Disadvantaged children's play behavior over the school year in public school preschool classrooms
The purpose of this study was to examine the developmental changes in preschool children's play behavior in public school preschool classrooms. From the original four hundred eighty economically disadvantaged children in public pre-kindergarten programs funded by Chapter 1, two hundred eighty three children were used for the final analyses of this study. Children's play behaviors during free play time were observed twice over the school year in their classroom settings using an event sampling method. A series of repeated measures multivariate analyses of variance (MANOVA) were conducted to test 12 hypotheses. In addition to examining the developmental aspects of play, the findings were also compared with those of previous research studies to determine how public preschool intervention programs contribute to children's play development.
ackground: Schizophrenia patients exhibit impairment in prepulse inhibition (PPI) of the acoustic startle response (ASR), which is ommonly interpreted as a sensorimotor gating deficit. To date, it is unclear when these gating deficits arise. Results of animal studies and ome human data suggest that PPI deficits are in part genetically determined, such that gating deficits could be present before the onset of full-blown psychosis. To test this assumption, we investigated PPI of ASR in individuals with prodromal symptoms of schizophrenia and atients with first-episode schizophrenia.