Discourse after Early-Onset Hydrocephalus: Core Deficits in Children of Average Intelligence

A review of our studies of oral and written language in children with early-onset hydrocephalus suggests that hydrocephalus is associated with specific deficits in discourse as opposed to generalized linguistic deficit. It is proposed that the language skills that are impaired in hydrocephalus are those that require context to derive meaning, while those that are intact may function relatively independent of particular discourse contexts. This hypothesis was tested in two discourse studies comparing children with hydrocephalus of average verbal IQ to age-matched controls. Study 1 investigated narrative economy, syntactic complexity, and semantic content in the retellings of familiar and less familiar fairy tales. Despite producing quantities of story content similar to controls and using syntactic economy similar to controls, the hydrocephalus group produced less of the core semantic content of both familiar and less familiar tales. Study 2 investigated inferencing and figurative language understanding in a narrative comprehension task. Even when prior knowledge was controlled, the hydrocephalus group had difficulty making inferences and recalling factual information from the story. In contrast to their ability to understand idiomatic figurative expressions, the hydrocephalus group had difficulty interpreting novel figurative expressions. The results are compatible with the hypothesis that the core discourse deficits characteristic of children with hydrocephalus are concerned with computing meaning from context. Putative processing features underlying the proposed core discourse deficit are discussed.     

How Children with Head Injury Represent Real and Deceptive Emotion in Short Narratives

Narratives are not only about events, but also about the emotions those events elicit. Understanding a narrative involves not just the affective valence of implied emotional states, but the formation of an explicit mental representation of those states. In turn, this representation provides a mechanism that particularizes emotion and modulates its display, which then allows emotional expression to be modified according to particular contexts. This includes understanding that a character may feel an emotion but inhibit its display or even express a deceptive emotion. We studied how 59 school-aged children with head injury and 87 normally-developing age-matched controls understand real and deceptive emotions in brief narratives. Children with head injury showed less sensitivity than controls to how emotions are expressed in narratives. While they understood the real emotions in the text, and could recall what provoked the emotion and the reason for concealing it, they were less able than controls to identify deceptive emotions. Within the head injury group, factors such as an earlier age at head injury and frontal lobe contusions were associated with poor understanding of deceptive emotions. The results are discussed in terms of the distinction between emotions as felt and emotions as a cognitive framework for understanding other people's actions and mental states. We conclude that children with head injury understand emotional communication, the spontaneous externalization of real affect, but not emotive communication, the conscious, strategic modification of affective signals to influence others through deceptive facial expressions.     

The language dependence of accuracy

David Miller has demonstrated to the satisfaction of a variety of philosophers that the accuracy of false quantitative theories is language dependent (cf. Miller 1975). This demonstration renders the accuracy-based mode of comparison for such theories obsolete. The purpose of this essay is to supply an alternate basis for theory comparison which in this paper is deemed the knowledge-based mode of quantitative theory comparison. It is argued that the status of a quantitative theory as knowledge depends primarily on the soundness of the measurement procedure which produced the theory; such soundness is invariant, on my view, under Milleresque translations. This point is the basis for the linguistic invariance of knowledgelikeness. When the aim of science is not construed simply in terms of the truthlikeness or accuracy of theories, but in terms of the knowledge such theories embody, Miller's language dependence problem is overcome. One result of this analysis is that the possibility of objective scientific progress is restored, a possibility that Miller's analysis has prima facie defeated.I am grateful to Noretta Koertge for numerous comments and criticisms. Thanks are also due to David Miller for clarification of several points in his (1975). Veronica Barnes also made a number of pertinent observations.     

Procedural justice and preferential treatment: A brief review and comment

To put Singer’s (1992) work on relative deprivation and responses to preferential treatment in context, studies from a procedural justice perspective are reviewed. That review suggests that the psychological dynamics of preferential treatment are well accounted for by concepts derived from theories of procedural justice. It is thus argued that, to be parsimonious, Singer’s work is best conceptualized in procedural justice rather than relative deprivation terms.     

A longitudinal study of the self-concept of low-income youth

Children in grades five and six were interviewed in 1969 and a follow-up phase was conducted in 1978 using those children who had answered the 1969 phase and who were now out of high school. The purpose was to determine the stability of self-concept over a decade, and to investigate changes or differences that occurred within and between the groups over time. Data were analyzed using self-concept as the dependent variable. The independent variables measured in relation to self-concept were sex, race, and place of residence. Pearson product-moment correlations and paired t-tests indicated that the majority of youth undergo minimal changes during this age span.     

More than just the mean: moving to a dynamic view of performance-based compensation

Compensation decisions have important consequences for employees and organizations and affect factors such as retention, motivation, and recruitment. Past research has primarily focused on mean performance as a predictor of compensation, promoting the implicit assumption that alternative aspects of dynamic performance are not relevant. To address this gap in the literature, we examined the influence of dynamic performance characteristics on compensation decisions in the National Basketball Association (NBA). We predicted that, in addition to performance mean, performance trend and variability would also affect compensation decisions. Results revealed that performance mean and trend, but not variability, were significantly and positively related to changes in compensation levels of NBA players. Moreover, trend (but not mean or variability) predicted compensation when controlling for future performance, suggesting that organizations overweighted trend in their compensation decisions. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Violence in criminal careers: A review of the literature from a developmental life-course perspective

The criminal career paradigm focuses on the prevalence and frequency of crime along with an emphasis on offense specialization, age of onset and desistance, offense seriousness, and career length. Coinciding with the criminal career framework, developmental/life-course criminology offers more complex theoretical explanations for crime which highlight the importance of age-graded developmental risk factors that affect offending over the course of a criminal career. This review provides a systematic examination of the role of violence in criminal career and developmental/life-course research with a specific focus on its prevalence and frequency and its share of the offense repertoire. The results show that the incidence of violence is rare in one's criminal career except for a small group of chronic offenders who are responsible for a majority of the violent offenses. Regarding specialization, evidence suggests that offenders are spectacularly non-specialized and violent offenders can primarily be characterized as frequent offenders who offend more often and thereby have a higher probability of committing a violent offense in their criminal career. Conclusions and directions for future research are discussed.     

Beginning the workday yet already depleted? Consequences of late-night smartphone use and sleep

Smartphones have become a prevalent technology as they provide employees with instant access to work-related information and communications outside of the office. Despite these advantages, there may be some costs of smartphone use for work at night. Drawing from ego depletion theory, we examined whether smartphone use depletes employees’ regulatory resources and impairs their engagement at work the following day. Across two studies using experience sampling methodology, we found that smartphone use for work at night increased depletion the next morning via its effects on sleep. Morning depletion in turn diminished daily work engagement. The indirect effects of smartphone use on depletion and engagement the next day were incremental to the effects of other electronic devices (e.g., computer, tablet, and television use). We also found some support that the negative effects of morning depletion on daily work engagement may be buffered by job control, such that depletion impairs work engagement only for employees who experience low job control.