Normative Development Research Articles

Addressing the Need for Better Measures of Positive Health.

Addressing the Need for Better Measures of Positive Health.

Sensory Features of Young Children From a Large Community Sample: Latent Factor Structures of the Sensory Experiences Questionnaire (Version 2.1, Short Form).

Although three sensory factors (hyperresponsiveness [HYPO]; hyporesponsiveness [HYPER]; and sensory interests, repetitions, and seeking behaviors [SIRS]) have been demonstrated among a wide age range of clinical populations, they have not been well validated in the general population, especially with a large community sample of young children. To validate the factor structure of the Sensory Experiences Questionnaire (Version 2.1, Short Form; SEQv2.1) in a community sample and to confirm the factor structure's existence in this sample. Caregivers completed the SEQv2.1, a parent-reported questionnaire designed to capture children's everyday sensory experiences. The latent factors of the SEQv2.1 were examined using confirmatory factor analysis. North Carolina. Caregivers of 2,195 children age 3 yr were initially recruited through state birth records and were eligible to participate if the child did not have a history of serious medical problems and English was the family's primary language. SEQv2.1. The SEQv2.1 showed validity in the community sample. Similar to previous research with clinical populations, the three broad patterns of sensory responsiveness were also confirmed in this large community sample of young children, but associations among the factors differed. Validation of the three-sensory-factor structure in the general population suggests that these constructs are similar to those found with samples of participants with autism spectrum disorder and developmental disabilities. This finding underscores the importance of understanding the normative development of sensory features across a wider age range to better delineate qualitative differences underlying sensory features between clinical and general populations. What This Article Adds: Occupational therapists seeking to assess children's sensory features can use the SEQv2.1 not only with clinical samples but also with children in the general population.

Binocular coordination of children with dyslexia and typically developing children in linguistic and non-linguistic tasks: evidence from eye movements.

Given the increased evidence suggesting the presence of binocular coordination deficits in dyslexia, investigations of binocular eye movements are beneficial to clarify the underlying causes of reading difficulties. This systematic review aims to (a) synthesize the literature through the examination of binocular coordination in children with dyslexia by describing the normative development of stable binocular control and (b) outline future directions. Boolean expressions in the PubMed search were used to define papers. Following a literature search and selection process, 25 papers were included. Studies using binocular eye tracking during linguistic and nonlinguistic tasks in children with dyslexia and typical development 5-17years of age are reviewed. The studies reviewed provided consistent evidence of poor binocular coordination in children with dyslexia, but the results associated with different task characteristics were less consistent. The relation between binocular coordination deficits and reading difficulties needs to be further elucidated in longitudinal studies which may provide future treatments targeting the binocular viewing system in dyslexia.

Failing Forward

Abstract Despite the pandemic’s widespread and transnational impact on human rights, both solidarity and human rights have been side-lined in key intergovernmental discussions on global health law reform to date, while conversations about the development of international human rights law seldom consider global health law’s import to the field. This article argues that in spite of states’ apparent reluctance to reconcile and harmonise global health law and international human rights law for fairer and more effective public health emergency preparedness and response, international law experts and practitioners are well-placed to indirectly influence normative development in this direction, drawing on their past successes in clarifying and elaborating upon informal international legal standards. Merging strengths from existing legal frameworks of global health law and international human rights law, such expert standard setting efforts can help reimagine a “progressively harmonised” framework of legal regimes for public health emergency preparedness and response.

Formation of Cognitive Interests of Children with Special Educational Needs Through Eidetics

The article emphasizes that Eidetic is one of the effective methods of forming the cognitive interests of preschool children with special educational needs (SEN). Eidetic methods include chain, acroverbal, pictographic, phonetic associations, the method of loci (based on visual associations), nonverbal associations, paradoxical verbal transformations, enlarged structuring of educational material. Their use helps to transform incomprehensible information into an achievable and understandable form to them. Due to Eidetic, various analyzers are involved in cognitive activity at the same time. The child can see and hear and touch, smell, and even taste. At the same time, children's mastery of new knowledge is based on already well-known images, so Eidetic creates a boundless play space in which children's imagination has a wide field for development. The authors note that a characteristic feature of the cognitive interest of preschool children is a selective focus on interest in phenomena, objects, and environmental processes. For students with special educational needs the subject of cognitive interest, as well as for their peers with normative development, is not the whole environment, but only some of its elements, which are personally relevant, attractive, and valuable. The cognitive interest of preschoolers can be both situational and sustainable. It occurs in the process of performing a certain action but may disappear immediately after its completion. At the same time, with systematic pedagogical support, it can become a relatively stable personal quality of a child with special educational needs.An important positive aspect of the use of Eidetic in working with preschool children with SEN is that it creates a psychological situation of success, activates the neurodynamics of brain activity. As a result, the problem areas of the central nervous system and children's deviant behavior are corrected. Eidetic performs a dual developmental and educational function. Due to its application, such mental processes of personality as attention, imagination, memory, different types of thinking are developed, and thus the mastery of educational material is activated. Thanks to the methods of Eidetic, all the child's analyzers are involved, which allows him/her to see, hear, touch, smell, taste, and perceive something new and unknown through the channels of learning about the surrounding reality available to the child with SEN.

AI ethical biases: normative and information systems development conceptual framework

ABSTRACT Alongside the revolutionary benefits of AI, it can cause numerous problems across the system development process. AI ecosytem players have recently started to interrogate the ethical biases implicit in AI-enabled applications and agents. The contestable nature of ethics and the complexity of AI-enabled applications has led to incoherent literature around AI ethical biases. The numerous conceptions of AI ethics and a multiplicity of ethical biases has compounded matters for researchers, practitioners, and policy makers. The current study proposes a conceptual framework to organize AI ethical biases. A narrative literature review was conducted to identify and group the biases into data biases, method biases and implementation biases. The CRISP-DM framework was used to classify the ethical biases. The emerging conceptual framework has four clusters that represents: System development phases, scope of ethical bias, exemplars, and possible solutions. The study extends the existing AI ethical frameworks and provides a unified communication artefact for practitioners.

Beyond chaos and rigidity, flexstability

Chaos and rigidity are often used to describe problematic psychological states. If they are to be avoided, how does one conceive of a normative alternative? A midway compromise between chaos and rigidity seems unsatisfactory. This paper proposes that underlying chaos and rigidity are two dimensions of healthy human experience, those of stability (focus, routine, unity) and flexibility (exploration, novelty, diversity). Their union is possible, the optimal state of “flexstability”, a state in which individuals experience flexibility and stability simultaneously. Chaos can be now understood as flexibility without stability, and rigidity as stability without flexibility. These concepts may be arranged in a two-by-two “flexstability matrix” that suggests that normative psychological development navigates the extremes of chaos and rigidity and pursues the state of flexstability. The concepts of the matrix are applied to seven research areas in psychology: parenting styles, identity formation, development of mind, flow, creativity, emotional regulation and self-determination.

Psychometric Qualities of the Educational Identity Processes Scale (EIPS).

In the educational domain, the development of identity becomes especially salient during school transition phases. To assess the specific identity processes that match the adolescents' experiences before and after the school transition, the Educational Identity Processes Scale (EIPS) was developed. The present study aimed to test the psychometric qualities of the EIPS by examining its factor structure, the internal and convergent validity of the identity dimensions, and whether the questionnaire was measurement invariant over time. The pre-transition version was tested in a Dutch sample (N = 242 early adolescents) and the post-transition version was tested in a Lithuanian sample (N = 1,268 mid-adolescents). Findings indicated good psychometric qualities for both the pre- and post-transition versions of the EIPS. Additionally, context dependencies were observed, as distance to the transition influenced the meaning of specific identity processes and determined whether specific processes could be considered as part of normative development.

Mean-level correspondence and moment-to-moment synchrony in adolescent and parent affect: Exploring associations with adolescent age and internalizing and externalizing symptoms.

Interactions with parents are integral in shaping the development of children's emotional processes. Important aspects of these interactions are overall (mean level) affective experience and affective synchrony (linkages between parent and child affect across time). Respectively, mean-level affect and affective synchrony reflect aspects of the content and structure of dyadic interactions. Most research on parent-child affect during dyadic interactions has focused on infancy and early childhood; adolescence, however, is a key period for both normative emotional development and the emergence of emotional disorders. We examined affect in early to mid-adolescents (N = 55, Mage = 12.27) and their parents using a video-mediated recall task of 10-min conflict-topic discussions. Using multilevel modeling, we found evidence of significant level-2 effects (mean affect) and level-1 effects (affective synchrony) for parents and their adolescents. Level-2 and level-1 associations were differentially moderated by adolescent age and adolescent internalizing and externalizing symptoms. More specifically, parent-adolescent synchrony was stronger when adolescents were older and had more internalizing problems. Further, more positive adolescent mean affect was associated with more positive parent affect (and vice versa), but only for dyads with low adolescent externalizing problems. Results underscore the importance of additional research examining parent-child affect in adolescence.

Development of circadian rest-activity rhythms during the first year of life in a racially diverse cohort.

To describe the development of circadian rest-activity rhythms (CRARs) during infancy in a racially diverse cohort. We studied 414 infants from the Nurture birth cohort (51.2% female, 65.2% Black) who wore actigraphs on their left ankles for 4 days and nights at 3, 6, 9, and 12 months. We quantified CRARs using cosinor and non-parametric circadian rhythm analysis, and investigated change in CRARs over time, comparing 6, 9, and 12 months to CRARs at 3 months. We adjusted for baseline and time-varying covariates and used function-on-scalar regression (FOSR) to identify the specific times of day at which activity changes occurred. Across the first year, daily mean and peak activity levels and day-to-day activity level regularity increased, and activity level fragmentation and nighttime activity decreased. Only at 9 months, compared to at 3 months, did timing of peak activity levels and the most active periods shift later, while timing of least active periods shifted earlier. FOSR analyses showed that mean activity levels decreased during nighttime hours and increased during daytime hours, with the most pronounced changes at 9 months. Among racially diverse infants, CRARs became more robust, stable, and less fragmented over time. Findings suggest the greatest change from 3-month CRARs occurs at 9 months, which may be a key period of CRAR development. This and future research will contribute to our understanding of normative infant CRAR development in diverse populations and enable us to identify infants who may benefit from intervention.

‘Offending doesn't happen in a vacuum’: The backgrounds and experiences of children under the age of 14 years who offend

Relative to those who first offend in adolescence, younger children who offend are at increased risk of engaging in serious, persistent, and violent offending. In addition, these children are at risk of a range of adverse psychosocial outcomes across the lifespan. Early intervention with children at risk of offending is therefore critical to support children to thrive and reduce offending and victimisation rates. This study sought to explore the backgrounds and experiences of children who offend prior to the age of 14 years to shed light on the development of child offending and assist early intervention efforts. Interviews with family members (with lived experience of interacting with the child welfare and child offending system) and frontline child welfare and judicial professionals (who directly engage with children who offend) ( n = 33) were conducted. Their experiences show that children who offend have clear, significant, and unaddressed child welfare concerns, including growing up in poverty and experiencing abuse, which cumulatively impacts on children's normative development and can eventually culminate in offending. Participants called for urgent action to address the sociostructural concerns that underlie child welfare concerns and provide prompt and effective assistance to families in need to support children to thrive and prevent future victimisation.

Unintelligibility, personhood and curriculum silences of intersex bodies in the Life Orientation high school classroom: A case study

Despite an increase in the research that promotes affirmative gender and sexual diversity in the South African Life Orientation (LO) education, there remains an uncomfortable silence on intersex bodies. In the absence of distinctive binary classifications of external genitalia, learners with variant intersex characteristics are incapable of integration into socio-educational environments. This article explores how individuals with variant intersex characteristics learn about the self in relation to society within LO lessons. It extrapolates factors that influence the educational and psycho-social agency in and around the classroom. This phenomenological study has drawn on in-depth interviews with six individuals with variant intersex characteristics post schooling. The evidence shows that the LO curriculum privileges distinct genital developments as a marker of normal human development and means of gender identification. Previous studies found that the mutually exclusive biological sex characteristics drawn from XY (male) and XX (female) chromosomal development were major determinants of social sexual and gender embodiment in puberty lessons. Lensed through the theory of unintelligibility, bodies that deviated from this normative development were seen as ambiguous and derogatively referred to as hermaphrodites. Their personal identities were marred with constructions of freaks and abnormality. Vilifying personhood rhetoric impacted the social skills of intersex learners and their peers. Learners with intersex bodies were uncomfortable to engage with the gender binary curriculum content, facilities and school culture. Silences on intersex bodies in the LO curriculum made these learners feel invisible which led to early school dropout. This article argues for the integration of intersex knowledge that affirms, humanises and protects all gender, sexual expressions and sex characteristics in the school context. The LO curriculum is well-positioned to disrupt problematic constructions of intersex bodies as deficit and embarrassing by including variant sex characteristic developments as a norm.

The African Small Island Developing States and normative coherence for sustainable development: The quality of civil rights and liberties

SummaryMotivationThe literature on small states suggests that small island states are more likely than larger states to support regional and international democratic norms, but is this true of the six African Small Island Developing States (ASIDS), an underexplored regional grouping? This article explores the ASIDS' normative commitment to regional democratic norms of civil rights and liberties.PurposeThis article aims to answer the question: how normatively coherent are ASIDS with the normative development of regional civil rights and liberty norms promoted by the African Union (AU) through the Banjul Charter?Methods and approachThe article adopts a normative conceptual lens in its outlook and uses quality of democracy methodology to compare the quality of selected regional civil rights and liberty norms across the ASIDS grouping.FindingsThe article finds that procedurally all ASIDS are coherent with the Banjul Charter norms on civil rights and liberties, but that local realities mean that substantive coherence to these norms is often slow or, in some cases, ineffectual. Cultural context, agency, and capacity are as important as size and “islandness” in determining small island state democratic quality.Policy implicationsIt suggests that political will for normative coherence for sustainable development (NCSD) within a region is not enough, at least for these island states. A real lack of capacity warrants greater regional support from continental Africa in the form of, among other things, financing, capacity building, expertise, peer review, and monitoring. Only through reinforcement of NCSD can the AU fulfil its rights‐based mission.

Longitudinal development of cognitive mapping from childhood to adolescence

Cross-sectional studies have suggested that the ability to form cognitive maps increases throughout childhood and reaches adult levels during early adolescence. However, adults show large individual differences in their ability to relate local routes to form a global map. Children also vary, but when does variation stabilize? We asked participants from a previously published cross-sectional study [Journal of Experimental Child Psychology (2018), Vol. 170, pp. 86–106] to return for a second session of testing 3 years later to examine whether longitudinal stability is more evident at older ages. The subsample of 50 of the original 105 participants available for retesting did not differ from the original sample on male–female ratio or Session 1 task performance. We reassessed performance on the Virtual Silcton navigation paradigm, the Spatial Orientation Test (SOT), and the Mental Rotation Test (MRT) and added parents’ scores on the SOT and MRT at Timepoint 2. Our initial analyses of normative development aligned with prior cross-sectional findings; overall navigation performance reached adult levels of proficiency around 12 years of age. In addition, variation in route integration abilities, as measured by between-route pointing, stabilized around 12 years of age; that is, longitudinal stability was higher in the older cohort than in the younger cohort. The same pattern appeared for the MRT.

Dignity of Risk in Adolescent Development: A Neuropsychological Perspective.

Although the notion of "dignity of risk" has primarily been used in reference to adolescents with disabilities, this concept can be applied to all adolescents, as parents and guardians are challenged by how to balance adolescents' need for self-determination with the need for safety and supervision. In the context of maturing cognitive and emotional neural circuits, normative adolescent development involves temporal shifts in social and environmental factors that are inherently associated with both higher risk-taking and opportunities for growth and new learning. The challenge for parents of balancing risk and opportunity is influenced by social, cultural, and environmental factors, previous experience, personality, and the perceived capability of the adolescent. When perceived capability is lower, the challenge becomes even more acute, such as when an adolescent has a developmental, physical, or psychiatric disability that impacts cognitive, emotional, or adaptive functioning. This article reviews the literature on normative brain development from the perspective of balancing risk and self-determination in adolescence and discusses the implications for families and clinicians across a range of ability and disability. Potential approaches to fostering self-determination are discussed.

Pendidikan Kesehatan Reproduksi Remaja dengan Media Pemanfaatan Buku Rapor Kesehatanku

Adolescence is a sensitive development or critical period for normative and maladaptive development patterns. Reproductive health is an essential issue for adolescents because every phase of adolescent development has developmental tasks that must be fulfilled. Implementing the activity is a combination of health education and peer group discussion using my health report book as the media. The results of community service activities were four teenagers (20%) who were at the level of knowledge both before being given health education and peer group discussions with my health report book media and after being shown an increase of 17 teenagers (85%). Then as many as seven teenagers (35%) were at the level of sufficient knowledge before being given health education and peer group discussion with my health report book media. After being offered only three teenagers (15%) who were at the level of sufficient knowledge. At the level of lack of knowledge before being given counseling and peer group discussion with my health report book media as many as nine teenagers (45%) at level of lack of knowledge and after being given, there were no teenagers at the level of lack of knowledge so it can be concluded that the combination of health education and peer group discussion with media My health report card is an alternative choice in increasing adolescent knowledge about reproductive health.

The influence of age and gender on normalized foot arch height of Korean children and adolescents: a cross-sectional study

Both the non-normalized and normalized arch height have been used to compare foot arch height among children. This study measured changes in foot dimensions, including length and the non-normalized and normalized arch height, among children and adolescents aged 8–19 years. Three-dimensional scanning data of 1451 children and adolescents were obtained. Four normalized arch height indices were calculated: the navicular height/total foot length, navicular height/instep length, instep height/total foot length and instep height/instep length. The current study found a significant positive relationship between foot length and non-normalized arch height. The normalized arch height increased linearly up to the age of 16 years. The proportion of pes planus also decreased with age. Current findings shed light on normative foot development in children and adolescents.

Prerequisites for the introduction of climbing in the recreational activities of primary school age children with emotional and volitional disorders

The article aims to determine the advisability and prerequisites for the introduction of climbing in the recreational activities of primary school age children with emotional and volitional disorders. The following research methods were used: theoretical analysis of professional scientific and methodological literature; comparative analysis; expert assessment; pedagogical, anthropometric, physiological, psychodiagnostic research methods; physical health assessment methods; mathematical statistics methods.
 Based on the expert assessment, we identified factors limiting the effectiveness of health and recreational activities with this cohort, and determined the organizational and methodological conditions for the introduction of climbing in recreational activities of primary school age children with emotional and volitional disorders. The analysis of the physical development of children with emotional and volitional disorders confirmed and supplemented research conducted by other authors proving that emotional and volitional disorders do not have any fundamental influence on changes in the growth patterns of the child's body. It was found that the indicators of the functional state of the cardiovascular system of primary school children with emotional and volitional disorders did not differ significantly from that of children of the same age with normative development.
 The analysis of the physical fitness of the studied cohort confirmed the existing trends in the professional literature regarding the insufficient level of physical qualities development in junior schoolchildren. The results obtained in 6 motor tests measuring the development of coordination skills indicate that in younger students aged 9-10 the level of these skills is much lower than in their peers with normative development. The analysis of the emotional and volitional features of junior schoolchildren aged 9-10 years of both sex groups showed the lack or insufficient development of the following studied qualities: discipline, independence, perseverance, endurance, organization, determination, and initiative, which indicates the difference between this cohort of students from their peers with normative development. In the study of the psycho-emotional sphere in this cohort of schoolchildren, we found dominance of medium and high levels of psycho-emotional stress in both boys and girls aged 9-10, which significantly distinguishes them from peers with normative development.

The discontents of competition for recognition on social media: Perfectionism, ressentiment, and collective narcissism

Individuals frequently utilize social media platforms (SMPs) to express their positive features and receive recognition. Axel Honneth proposes that recognition plays an essential role in social life, explaining both social conflicts and guiding normative social development. While SMPs appear as a perfect tool for the pursuit of recognition, they often fail to achieve the intended results. This paper argues that the failure to achieve recognition through SMPs occurs because SMPs operate according to the neoliberal principle of competition. Competition arises because several structural affordances (quantification, homogeneity, and availability of information) allow for comparing different expressions of recognition. I argue that the competitive pursuit of recognition on SMPs results in several problematic developments, causing the manifestation of perfectionism, ressentiment, and collective narcissism. I conclude that the normative potential of Honneth’s theory is compromised if recognition is pursued competitively.

Childhood abuse and sadomasochism: New insights

The development of sexuality begins in early childhood and is vital to a normative sexual development over the lifespan. Unfortunately, this developmental process can be disrupted by many traumatic events. Of these, childhood abuse may be the most damaging: it has been shown to disrupt the natural development of sexuality, one of the manifestations being increased tendencies towards sexual paraphilias, especially sexual masochism and sadism, which can be particularly harmful in their more extreme forms. The current study sought to investigate links between three types of childhood abuse: psychological, physical, and sexual–and the genesis of adult sadomasochistic sexual tendencies, and how the relationship between child abuse and sadomasochism differs by gender. An online survey was conducted on a sample of 1219 participants who were queried regarding childhood psychological, sexual, and physical abuse. Based on the results of life history items, the participants were separated into the categories “abused” and “non-abused”. Both groups were then given a Masochism and Sadism survey with items adapted from Fisher et al. (2011). For analysis, sadistic and masochistic orientations were partitioned into severity levels of light and heavy masochism, and light, heavy, and passive sadism. The results confirmed that childhood abuse, especially sexual, increases sadomasochistic tendencies. These increases varied by gender such that abused males exhibited more sadistic preferences and females more masochistic. Levels of sadism and masochism varied with history of abuse and gender. The analyses also resulted in triple interactions for both masochism and sadism, as well as in several simple effects. There were no gender differences for heavy masochism and passive sadism, however, light masochism was more prominent in females, and heavy and light sadism was found more commonly in males. Additionally, the presence of any form of abuse was connected with significantly higher heavy, light and passive masochism and sadism. Differing types of childhood abuse, as well as gender, affect sadomasochistic preferences in adulthood, and the magnitude of these preferences.