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Scholarly Works (2 results)

  • Thesis
  • Peer Reviewed
UC Irvine Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2018)

Parents frequently talk to their children about past experiences. When parents perceive it is important for their child to provide a highly factual recount of a past event, they may use evaluations to encourage accuracy. Specifically, negative evaluations serve to negate the child’s input (“No, that didn’t happen”) while positive evaluations are used to specifically affirm their input (“Yes, that’s right”) or more generally encourage conversation (“Uh-huh” or “Oh, I see”). However, some literature suggests that these more general encouraging evaluations may serve a different function relative to appraising, or positive and negative, evaluations. As such, the present research explored this relation in conjunction with conversation accuracy demand and child gender. Eighty-nine children (Mage = 54.93 months) engaged in a brief, scripted play activity with a researcher. Afterwards, caregivers were instructed to discuss the event with their child, either in a factual way or an entertaining way. These conversations were coded on a variety of narrative characteristics, including how frequently caregivers used evaluations. Analyses revealed that parents used appraising and encouraging evaluations differently. In addition, an interaction between child gender and context condition was found for appraising evaluations. Theoretical implications, as well as potential application and future directions, are discussed.

    Cover page: Who Really Chopped Down the Cherry Tree? Accuracy Demands and Child Gender in Parent-Child Reminiscing
    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    UC Irvine Previously Published Works (2006)
    This study examined the cerebral response to a verbal learning (VL) task in obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) patients. Twelve OSA patients and 12 controls were studied with functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI). As hypothesized, VL performance was similar for both groups, but OSA patients showed increased brain activation in several brain regions. These regions included bilateral inferior frontal and middle frontal gyri, cingulate gyrus, areas at the junction of the inferior parietal and superior temporal lobes, thalamus, and cerebellum. Better free recall performance in the OSA group was related to increased cerebral responses within the left inferior frontal gyrus and left supramarginal area. Recall was negatively related to activation within the left inferior parietal lobe. The findings support the predictions that intact performance in OSA patients is associated with increased cerebral response. Recruitment of additional brain regions to participate in VL performance in OSA patients likely represents an adaptive compensatory recruitment response, similar to that observed in young adults following total sleep deprivation and in healthy older adults. These data, and those of the only other FMRI study in OSA, suggest that individuals with OSA show characteristic differences in the BOLD signal response to cognitive challenges. Including subjects with untreated OSA in neuroimaging studies may potentially influence the results by altering individual and group level activation patterns. Given this, future neuroimaging studies may want to be aware of this potential confound.
      Cover page: Increased brain activation during verbal learning in obstructive sleep apnea
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