Taming the Conflict over Educational Equality

This article proposes an approach to educational distribution that attempts to minimise enduring tensions among conflicting values. At the foundation of this approach is a threshold of educational adequacy based on what is needed for citizens to participate in a democratic society. This threshold is justified because it minimises conflict with parental rights and because it better manages ‘the bottomless pit’ problem of educational distribution. This threshold is then modified to stipulate that, after the threshold has been reached, public resources should be distributed equally across students from all backgrounds. While this modification is essential to sending messages of equal citizenship, it also leaves a ‘moral residue’ because it allows wealthy parents to invest greater private resources in their children, thus preserving their children's competitive advantage. Minimising this harm requires policy mechanisms outside of schools that more aggressively break the link between educational outcomes, success in market competition, and social goods. Something ‘external’ to educational institutions is necessary, then, for the achievement of educational justice.     

Editorial overview: Analytic and methodological innovations for suicide‐focused research

This editorial overview provides an introduction to the Suicide and Life‐Threatening Behaviors Special Issue: “Analytic and Methodological Innovations for Suicide‐Focused Research.” We outline several challenges faced by modern suicidologists, such as the need to integrate different analytical and methodological techniques from other fields with the unique data problems in suicide research. Therefore, the overall aim of this issue was to provide up‐to‐date methodological and analytical guidelines, recommendations, and considerations when conducting suicide‐focused research. The articles herein present this information in an accessible way for researchers/clinicians and do not require a comprehensive background in quantitative methods. We introduce the topics covered in this special issue, which include how to conduct power analyses using simulations, work with large data sets, use experimental therapeutics, and choose covariates, as well as open science considerations, decision‐making models, ordinal regression, machine learning, network analysis, and measurement considerations. Many of the topics covered in this issue provide step‐by‐step walkthroughs using worked examples with the accompanied code in free statistical programs (i.e., R). It is our hope that these articles provide suicidologists with valuable information and strategies that can help overcome some of the past limitations of suicide research, and improve the methodological rigor of our field.     

Tests of the mediational role of preparatory safer sexual behavior in the context of the theory of planned behavior.

The present research details 2 empirical tests within the context of the theory of planned behavior (I. Ajzen & T. Madden, 1986) of the assumption that preparatory behaviors (e.g., discussing safer sex, obtaining condoms) play a mediational role in the relation between psychological variables (e.g., attitudes toward safer sex, social norms about safer sex) and condom use. The assumption of the mediational role of preparatory behaviors is examined in sexually experienced samples from 2 different populations: inner-city high school students (N = 226) and college students (N = 160). The results suggest that the mediational role of preparatory behaviors is a highly significant one. Results indicate no gender differences with regard to the main mediational hypotheses. The methodological, theoretical, and practical implications and importance of these findings are discussed.     

Asymmetrical hemisphere activation enhances global–local processing

Decades of research focusing on the neurophysiological underpinnings related to global–local processing of hierarchical stimuli have associated global processing with the right hemisphere and local processing with the left hemisphere. The current experiment sought to expand this research by testing the causal contributions of hemisphere activation to global–local processing. To manipulate hemisphere activation, participants engaged in contralateral hand contractions. Then, EEG activity and attentional scope were measured. Right-hand contractions caused greater relative left-cortical activity than left-hand contractions. Participants were more narrowly focused after left-hemisphere activation than after right-hemisphere activation. Moreover, N1 amplitudes to local targets in the left hemisphere were larger after left-hemisphere activation than after right-hemisphere activation. Consistent with past research investigating hemispheric asymmetry and attentional scope, the current results suggest that manipulating left (right) hemisphere activity enhanced local (global) attentional processing.     

Does Teaching Problem-Solving Skills Matter? An Evaluation of Problem-Solving Skills Training for the Treatment of Social and Behavioral Problems in Children

Problem-solving skills training (PSST) has been proposed as a potentially effective addition to behavioral parent training (PT). However, it is not clear whether PSST specifically increases the benefits provided by PT. In this study, PT + PSST was compared to PT + nondirective therapy in a sample of 26 families. All parents received PT. Following this, children received PSST or nondirective therapy. Outcomes included measures of child behavior problems, social skills, and parent stress at posttherapy and a 6-week follow-up. Children in both groups improved over time with few differences between groups.     

A Function Acquisition Speed Test for Equivalence relations (Faster)

The Psychological Record - The current study employed a stimulus equivalence paradigm to assess the ability of the recently developed Function Acquisition Speed Test (FAST) to measure the existence...     

The interaction of synesthetic and print color and its relation to visual imagery

Synesthetic color induced by graphemes is well understood to be an automatic perceptual phenomenon paralleling print color in some ways, but also differing in others. We addressed this juxtaposition by asking how synesthetes are affected by synesthetic and print colors that are the same. We tested two groups of grapheme–color synesthetes using a basic color-priming method in which a grapheme prime was presented, followed by a color patch (probe), the color of which was to be named as quickly and accurately as possible. The primes induced either no color, print color only, synesthetic color only, or both forms of color (e.g., a letter “A” printed in red that also triggered synesthetic red). As expected, responses to name the probe color were faster if it was congruent with the prime color than if it was incongruent. The new finding (Exp. 1) was that a prime that induced the same print and synesthetic colors led to substantially larger priming effects than did either type of color individually, an effect that could not be attributed to semantic priming (Exp. 2). In addition, the synesthesia effects correlated with a standard measure of visual imagery. These findings are discussed as being consistent with the hypothesis that print and synesthetic color converge on similar color mechanisms.