Children of parents with unipolar depression: A controlled 1-year follow-up

An earlier cross-sectional study indicated that children's health and adjustment is at risk when their parents are depressed. Here, we report the associated longitudinal changes in children and families when parental depression either remits or continues. Comparisons are made among three groups established at a 1-year follow-up: previously depressed parents whose symptoms have remitted (N = 34 remitted parents), previously depressed parents who continue to be depressed (N = 23 nonremitted parents), and sociodemographically matched control families (N = 95). Although remitted parents and their family social environments improved, their children were still functioning more poorly than children of controls. Both the children and the families of nonremitted parents continued to function more poorly than controls. A social-environmental framework indicates that parents' functioning as well as family stressors and resources are concurrently and predictively linked to children's health.     

Observations on Long-Term Group Therapy with Suicidal and Depressed Persons

ABSTRACT: A long-term, open-ended group for depressed and suicidal individuals who had made suicide attempts is described. Two hundred persons participated in the sample groups over a 46-month period, with only 10 suicide attempts and 1 suicide occurring in this high risk group during the period of the study. Our observations corroborated some findings and differed with others reported of experiences with groups of individuals who have manifested suicidal behavior. The paper includes recommendations for starting groups of suicidal persons and emphasizes that this method of therapy appears to be an effective mode of suicide prevention.     

On the Role of Goal Orientation Traits and Self-Efficacy in the Goal-Setting Process: Distinctions That Make a Difference

We conducted a field study to investigate how goal orientation traits and two variants of self-efficacy affect the goal-setting process and, in turn, performance. Participants were 255 college students enrolled in psychology or biochemistry courses at a large east-coast university in the People's Republic of China. Structural equation modeling analyses largely supported the argument that self-efficacy defined as a trait interacts with goal orientation traits, whereas self-efficacy defined as a state mediates the trait effects in the goal-setting process. The specific Trait × Trait interaction form was consistent with Dweck's original goal orientation theory and Brockner's behavior plasticity theory.     

Discerning the Division of Cognitive Labor: An Emerging Understanding of How Knowledge Is Clustered in Other Minds

The division of cognitive labor is fundamental to all cultures. Adults have a strong sense of how knowledge is clustered in the world around them and use that sense to access additional information, defer to relevant experts, and ground their own incomplete understandings. One prominent way of clustering knowledge is by disciplines similar to those that comprise the natural and social sciences. Seven studies explored an emerging sense of these discipline-based ways of clustering of knowledge. Even 5-year-olds could cluster knowledge in a manner roughly corresponding to the departments of natural and social sciences in a university, doing so without any explicit awareness of those academic disciplines. But this awareness is fragile early on and competes with other ways of clustering knowledge. Over the next few years, children come to see discipline-based clusters as having a privileged status, one that may be linked to increasingly sophisticated assumptions about essences for natural kinds. Possible mechanisms for this developmental shift are examined.     

Should Humans Colonize Other Planets? No

In certain segments of the space community, the idea of colonizing other planetary bodies has been popular for decades. Disproportionate attention to this idea in the mass media, and lip service from key U.S. government officials, may convey the impression that the goal of space colonization¹1. Though some advocates now eschew the term “colonization” in favor of “settlement” when advocating for human expansion to other planetary bodies, the author makes no distinction between the two terms in this particular case and will use the term colonization.View all notes and exploitation is universally embraced. This author will argue that this is not the case, and, further, should not be. Given the current state of humankind’s overall ethical and moral development, humans should clean up the mess they have made on their home planet and learn how to take care of one another here before they go off into space.     

'At the Age of 12': The Boy Jesus in the Temple (Luke 2:41-52), The Emperor Augustus, and the Social Setting of the Third Gospel

The story of the boy Jesus at the age of 12 in the temple (Luke2:41–52) is often read and understood in relation to itsinherently Jewish narrative setting. The probable recipientsof Luke–Acts were, however, almost certainly Gentilesliving in the cities of Asia Minor in the late first centuryCE, removed by at least a generation from the Jewish originsof Christianity. The social setting of the recipients is, then,shaped not by the rituals and symbols of late Second TempleJudaism, but those of imperial Rome and, in particular, thelegacy and cult of the first of the imperial princeps, thatof Augustus. Writing in this milieu, Luke seeks to present Jesusas a significant figure in history in accordance with the conventionsof contemporary Greco-Roman biography, and to transmit throughhis infancy narrative those traditions about Jesus which assistin presenting him as the ultimate superior and successor tothe deified Augustus. The episode in the temple is includedby Luke in his infancy narrative because it is consistent with,and contributes to, this broader purpose.