Have you been to Paris?

Two experiments examined how people answer questions of the form ‘Have you been to X?’ where X is a city or a country abroad. In the natural experiment subjects were not given any material to memorize, and were timed as they indicated whether they themselves had been to the place in question. In the artificial experiment subjects were given places to memorize and were asked to imagine they had been to them. The test was similar to that of the natural experiment. The natural experiment supports a hierarchical search proceeding first on the level of countries and then on that of cities. The results of the artificial experiment reflect the structure of the memorized information. The comparison between the two experiments is made from a general methodological perspective.     

Social system responses to Huntington disease

Huntington disease (HD) is an adultonset, genetic disorder with major psychosocial implications. Although many of the psychiatric symptoms of the disorder have been attributed to the HD gene, systems factors may also account for the disorder's manifestations. Three illustrative issues--patient preselection, the denial of symptom onset, and suicide induction--are discussed from the vantage point of family systems thinking. Recently developed capacity for presymptomatic testing of HD despite the current absence of treatment or cure makes it likely that family therapists increasingly will be involved in clinical work with individuals and families in which HD occurs.     

How to tell the time in Hebrew

A corpus of expressions specifying time, length, and price in modern Hebrew was collected. The corpus reveals systematic morphological patterns that are at the same time complex and consistent both within and across informants. Further check revealed that informants are totally unaware of the rules governing these patterns. Indeed, these rules are not specified in the literature (grammar books, instruction texts, or language manuals) either. The systematic patterns of verbal behavior coupled with informants' total ignorance of the rules governing them are taken as an empirical demonstration of the contrast between knowing how and knowing that. The contrast is significant in that it pertains not to abstract formal rules (like the syntactic rules with which the contrast is standardly associated) but rather to concrete rules of morphology.     

Logic for physical space

Since the early days of physics, space has called for means to represent, experiment, and reason about it. Apart from physicists, the concept of space has intrigued also philosophers, mathematicians and, more recently, computer scientists. This longstanding interest has left us with a plethora of mathematical tools developed to represent and work with space. Here we take a special look at this evolution by considering the perspective of Logic. From the initial axiomatic efforts of Euclid, we revisit the major milestones in the logical representation of space and investigate current trends. In doing so, we do not only consider classical logic, but we indulge ourselves with modal logics. These present themselves naturally by providing simple axiomatizations of different geometries, topologies, space-time causality, and vector spaces.     

Testing causal models of the relationship between childhood gender atypical behaviour and parent–child relationship

An association between childhood gender atypical behaviour (GAB) and a negative parent–child relationship has been demonstrated in several studies, yet the causal relationship of this association is not fully understood. In the present study, different models of causation between childhood GAB and parent–child relationships were tested. Direction of causation modelling was applied to twin data from a population‐based sample (n= 2,565) of Finnish 33‐ to 43‐year‐old twins. Participants completed retrospective self‐report questionnaires. Five different models of causation were then fitted to the data: GAB → parent–child relationship, parent–child relationship → GAB, reciprocal causation, a bivariate genetic model, and a model assuming no correlation. It was found that a model in which GAB and quality of mother–child, and father–child relationship reciprocally affect each other best fitted the data. The findings are discussed in light of how we should understand, including causality, the association between GAB and parent–child relationship.