Childhood Violence Exposure Predicts High Blood Pressure in Black American Young Adults.

Objective: To test the impact of childhood adversity, including community violence exposure, on hypertension risk in Black American young adults to understand what risk factors (eg, prenatal factors, later exposures) and ages of adversity exposure increased hypertension risk.

Study Design: The study included 396 Black American participants with data from prenatal, birth, and age 7-, 14-, and 19-year visits. At age 19 years, individuals with blood pressure (BP) measures >120 mmHg systolic and/or >80 mmHg diastolic were classified as having high blood pressure (HBP), and those with BP <120/80 mmHg were classified as normal.

Promoting Sense of Community in an Early Childhood Care and Education Consortium.

Continued professional development is important for promoting quality early childhood care and education (ECE) programs. One approach to fulfill this need for professional development is through the creation of a community of practice, which brings together professionals with similar interests. In this investigation, we report the evaluation results for one CoP, called the Early Childhood Consortium, that included ECE center directors and teachers.

The role of goals and outcomes in young children's memory for actions.

Four- to six-year-old children participated in three experiments designed to investigate action features that may contribute to the self-enactment effect and help clarify contradictory findings in the literature. Although activity is important in young children's learning and development, preschoolers' memory for self-actions is often found to be no better than memory for another person's actions. In the few studies in which the self-enactment effect has been found for this age group, the actions included as test materials differ markedly from those in the studies in which no differences occur.

A Pragmatic Internet Intervention to Promote Positive Parenting and School Readiness in Early Childhood: Initial Evidence of Program Use and Satisfaction.

Background: Internet-based parenting programs have the potential to connect families to research-informed materials to promote positive child development. However, such programs can only succeed to the extent that the intended population engages with them.

Objective: This study aimed to evaluate engagement in the 5-a-Day Parenting program, a technology-based program designed with low-income families in mind, to promote daily use of 5 specific parenting activities conducive to children's school readiness.

Violence exposure, conflict, and health outcomes in inner-city African American adolescents.

Purpose: To examine relationships among community and school violence exposure, parent-adolescent conflict, coping style, and self-reported health in a sample of 432 high-risk, inner-city African American adolescents at age 14 years.

Design And Methods: Multiple regression and principal component analysis were used to analyze the secondary data. After controlling for multiple covariates (eg, sex, age, blood lead levels, and socioeconomic status), both violence exposure and posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) were related to health outcomes.

Kindergarten children's event memory: the role of action prediction in remembering.

In two studies, kindergarteners participated in a series of staged events immediately preceded by pre-event interactions that were designed to identify factors relevant to improving recall. The events were based on preschool science-related activities and the experimental pre-event involved predicting actions to occur during a target event, manipulating types of cues available to support these predictive inferences. Action prediction did improve free recall, and effects may have influenced attentional processes evoked by actions generated and enacted.

The role of collaborative planning in children's source-monitoring errors and learning.

The aim of this research was to provide empirical evidence for a cognitive process that may contribute to children's learning from another person. A cornerstone of Vygotsky's sociocultural theory is that knowledge is internalized from others; however, the cognitive processes that support this transformation are underspecified. In a series of three studies, kindergarten children (mean age 5 years 8 months) participated in a categorization task with an adult in several collaborative and noncollaborative conditions and then were tested on their memory of who had performed which actions in the task.