The study of adaptive expertise in health professions education has focused almost exclusively on cognitive skills, largely ignoring the processes of adaptation in the performance of precision technical skills. We present a focused review of literature to argue that repetitive practice is much less repetitive than often perceived. Our main thesis…

There exists now a body of research that describes case studies of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who have engaged, or are alleged to have engaged, in a range of illegal behaviours, and that attempts to estimate the prevalence of ASD at different stages of the criminal justice process. Taken together, this research does suggest…

Although adolescents' sexual health is generally better when parents and adolescents communicate about sex and sexuality, researchers have found parents can be reluctant to engage adolescents in conversations about those topics. To better understand why, we reviewed prior literature and identified four types of parent-based barriers to…

Background: Adaptation is key to survival. An organism must adapt to environmental challenges in order to be able to thrive in the environment in which they find themselves. Resilience can be thought of as a measure of the ability of an organism to adapt, and to withstand challenges to its stability. In higher animals, the brain is a key player in…

We are facing rapid changes in the global climate, and these changes are attributable to human behavior. Humans produce this global impact through our use of natural resources, multiplied by the vast increase in population seen in the past 50 to 100 years. Our goal in this article is to examine the underlying psychosocial causes of human impact,…

Ideally, the unit of analysis in psychology is the individual. However, many psychological methods do not cope well, either at the level of construct definition or at the level of measurement, with individuality in behavior. There is little leeway for constructs to be both idiosyncratically tailored to the individual, and still identified as…

The developmental origins of respect and disrespect among American children are seen in early childhood and in the transition to the school years. This chapter presents the first published research to focus on the development of both respect and disrespect as distinct concepts. The findings are examined in the context of both sociocultural and…

Noting that there is growing interest in systematic, ethnographic studies of mass media and their primary audiences (families), this paper seeks to encourage additional ethnographic study of audience behavior by discussing some theoretical concerns that bear on the qualitative research enterprise. To do this, the paper first introduces a variety…

It is argued that intelligent behavior cannot be understood without reference to inhibitory processes. A review of research findings suggests that resistance to interference and the capacity for inhibition are important sources of individual differences, associated with the operation of the frontal lobes of the brain. (SLD)

Studying normal infant development is a challenge for cognitive scientists in general and for neuroscientists in particular because: (1) physiological indices of infant cognition are generally noisy and technically difficult to obtain; and (2) interindividual variability and a paucity of established results make data interpretation very complex,…

Research findings and theories regarding adolescent contraceptive use are reviewed to propose an alternative framework relying on social learning theory. Environmental context, cognitive influences, and behavior execution constraints are suggested as the foundation for contraceptive behaviors. The behavioral skills teenagers need to use birth…

Research reveals striking differences in college classroom participation patterns across gender, race, and ethnicity. Trained faculty can change these patterns. An American University experimental equity training program illustrated that trained faculty (n=23) were 38 percent more interactive than the control group, giving more precise feedback to…

Reviews research on norms of behavior toward male and female students that newly certified teachers bring to their classrooms, and explores ways teacher educators can provide alternatives to gender bias. There are no simple strategies for preservice teachers to learn, but research can help teacher educators work toward gender fairness. (SLD)

The Personal Profile System (PPS) is a psychological testing instrument that has been widely used. The construct validity of the PPS was studied through a review of the literature. This paper organizes the literature review into three broad categories: the background of the PPS; the reliability of the PPS; and the validity of the PPS. The PPS is a…

This report is an overview of recent research on the effects of class size on the academic performance and behavior of students at risk. In several ways it is not a conventional literature review. It emphasizes one recent large-scale investigation, Tennessee's Project STAR (Student-Teacher-Achievement-Ratio), begun in 1985. It is more evaluative…