Maltreated and Comparison Adolescents’ Recollections of Lifetime Residences: Relationship to Delinquency and Marijuana Use

This study of child welfare-affiliated maltreated youth (n?=?216) and comparison youth (n?=?128) from the same community (age M?=?18.21, SD?=?1.42) examined: 1. whether child/caregiver characteristics and maltreatment status were associated with lifetime number of residences; and 2. whether child/caregiver characteristics, residences, and maltreatment status were associated with delinquency and marijuana use. Maltreatment status, ever living with a nonparent caregiver, and being older were associated with more residences during childhood. More residences and male sex were associated with person offense delinquency and marijuana use. It is important to help caregivers who live in disadvantaged neighborhoods, especially families with child welfare involvement, understand the behavioral consequences of a high number of residences during childhood and adolescence and provide support for stable long-term housing.     

Entering Prostitution in Adolescence: History of Youth Homelessness Predicts Earlier Entry

The effect of youth homelessness on age of entry into prostitution was tested, controlling for other known covariates using a multivariate model. Women (N = 96) who self-identified as having engaged in prostitution completed cross-sectional standardized questionnaires (M_age = 42.6, SD = 9.18; 62% African American). Women with a history of youth homelessness entered prostitution nearly 8 years earlier than their peers without this history (at 18 vs. 25 years old). Lack of a high school degree or equivalent also predicted an earlier age of entry (at 20 vs. 28 years old). Findings highlight the poverty dynamics that underlie the relationship between early entry into prostitution and homelessness. Young women, living on the street or in shelters, with limited education and employment opportunities, are at high risk of entering prostitution when they are barely out of adolescence. Future research will be better able to design age-specific prevention strategies.     

Spatial Proportional Reasoning Is Associated With Formal Knowledge About Fractions

Proportional reasoning involves thinking about parts and wholes (i.e., about fractional quantities). Yet, research on proportional reasoning and fraction learning has proceeded separately. This study assessed proportional reasoning and formal fraction knowledge in 8- to 10-year-olds. Participants (N = 52) saw combinations of cherry juice and water in displays that highlighted either part–whole or part–part relations. Their task was to indicate on a continuous rating scale how much each mixture would taste of cherries. Ratings suggested the use of a proportional integration rule for both kinds of displays, although more robustly and accurately for part–whole displays. The findings indicate that children may be more likely to scale proportional components when being presented with part–whole as compared with part–part displays. Crucially, ratings for part–whole problems correlated with fraction knowledge, even after controlling for age, suggesting that a sense of spatial proportions is associated with an understanding of fractional quantities.     

MATERNAL SELF‐REPORTED DEPRESSIVE SYMPTOMS AND MATERNAL CORTISOL LEVELS INTERACT TO PREDICT INFANT CORTISOL LEVELS

Three basic findings have emerged from research on maternal depressive symptoms and offspring hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal functioning: (a) Mothers’ depressive symptoms are positively associated with their offsprings’ cortisol stress response, (b) numerous individual and interpersonal maternal characteristics moderate this association, and (c) maternal and infant cortisol levels are highly correlated. In combination, these findings have suggested that maternal cortisol levels may moderate the relation between maternal depressive symptoms and infant cortisol responsivity; the current study assessed this hypothesis. Participants were 297 mother–infant dyads who were recruited from the community. Maternal depressive symptoms were assessed via self‐report. Dyads participated in two differentially stressful infant challenges when infants were 16 and 17 months old. Mother and infant salivary cortisol was collected before and after challenges. Results indicate that maternal cortisol levels moderated associations between maternal depressive symptoms and infant cortisol levels across both challenges. Infants showed higher cortisol levels if their mothers had both higher depressive symptoms and higher cortisol levels, as compared to infants of mothers with higher depressive symptoms and lower cortisol, and to infants of mothers with lower depressive symptoms and either higher or lower cortisol levels. We discuss findings in relation to environmental and biological factors that may contribute to the intergenerational transmission of depressive symptoms.     

Possibility and Consciousness in Husserl’s Thought

Clarifying the nature of possibility is crucial for an evaluation of the phenomenological approach to ontology. From a phenomenological perspective, it is ontological possibility, and not spatiotemporal existence, that has pre-eminent ontological status. Since the sphere of phenomenological being and the sphere of experienceability turn out to be overlapping, this makes room for two perspectives. We can confer foundational priority to the acts of consciousness over possibilities, or to pre-set possibilities over the activity of consciousness. Husserl’s position on this issue seems to change over time. Ultimately, the establishment of a phenomenological perspective must involve a rejection of any hypostatization of pre-set possibilities, but not all implications of this theoretical step seem to be drawn in Husserl’s texts. This paper is devoted to an illustration of how the phenomenological notion of possibility should change when we reject the hypostatization of possibility, that is, when we reject the idea that all acts of consciousness are to be conceived as realizations of pre-set “ideal forms”. We examine this question, first, by trying to clarify the conceptual constellation of “possibility” in Husserl’s texts. This leads to an overall classification of the features of constituted (ontic) possibilities. Then we distinguish such constituted possibilities from their constituting conditions, which outlines a different sense of “possibility”. In the last instance two “possibilizing” dimensions (transcendental motivation and transcendental contingency) are shown to lie at the root of all ontic possibilities. This leads to a final suggestion on the nature of the relation between experience and possibility. Actual experiences create the room for possibility: they are possibilizations (Ermöglichungen). In this sense, experience is to be taken as a generative sphere which goes beyond the customary boundary between epistemic and ontological. From this point of view all experience is to be conceived as emergence .     

An iterative procedure for extracting skill maps from data

The methodologies for the construction of a knowledge structure mainly refer to the query to experts, the skill maps, and the data-driven approaches. This last method is of growing interest in recent literature. In this paper, an iterative procedure for building a skill map from a set of data is introduced. This procedure is based on the minimization of the distance between the knowledge structure delineated by a given skill map and the data. The accuracy of the proposed method is tested through a number of simulation studies where the amount of noise in the data is manipulated as well as the kind of structure to be reconstructed. Results show that the procedure is accurate and that its performance tends to be sufficiently stable even with high error rates. The procedure is compared to two already-existing methodologies to derive knowledge structures from a set of data. The use of the corrected Akaike Information Criterion (AICc) as a stopping criterion of the iterative reconstruction procedure is tested against the app criterion introduced by Schrepp. Moreover, two empirical applications on clinical data are reported, and their results show the applicability of the procedure.     

The fate of unattended stimuli and emotional habituation: Behavioral interference and cortical changes

The interference produced by the viewing of emotional distractors has been interpreted as evidence that emotional cues are processed in a fairly mandatory fashion, and that they divert attention from the primary ongoing task. However, few studies have examined how behavioral emotional interference varies with repeated presentation of the same emotional distractors. In two experiments, while participants were engaged in a parity judgment task, we investigated the effects of repetition of task-irrelevant emotional pictures, as reflected in both behavioral interference (Experiments 1 and 2) and neural activity (Experiment 2). Both experiments showed that the slowing of reaction times that was observed when viewing emotional, compared to neutral, scenes disappeared after only a few repetitions, suggesting diminished attention allocation to repeated emotional pictures. Conversely, in Experiment 2, neural correlates of picture processing revealed that the late positive potential (LPP) amplitude continued to be enhanced for emotional, compared to neutral, distractors despite picture repetition and the presence of a concurrent task. Altogether, these findings suggest that while evaluative processes are mandatory, and continue to engage cortico-limbic appetitive and defensive systems even after massive repetition, as suggested by the affective modulation of the LPP, attentional processes are not necessary after several repetitions of the same stimulus, as indicated by the rapid decline of behavioral emotional interference.