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Experiential Factors (experiential + factor)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Psychology75%

Selected Abstracts

Community service or activism as an identity project for youth

JOURNAL OF COMMUNITY PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 6 2007
Niki Harré
This article reviews the literature on community service and activism, particularly in youth, using the theoretical approach provided by an identity projects framework. This framework allows for an examination of the contextual and experiential factors that contribute to the emergence and maintenance of an identity project of service or activism. The contributors to project emergence may include: favourable social structures, collective crises, biographical availability, parental modelling, experiencing or witnessing injustice or suffering, inspiring stories, altruistic personality, religious values, and organisational affiliations. For many participants, these projects appear associated with intense experiences of belonging, stimulation, efficacy, and integrity. These experiences may be of great importance in reinforcing and expanding service or activism. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Comm Psychol 35: 711,724, 2007. [source]

Habits of the heart: Life history and the developmental neuroendocrinology of emotion

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF HUMAN BIOLOGY, Issue 6 2009
Carol M. Worthman
The centrality of emotion in cognition and social intelligence as well as its impact on health has intensified investigation into the causes and consequences of individual variation in emotion regulation. Central processing of experience directly informs regulation of endocrine axes, essentially forming a neuro-endocrine continuum integrating information intake, processing, and physiological and behavioral response. Two major elements of life history,resource allocation and niche partitioning,are served by linking cognitive-affective with physiologic and behavioral processes. Scarce cognitive resources (attention, memory, and time) are allocated under guidance from affective co-processing. Affective-cognitive processing, in turn, regulates physiologic activity through neuro-endocrine outflow and thereby orchestrates energetic resource allocation and trade-offs, both acutely and through time. Reciprocally, peripheral activity (e.g., immunologic, metabolic, or energetic markers) influences affective-cognitive processing. By guiding attention, memory, and behavior, affective-cognitive processing also informs individual stances toward, patterns of activity in, and relationships with the world. As such, it mediates processes of niche partitioning that adaptively exploit social and material resources. Developmental behavioral neurobiology has identified multiple factors that influence the ontogeny of emotion regulation to form affective and behavioral styles. Evidence is reviewed documenting roles for genetic, epigenetic, and experiential factors in the development of emotion regulation, social cognition, and behavior with important implications for understanding mechanisms that underlie life history construction and the sources of differential health. Overall, this dynamic arena for research promises to link the biological bases of life history theory with the psychobehavioral phenomena that figure so centrally in quotidian experience and adaptation, particularly, for humans. Am. J. Hum. Biol. 2009. © 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source]

Specific reading disability (dyslexia): what have we learned in the past four decades?

THE JOURNAL OF CHILD PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHIATRY AND ALLIED DISCIPLINES, Issue 1 2004
Frank R. Vellutino
We summarize some of the most important findings from research evaluating the hypothesized causes of specific reading disability (,dyslexia') over the past four decades. After outlining components of reading ability, we discuss manifest causes of reading difficulties, in terms of deficiencies in component reading skills that might lead to such difficulties. The evidence suggests that inadequate facility in word identification due, in most cases, to more basic deficits in alphabetic coding is the basic cause of difficulties in learning to read. We next discuss hypothesized deficiencies in reading-related cognitive abilities as underlying causes of deficiencies in component reading skills. The evidence in these areas suggests that, in most cases, phonological skills deficiencies associated with phonological coding deficits are the probable causes of the disorder rather than visual, semantic, or syntactic deficits, although reading difficulties in some children may be associated with general language deficits. Hypothesized deficits in general learning abilities (e.g., attention, association learning, cross-modal transfer etc.) and low-level sensory deficits have weak validity as causal factors in specific reading disability. These inferences are, by and large, supported by research evaluating the biological foundations of dyslexia. Finally, evidence is presented in support of the idea that many poor readers are impaired because of inadequate instruction or other experiential factors. This does not mean that biological factors are not relevant, because the brain and environment interact to produce the neural networks that support reading acquisition. We conclude with a discussion of the clinical implications of the research findings, focusing on the need for enhanced instruction. [source]

Probing Predispositions: The Pragmatism of a Process Perspective

CHILD DEVELOPMENT PERSPECTIVES, Issue 2 2009
David S. Moore
Abstract, As J. P. Spencer et al. (2009) argue, the theories of some developmental psychologists continue to be nativistic, even though nativism is an inherently nondevelopmental school of thought. Psychologists interested in development study the emergence of human characteristics,including predispositions,and are not content to simply catalogue competences that characterize human newborns; instead, they recognize that all human characteristics, including those present at birth, reflect the circumstances of development. A truly developmental science of behavior requires rejecting the nativism,empiricism debate outright, abandoning ideas such as "core knowledge" and psychological "endowments," and adopting a process perspective that focuses on how traits emerge from the co-actions of biological and experiential factors. Unlike nativism, the process perspective advocated by J. P. Spencer et al. encourages research that can reveal the developmental origins of psychological characteristics of interest. [source]