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Parent visitation between parents and their children in foster care is the primary intervention for maintaining and supporting the development of parent child relationships necessary for reunification. This article examines the aspects of attachment relationships that provide an approach for understanding, assessing, and intervening in parent child relationships during foster care visits. (Contains 67 references.) (GCP)

The case-based research discussed in this article describes the variety of strategies mothers and young children spontaneously used to negotiate the complexities of foster care visits. Mothers and children displayed a variety of responses to visits, particularly separating at the end of visits. (Author)

In this paper, a high performance three-phase switching digital-to-synchro (D/S) power converter is proposed for driving high power synchro motors. An amplitude/phase modulation algorithm is implemented with digitally controlled sinusoidal pulse-width-modulation. Design methodology and synchronization improvement are also presented. The generated synchro format output is first verified by simulation and then by a digital signal processor controlled hardware prototype testing. Experimental results indicate that the switching amplifier based D/S converter not only shrinks the size over the conventional linear amplifier based unit, but also demonstrates superior performance to the commercially available unit. Index Terms--Converter, D/S converter, PWM, simulation, synchro.

Much of our work with enriched experience and training in animals supports the Quartz & Sejnowski (Q&S) thesis that environmental information can interact with pre-existing neural structures to produce new synapses and neural structure, However, substantial data as well as an evolutionary perspective indicate that multiple information-capture systems exist: some are constructivist, some are selectionist, and some may be tightly constrained.

Rats kept in complex environments (EC) show an array of brain changes relative to animals housed individually (IC). These effects have been explained as due to (a) information storage, (b) chronic stress that causes brain damage, or (c) neuroendocrine effects on brain maturation. Complex experience also affects somatic growth and organ development, and these may be related to the EC/IC brain differences. We have compared somatic growth and internal organs of 315 weanling and adult rats with various histories. (a) Young EC rats showed slower skeletal and visceral growth, while many brain components expand. (b) Although thymus and spleen were lighter in young ECs, immunocompetence was nonsignificantly (p < .07) higher than in ICs. (c) Somatic growth of adult rats was slow and not very responsive to experience, whereas studies have shown EC/IC brain effects similar to those in young rats. (d) Males had slightly greater EC/IC somatic and visceral differences. (e) The stress index, adrenal weight, varied across age and experience, so chronic stress can not explain EC/IC brain differences. Training paradigms show brain changes similar to those from complex experience, occurring specifically with learning and in brain regions using the information. Learning and memory, therefore remain the best explanation of the EC brain effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]