The relation of cultural context and social relationships to career development in middle school

This study examined the role of supportive relationships (i.e., family, teacher, and peer) and agency (i.e., self-efficacy, motivation, and goal-setting orientation) on three outcomes: academic grades, distress, and career decidedness. Data from 588 middle school youth from Northern (N = 322) and Southern (N = 266) Italy were analyzed using path modeling. Results indicated that across gender and region, agency was consistently related to academic grades and career decidedness. However, the role of supportive relationships was found to differ across gender and region. For both boys from Northern Italy and girls from Southern Italy, the impact of family support on academic grades and career decidedness was mediated by agency. For girls from Northern Italy, family support related directly to academic grades and career decidedness. Implications for practice were described.     

Increases in Tolerance Within Naturalistic, Intentional Communities: A Randomized, Longitudinal Examination

The authors examine differential changes in values of tolerance among 150 participants discharged from inpatient treatment centers, and randomly assigned to either a self-help-based, communal living setting (i.e., Oxford House), or usual aftercare. Participants were interviewed every 6 months for a 24-month period. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was used to examine the effect of condition (therapeutic communal living versus usual aftercare) on wave trajectories of tolerance (i.e., universality/diversity scores). Over time, residents of the communal living model demonstrated significantly greater values of tolerance than usual aftercare participants. Communal living participants who resided in the house for over 6 months showed the most substantial increases in tolerance. Results support the notion that communal living residents may develop more tolerant attitudes by striving toward superordinate community goals (objectives held by (a) the whole group and (b) which individual members could not achieve alone).     

Leśniewski’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">characteristica universalis</Emphasis>

Leśniewski’s systems deviate greatly from standard logic in some basic features. The deviant aspects are rather well known, and often cited among the reasons why Leśniewski’s work enjoys little recognition. This paper is an attempt to explain why those aspects should be there at all. Leśniewski built his systems inspired by a dream close to Leibniz’s characteristica universalis: a perfect system of deductive theories encoding our knowledge of the world, based on a perfect language. My main claim is that Leśniewski built his characteristica universalis following the conditions of de Jong and Betti’s Classical Model of Science (2008) to an astounding degree. While showing this I give an overview of the architecture of Leśniewski’s systems and of their fundamental characteristics. I suggest among others that the aesthetic constraints Leśniewski put on axioms and primitive terms have epistemological relevance.     

Career Adapt-Abilities Scale-Italian Form: Psychometric proprieties with Italian preadolescents

During preadolescence children start to give attention to the future, to formulate thoughts, and to wonder about what they want. They also acquire knowledge and experiment with strategies to assist them in designing their future career. Among the constructs that can now play a relevant role in life designing, the four resources of career adaptability have a prominent role. This article reports the psychometric properties of the Italian version of the Career Adapt-Abilities Scale-International Form 2.0 for a group of middle school students. Two different studies involving Italian preadolescents were conducted. The first study tests the instrument's multidimensional structure, internal consistency and discriminant validity. The second one verifies the factorial structure's across-gender invariance and the test–retest reliability. Results provide strong psychometric support for the CAAS-Italian Form with preadolescents as a valid measure for analyzing their career adaptability and for using it in career counseling and education.     

Disturbance cues function as a background risk cue but not as an associative learning cue in tadpoles

Animal Cognition - Chemical information has an important role in the sensory ecology of aquatic species. For aquatic prey, chemical cues are a vital source of information related to predator...     

Delaying Disposing: Examining the Relationship between Procrastination and Clutter across Generations

We explored how two types of procrastination (indecision and behavioral), contribute to problems with clutter across three adult U.S. samples differing as generational cohorts. An online survey was administered to college students (mean age = 21) and younger adults recruited using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk; mean age = 31), plus older adults recruited with help from the Institute for Challenging Disorganization (mean age = 54) (http://challengingdisorganization.org). Hierarchical linear regression revealed that behavioral procrastination contributed significantly to an increasingly larger percentage of explained variance in clutter problems across the generational cohorts in a series of separate analyses. The addition of indecision as a variable led to a significant incremental increase in explained variance for the younger and older adult samples, but not for the student sample. Clutter problems led to a significant decrease in satisfaction with life among older adults. Findings suggest that general procrastination tendencies may enable a lifelong pattern of responses to one’s environment that become increasingly maladaptive throughout the life cycle - simultaneously delaying disposal decisions.     

A cross-modal effect of noise: the disappearance of the alarm reaction of a freshwater fish

Anthropogenic noise pollution is recognized as a major global stressor of animals. While many studies have assessed the unimodal impacts of noise pollution with a focus on intraspecific acoustic communication, little is known about noise pollution on the perception of visual and chemical information. The ‘distracted prey hypothesis’ posits that processing noise interferes with processing other information in the brain. Here, we found evidence for such a cross-modal effect of noise on the antipredator behaviour of a freshwater prey fish, the fathead minnow, Pimephales promelas. In laboratory trials, exposure to noise from a motorboat caused the total absence of the classical fright reaction of minnows to conspecific alarm cues, whereas an ambient noise control had no such impact. In natural habitats, the impairment of such antipredator behaviour due to noise pollution could have major fitness consequences. We discuss how our findings translate to animal ecology and the need for future studies that target specific management decisions regarding noise pollution.