Acceptability and feasibility of a brief substance use intervention for adolescents in Cape Town,South Africa: A pilot study

Substance use is prevalent among South African adolescents, but few interventions exist to reduce risk of harm. This study assesses the feasibility, acceptability and preliminary effects of a brief intervention for reducing adolescent substance use and other risk behaviours. This single-arm feasibility test recruited 30 substance-using adolescents and their primary caregiver. Participants received separate interventions (2 sessions for adolescents, 1 session for caregivers), with a subsample randomly selected for post-intervention interviews. Feasibility was measured by the proportion of eligible adolescents who were enrolled and retained in the study. Interviews explored acceptability, and changes in outcomes from baseline to 1-month follow-up assessed preliminary effects of the intervention. Thirty of 43 (69.8%) eligible adolescents and their caregivers were enrolled, with 29 adolescents (96.7%) and 28 caregivers (93.3%) completing the intervention. Twenty-eight adolescents (93.3%) and 29 caregivers (96.7%) were retained at follow-up. Frequency of alcohol, cannabis use and delinquent-type behaviours decreased significantly from baseline to follow-up. Participants appreciated the intervention content and delivery and felt that it facilitated behaviour change. Suggestions for improving the intervention were provided. This study found that the intervention is feasible, acceptable and had promising effects on adolescent behaviour. Efficacy must be established with a randomised controlled trial.     

The Empathy Imbalance Hypothesis of Autism: A Theoretical Approach to Cognitive and Emotional Empathy in Autistic Development

The Psychological Record - There has been a widely held belief that people with autism spectrum disorders lack empathy. This article examines the empathy imbalance hypothesis (EIH) of autism....     

Segmenting initial fans of a new team: A taxonomy of sport early adopters

Marketers are interested in the first buyers of new products, given their important role in driving wider community adoption. This is especially the case for new entertainment products, like new or relocated sports teams who must quickly build fan connections and loyalty, given the importance of crowds and social networks in adding value to the entertainment experience. Fans choose to connect with sports teams for numerous reasons; however, fan development in the context of a new team has rarely been examined. This paper examines the diversity and similarity among inaugural fans of an expansion team. A large sample (n = 1724) was classified into five segments revealing how each varies in their brand associations, satisfaction, identification and involvement. By analysing key dimensions (relationship identifiers) that characterise how consumers connect with a new team, the authors provide new insights about the nature of consumers in the context of a new sports team. Furthermore, the five segments were found to be distinct cohorts, with sufficient variation between them to warrant variant marketing approaches to achieve the outcome of committed, long‐term fans. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Embedding If and Only If

Some left-nested indicative conditionals are hard to interpret while others seem fine. Some proponents of the view that indicative conditionals have No Truth Values (NTV) use their view to explain why some left-nestings are hard to interpret: the embedded conditional does not express the truth conditions needed by the embedding conditional. Left-nestings that seem fine are then explained away as cases of ad hoc, pragmatic interpretation. We challenge this explanation. The standard reasons for NTV about indicative conditionals (triviality results, Gibbardian standoffs, etc.) extend naturally to NTV about biconditionals. So NTVers about conditionals should also be NTVers about biconditionals. But biconditionals embed much more freely than conditionals. If NTV explains why some left-nested conditionals are hard to interpret, why do biconditionals embed successfully in the very contexts where conditionals do not embed?     

A tutorial on the use of excel 2010 and excel for mac 2011 for conducting delay-discounting analyses

In recent years, researchers and practitioners in the behavioral sciences have profited from a growing literature on delay discounting. The purpose of this article is to provide readers with a brief tutorial on how to use Microsoft Office Excel 2010 and Excel for Mac 2011 to analyze discounting data to yield parameters for both the hyperbolic discounting model and area under the curve. This tutorial is intended to encourage the quantitative analysis of behavior in both research and applied settings by readers with relatively little formal training in nonlinear regression.     

Fundamental(ist) attribution error: Protestants are dispositionally focused

Attribution theory has long enjoyed a prominent role in social psychological research, yet religious influences on attribution have not been well studied. We theorized and tested the hypothesis that Protestants would endorse internal attributions to a greater extent than would Catholics, because Protestantism focuses on the inward condition of the soul. In Study 1, Protestants made more internal, but not external, attributions than did Catholics. This effect survived controlling for Protestant work ethic, need for structure, and intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity. Study 2 showed that the Protestant-Catholic difference in internal attributions was significantly mediated by Protestants' greater belief in a soul. In Study 3, priming religion increased belief in a soul for Protestants but not for Catholics. Finally, Study 4 found that experimentally strengthening belief in a soul increased dispositional attributions among Protestants but did not change situational attributions. These studies expand the understanding of cultural differences in attributions by demonstrating a distinct effect of religion on dispositional attributions.     

Semantic plasticity and epistemicism

This paper considers the connections between semantic shiftiness (plasticity), epistemic safety and an epistemic theory of vagueness as presented and defended by Williamson (1996a, b, 1997a, b). Williamson explains ignorance of the precise intension of vague words as rooted in insensitivity to semantic shifts: one??s inability to detect small shifts in intension for a vague word results in a lack of knowledge of the word??s intension. Williamson??s explanation, however, falls short of accounting for ignorance of intension.     

Delay discounting in Lewis and Fischer 344 rats: steady-state and rapid-determination adjusting-amount procedures

Lewis rats have been shown to make more impulsive choices than Fischer 344 rats in discrete-trial choice procedures that arrange fixed (i.e., nontitrating) reinforcement parameters. However, nontitrating procedures yield only gross estimates of preference, as choice measures in animal subjects are rarely graded at the level of the individual subject. The present study was designed to examine potential strain differences in delay discounting using an adjusting-amount procedure, in which distributed (rather than exclusive) choice is observed due to dynamic titration of reinforcer magnitude across trials. Using a steady-state version of the adjusting-amount procedure in which delay was manipulated between experimental conditions, steeper delay discounting was observed in Lewis rats compared to Fischer 344 rats; further, delay discounting in both strains was well described by the traditional hyperbolic discounting model. However, upon partial completion of the present study, a study published elsewhere (Wilhelm & Mitchell, 2009) demonstrated no difference in delay discounting between these strains with the use of a more rapid version of the adjusting-amount procedure (i.e., in which delay is manipulated daily). Thus, following completion of the steady-state assessment in the present study, all surviving Lewis and Fischer 344 rats completed an approximation of this rapid-determination procedure in which no strain difference in delay discounting was observed.