. Children (Grades 2, 3, and 6) and adults (college students) were asked to attend to a mixed-modality (auditory and visual) list of nouns, then to recall the target words, and finally to identify the presentation modality of each word on a recognition list. Instructions (incidental vs. intentional), list length, and list organization (unrelated words vs. words from taxonomic categories) were varied across the experiments. Although these manipulations affected the recall of target words, they did not change the amount of modality information retained, which was clearly above chance in all three experiments. As predicted by the Hasher and Zacks (1979) model for automatic processing, there were no developmental changes on memory for modality, instructions to remember modality information had no effect on modality identification, and a tradeoff between word recall and modality identification rarely occurred.

Predictors of Compliance in Toddlers: Child Temperament, Maternal Personality, and Emotional Availability. Portions of the research were presented at the Conference on Human Development, Mobile, AL, March 6, 1998

Fifty-one mother-toddler (15 to 31 months) dyads participated in a study on the predictors of compliance. Mothers completed two questionnaires: the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (Tellegen, 1982), a measure of maternal personality, and the Toddler Behavior Assessment Questionnaire (Goldsmith, 1987), a measure of child temperament. A free play period in the laboratory provided the observations for scoring the quality of the mother-toddler interactions with the Emotional Availability Scales (Biringen, Robinson, and Emde, 1993). The following clean-up task in which children were asked to help put the toys in the basket provided the observations for scoring compliance with maternal directives. Emotional availability was the strongest predictor of compliance, especially the maternal variables of sensitivity and structuring. Child temperament was also implicated, with high compliance toddlers perceived by their mothers to be less socially fearful and less prone to anger than their less compliant peers. The results are discussed in terms of the contribution of the mother-child emotional climate to the development of compliance.

A national study on the development of visual attention using the cognitive assessment system.

Objective: Developmental changes in the performance of children and adolescents are studied using the Cognitive Assessment System (CAS) which is an individually administered test of 4 basic cognitive processes. Method: The test measures the Planning, Attention, Simultaneous, and Successive (PASS) processes as a theory of intelligence that can provide the framework for an alternative to traditional IQ tests. The CAS, which includes a scale of attention comprising 3 subtests, each of which is presented visually, provides an opportunity to study the development of visual attention for 2,200 children and adolescents aged 5- to 17-years-old who participated in the national standardization sample. A subsample ( n = 1,395) is also administered the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Achievement — Revised (WJ-R). Results: On all 3 CAS attention subtests, the mean scores improve with age, and the rate of change between adjacent age groups is moderate-to-large up to 15-years-old. At all ages the CAS Attention standard score is moderately related to WJ-R Achievement Cluster scores. Conclusion: The results are discussed in light of conclusions about the development of attention based on the standardization sample of the NEPSY—A Developmental Neuropsychological Assessment. (J. of Att. Dis. 2010; 14(1) 15-24)

Development of Intentional Forgetting in Children

The experience of deliberately trying to forget information, such as an old phone number when we move, is a common one in everyday life. Although the phenomenon has been extensively studied in adults, only a handful of studies have looked at intentional forgetting in children. This early work suggests that children begin to gain control over their forgetting in the elementary school years. However, partly because of the relatively complicated tasks used in these studies, many questions remain unanswered. How early in the school years, for example, can children make use of a forget instruction? By what mechanisms do children intentionally forget?

Item-cued directed forgetting of related words and pictures in children and adults: selective rehearsal versus cognitive inhibition.

Abstract The main purpose of this study was to compare the relative importance of selective rehearsal and cognitive inhibition in accounting for developmental changes in the directed-forgetting paradigm developed by R. A. Bjork (1972). In two experiments, children in Grades 2 and 5 and college students were asked to remember some words or pictures and to forget others when items were categorically related. Their memory for both items and the associated remember or forget cues was then tested with recall and recognition. Fifth graders recognized more of the forget-cued words than college students did. The pattern of results suggested that age differences in rehearsal and source monitoring (i.e., remembering whether a word had been cued remember or forget) were better explanatory mechanisms for childrens forgetting inefficiencies than retrieval inhibition was. The results are discussed in terms of a multiple process view of inhibition.

Long-term retention of information about presentation modality by children and adults

A mixed-modality continuous recognition task followed by a final recognition test after 0 h, 4 h, 1 day, or 7 days was administered to third- and fourth-grade children and adults. Subjects gave recognition responses and reported presentation modalities. Forgetting rates for both words and input mode were invariant with age. The decay functions for presentation modality were affected, however, by the initial input mode, with modality identification declining more rapidly for words heard first than for words seen first. Information about whether a word was seen or heard remained in memory for at least 4 h. The results demonstrate that long-term-memory representations contain a great deal of information about input mode and suggest that the theoretical distinction between automatic and effortful processing may be a useful one.

Auditory and Visual Continuous Performance Tests Relationships With Age, Gender, Cognitive Functioning, and Classroom Behavior

Elementary school children in three grade groups (Grades K/1, 3, and 5/6) completed either the auditory or the visual 1/9 vigilance task from the Gordon Diagnostic System (GDS) as well as subtests from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children–Third Edition and auditory or visual processing subtests from the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Cognitive Ability–Revised (WJ-R). Teachers rated the childrens classroom attentional and self-control behaviors on the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) and the Self-Control Observation Scale (SCOS). Although performance on both auditory and visual continuous performance tests (CPTs) improved with age, gender effects were small and limited to the visual CPT. Neither auditory nor visual CPT scores were related to IQ scores. However, auditory CPT scores were related to classroom behaviors as reported by teachers whereas visual CPT scores were related to visual processing.

Directed forgetting of related words: Evidence for the inefficient inhibition hypothesis

Abstract Fifth-grade children and college students were asked to remember some words and to forget others in an item-cued-directed-forgetting task. Taxonomically related pairs of words and control pairs that were unrelated in meaning were used as stimuli. Children found it more difficult than did adults to ignore forget-cued words that followed asso-ciatively related words that were remember-cued. The results provide support for D. F. Bjorklund and K. K. Harnishfegers (1990) inefficient inhibition hypothesis (i.e., that the efficiency of inhibitory mechanisms improves as children develop). The results also suggest that the inhibition is occurring primarily in the early stages of processing.