University of Maine

About: University of Maine is a education organization based out in Orono, Maine, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Ice sheet. The organization has 8637 authors who have published 16932 publications receiving 590124 citations. The organization is also known as: University of Maine at Orono.

Paleoindian settlement of the high-altitude Peruvian Andes

Abstract: Study of human adaptation to extreme environments is important for understanding our cultural and genetic capacity for survival. The Pucuncho Basin in the southern Peruvian Andes contains the highest-altitude Pleistocene archaeological sites yet identified in the world, about 900 meters above confidently dated contemporary sites. The Pucuncho workshop site [4355 meters above sea level (masl)] includes two fishtail projectile points, which date to about 12.8 to 11.5 thousand years ago (ka). Cuncaicha rock shelter (4480 masl) has a robust, well-preserved, and well-dated occupation sequence spanning the past 12.4 thousand years (ky), with 21 dates older than 11.5 ka. Our results demonstrate that despite cold temperatures and low-oxygen conditions, hunter-gatherers colonized extreme high-altitude Andean environments in the Terminal Pleistocene, within about 2 ky of the initial entry of humans to South America.

Emotion Socialization in Families of Children With an Anxiety Disorder

Abstract: Compared emotion socialization in 26 children with anxiety disorders ages 8–12 years and their mothers to 26 nonclinical counterparts without psychopathology Children and their mothers participated in an emotion interaction task in which they discussed occasions when the child felt worry, sadness, and anger Responses were coded for length of discussion, proportion of words spoken by child vs mother, frequency of positive and negative emotion words, explanatory discussion of emotion, and maternal facilitation of emotion discussion Children and their mothers also completed the Expressiveness and Control scales of the Family Environment Scale Results indicated that mothers of children with an anxiety disorder spoke less frequently than their child, used significantly fewer positive emotion words, and discouraged their children’s emotion discussions more than did mothers of nonclinical children Nonclinical children and their mothers indicated significantly more emotional expressiveness in their families than did children with an anxiety disorder and their mothers These results highlight the potential role of truncated family emotional expressivity in the emotional development and functioning of children with an anxiety disorder

Vocal atypicalities of preverbal autistic children.

Abstract: This study was designed to evaluate the nature of early vocal behaviors in young children with autism. Recent methodological and conceptual advances in the study of infant preverbal vocalizations were used to provide a detailed examination of the vocal behavior of young preverbal children with autism and comparison children with developmental delays. Results revealed that children with autism did not have difficulty with the expression of well-formed syllables (i.e., canonical babbling). However, children with autism did display significant impairments in vocal quality (i.e., atypical phonation). Specifically, autistic children produced a greater proportion of syllables with atypical phonation than did comparison children. Consistent with prior reports, the children with autism also displayed a deficit in joint attention behaviors. Furthermore, the atypicalities in the vocal behavior of children with autism appeared to be independent of individual differences in joint attention skill, suggesting that a multiple process model may be needed to describe early social-communication impairments in children with autism. Data are discussed in terms of their implications for future theoretical and applied research, including efforts to enhance the specificity of early diagnostic procedures.