No abstract

Asking for assistance from a teacher is generally viewed by elementary school students as a way of avoiding rather than resolving peer conflict. However, there are situations when it is appropriate and perhaps necessary to seek help. This study investigated such situations. Vignettes that portrayed aggressive peer conflict at school were presented to 128 3rd and 4th graders, who were asked what they would do and why. Students' self-perceptions of peer relations also were measured. At Grade 3, boys and girls were equally likely to go to the teacher for help, whereas at Grade 4, girls were more likely than boys to do so. At Grade 4, girls showed greater interest than boys in resolving conflict and "getting things back to normal." At Grade 3, students interested in revenge tended to go to the teacher. At both grades, boys were more concerned than girls that help seeking might lead to hassles with the teacher or reprisals from classmates. Boys who perceived themselves as popular and girls who perceived themselves as unpopular were relatively likely to seek help. Relations between help seeking and children's grade level, gender, and self-perceptions are discussed in terms of goal and strategy components in a socialinformation-processing model of conflict resolution.

Loss of insight is one of the core features of frontal/behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (FTD). FTD shares many clinical and pathological features with corticobasal degeneration (CBD) and progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP). The aim of this study was to investigate awareness of cognitive deficits in FTD, CBD and PSP using a multidimensional approach to assessment, which examines metacognitive knowledge of the disorders, online monitoring of errors (emergent awareness) and ability to accurately predict performance on future tasks (anticipatory awareness). Thirty-five patients (14 FTD, 11 CBD and 10 PSP) and 20 controls were recruited. Results indicated that loss of insight was a feature of each of the three patient groups. FTD patients were most impaired on online monitoring of errors compared to the other two patient groups. Linear regression analysis demonstrated that different patterns of neuropsychological performance and behavioural rating scores predicted insight deficits across the three putative awareness categories. Furthermore, higher levels of depression were associated with poor anticipatory awareness, reduced empathy was related to impaired metacognitive awareness and impaired recognition of emotional expression in faces was associated with both metacognitive and anticipatory awareness deficits. The results are discussed in terms of neurocognitive models of awareness and different patterns of neurobiological decline in the separate patient groups.