GUADALUPE ACLE TOMASINI^a - M. MARCELA CASTAÑEDA MOTA^b

^a Facultad de Estudios Superiores Zaragoza de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. gaclet@unam.mx
^b Facultad de Psicología de la Universidad Veracruzana. mcmariamarcela@gmail.com
Coordinadoras de la Red Mexicana de Investigación en Psicología Educativa del Sistema Mexicano de Investigación en Psicología (SMIP)

The interest of our Latin American countries to deepen the knowledge of various aspects of psychological development and learning is shown in the papers comprising this issue, where different topics are studied regarding populations ranging from early infancy to adulthood. The importance of addressing the various issues in a much broader sense, that is to say, not only focusing on the individual, but also on other contextual aspects is emphasized. In the case of studies related to children or adolescents, the importance of the role that parents play as key players in mediating their children's psychological development as well as their learning process in general and their educational process in particular is evident.

Concerning specific aspects of school learning, Guevara Guerrero and Puche Navarro, when investigating about the process of cognitive planning of preschool children in situations of problem solving and from a complex dynamic systems approach, found that young children are able to integrate the constraints of the task and consider future situations to plan their actions. Additionally, the study shows that preschoolers have a wealth of planning and self-regulation skills regarding actions to achieving the goal and anticipating future situations. In relation to primary education, when children start their learning reading, Galicia Moyeda, Robles Ojeda and Sánchez Velasco tested the favorable impact that training in phonological awareness, psycholinguistic skills and vocabulary has on this process.

Based on the need to provide elements for the education of autistic children, Oliveira Costa and Barbosa Alves de Souza, when comparing the efficiency of a Simple Conditional Discrimination procedure with one of Conditional Discrimination on receptive language learning, found that the latter was more efficient than the first one to establish receptive language in these children. However, they also found that the former was more effective for maintaining the acquired language repertoire.

The importance of children's emotional development is highlighted by Reyna and Brussino who assessed the differences in children between three and seven-year-old on social behavior in terms of social skills and behavior problems in relation to age, gender and socio-economic level. They found that the most marked differences are attributable, first, to age of the children, and secondly, to gender. In general, three-year-old children showed a lower performance than other groups, but development was not linear in all processes, since children five years of age had a similar or better performance than the seven-year-old on some variables.

Sharing the concern for behavioral problems in children, Romero Godínez, Lucio Gómez Maqueo and Forns Santacana investigated the presence of internalized and externalized behavioral problems and its relationship with the academic competence of elementary school children aged eight and twelve. The authors stress that there are significant effects on writing assignments in groups of children with internalized behavioral problems, unlike those with externalizing problems whose effects are present in reading activities. In this sense, Boone Salles shows that by using non-directive drawing together with expression of thoughts and feelings in therapy sessions with girls aged eight to ten years who exhibited oppositional defiant behavior, the frequency and intensity of their emotional and behavioral responses in the classroom were reduced.

In university population, Padilla Vargas, Fuentes González and Pacheco Chávez, based on the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, studied the effects of corrective training in the identification and development of empirical articles in 20 psychology students aged between 20 and 22 years, randomly assigned to two groups: experimental and control. The authors showed that most participants in the experimental group achieved a dramatic improvement in their success scores in the assessment and that six of the ten participants were able to write and support their research questions at an extra-situational level, which did not happen with the control group in neither of these two aspects.

In adult population, Andrade Calderón, Salvador Cruz and Sosa Ortiz focused their study on an elderly person who had progressive non-fluent aphasia, characterized by a progressive deficit in expressive language and parsing, among other problems. After applying a treatment and conducting assessment at six and twelve months after its implementation, not only an improvement in the prosody of language fluency and content of the spontaneous language was observed, as well as repetition, reading aloud and phonological praxis, but also in other cognitive and socioemotional aspects. With regards to the study of emotional aspects in adults, de Francisco Carvalho and Possenti Sette updated the dimension component of mood instability which is part of the Dimensional Clinical Personality Inventory, and applied it to 230 people aged between 18 and 63 years. The final version of that dimension of the test was formed of 16 items organized into three factors, with a range of internal consistency between 0.78 and 0.81, and a total of 0.85, which denoted good indicators in these areas to assess this dimension.

Parents' participation and the role they play in mediating learning and psychological development of infants, children and adolescents is evident in the following papers: The study by Cruz Dantas, Bezerra, Da Silva, Guerra and Chaves shows that mothers of premature babies have a low intensity negative association between State-Anxiety and Emotional Support, as well as a negative relationship from low to moderate intensity between Trait- Anxiety and Social Support, as opposed to mothers of full-term infants. In fact, a statistically significant difference showing that mothers of premature infants had a higher median as regards to State-Anxiety was found.

Relating to parents of preschoolers, Solis Cámara, Medina Cuevas and Díaz Romero randomly organized 60 parents into an experimental and a control group, and gave them training aimed at changing severe disciplinary rearing practices with children aged three to five years and to identifying some potential predictors of such practices. The authors found that stress of the parent-child interaction and behavioral problems were the main predictors of such disciplinary practices. In a second assessment, results indicated a significant change in disciplinary practices and in all variables of the study in the control group. Moreover, they showed the importance of parental anger-aggression as predictor of disciplinary practices.

 Concerning parents of children with special educational needs, Acle Tomasini, Martinez Basurto, Lozada García and Ordaz Villegas carried out a study to validate the acceptance, educational significance and social importance of the outcomes attained with special education intervention programs based on the ecological risk / resilience model and implemented with children. 55 parents and five grandparents of 30 children with these needs answered the Social Validity Questionnaire for Special Education Programs. The authors report that the participants perceived an increase in resilient behaviors of students both at school and home, so that the ecological basis of the proposed model was validated. No statistically significant differences between participants in relation to the type of special education category served by the programs were found.

García Cortés, García Méndez and Rivera Aragón aimed to establish whether family functioning predicted the Resilient Potential of parents with teenage children who drank or did not drink alcohol. By applying various scales to 140 parents with a teenage child who had a risky consumption of alcohol, and 187 parents with a teenager who did not consume it, they found that the resilient potential of parents was predicted by the factors Positive Family Environment and Command/ Problems on the Emotional Expression, of the Family Functioning Scale. Faced with this same problem, Cerutti, Paula Ramos and Lima Argimon found that adolescents with unloving fathers are much more likely to abuse alcohol, and with uncaring mothers, of becoming snuff dependent. By contrast, the father's role can become a protective factor for tobacco consumption and marijuana dependence if he exercises control over these behaviors.

Finally, we express our sincere gratitude to the Journal Acta Colombiana de Psicología, and in particular to its editor, Dr. Ernesto Ravelo for the opportunity offered to the Red Mexicana de Investigación en Psicología Educativa del Sistema Mexicano de Investigación en Psicología (Mexican Network of Research in Educational Psychology of the Mexican System of Research in Psychology) to collaborate in the organization of this issue. As it can be read in all of the articles, there is a clear commitment of academics from different Latin American countries and universities to contribute with their knowledge to the study of psychological and educational development of populations, from early childhood to adulthood, which provides guidelines to decrease the gap between research and practice in various areas of educational psychology.