Adolescent loneliness assessment

The aim of the present work was to develop a loneliness scale for adolescents in order to assess their perceptions of the quality of their relationships with parents and peers. The scale was administered to 1,233 Argentine secondary school students, aged 13-16 years. Factor analyses (principal axes, oblimin solution) were conducted. Four factors were obtained, which accounted for 43.13% of the variance: Peer Rejection, Family Deficits and Parent Rejection, Personal Inadequacy, and Significant Separation. The internal consistency assessed through Cronbach's alpha was satisfactory. We believe that this proposal, which aims at evaluating the different processes that cause and are caused by a feeling of loneliness, allows for an integral approach to the issue.     

Testosterone as a social inhibitor: two case studies of the effect of testosterone treatment on language

This study aimed to correlate testosterone levels with natural written language in 2 people undergoing testosterone therapy. Two participants, a man receiving treatment for loss of upper-body strength and a female-to-male transgendered individual, supplied records of injections over 1-2 years along with e-mails or journal entries as writing samples. Results showed that higher testosterone levels correlated with reduced use of words related to social connections. Language relating to anger, sexuality, and achievement was unrelated to testosterone levels. It appears that testosterone steers attention away from social connections but not necessarily toward concerns with aggression or sexual activity.     

Dilution and confirmation of probability judgments based on nondiagnostic evidence

Previous research has shown that probability judgments based on a mix of diagnostic and nondiagnostic information are less extreme than judgments based on the diagnostic information alone. Results of the present experiments suggest that this dilution effect holds only under a limited set of conditions. When judgments based on a mix of diagnostic and nondiagnostic information are compared with separately elicited judgments based on the diagnostic information alone, the dilution effect is consistently observed. When judgments based on the diagnostic evidence are revised in light of additional, nondiagnostic evidence, by contrast, the dilution effect is eliminated or even reversed (yielding a confirmation effect) depending on the type of nondiagnostic evidence under evaluation.     

Connecting the Dots through a Case Report: A Child’s Unmet Needs,Neuropsychological Impairment and Entrance into the Juvenile Justice System

ABSTRACT

Adolescent involvement in the criminal and juvenile justice systems has received widespread attention at national, state, and local levels. Developmental neuroscience has shaped our understanding of adolescence as a distinct period during which young people are at increased risk for a host of problems, especially entrance into the criminal and juvenile justice systems. Overrepresentation of Black and Latino youth, particularly those with disabilities, remains of significant concern. This case study explores the case of a 13-year-old boy, Trey (a fictional name), and his path into the school-to-prison pipeline. The roles of neighborhood, family poverty, parental health, trauma, chronic stress, and attendance to underserved schools are outlined. These factors are connected to Trey’s special needs like trauma, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and learning difficulties/disabilities going undiagnosed and untreated within the context of the neurobiological immaturity of adolescence. The extent to which these factors converged to result in neuropsychological impairment is explored. This case analysis focuses attention on implications for research, policy and practice in preventing youth in underserved communities from entering the criminal and juvenile justice systems.     

Kantian Constructivism and the Moral Problem

According to the standard objection, Kantian constructivism implicitly commits to value realism or fails to warrant objective validity of normative propositions. This paper argues that this objection gains some force from the special case of moral obligations. The case largely rests on the assumption that the moral domain is an eminent domain of special objects. But for constructivism there is no moral domain of objects prior to and independently of reasoning. The argument attempts to make some progress in the debate by defending a robust conception of construction, which names a distinctive view of practical reasoning as transformative.     

Distress Tolerance and Social Support in Adolescence: Predicting Risk for Internalizing and Externalizing Symptoms Following a Natural Disaster

The purpose of the multi-measure, multi-wave, longitudinal study was to examine the interactive relation between behavioral distress tolerance (DT) and perceived social support (PSS) in 352 tornado-exposed adolescents aged 12–17 years (M = 14.44; SD = 1.74). At baseline, adolescents completed a computer-based task for DT, and self-report measures of PSS, depressed mood, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), substance use, and interpersonal conflict. Symptoms also were assessed 4 and 12 months after baseline. Findings showed that lower levels of DT together with lower levels of PSS conferred risk for elevated symptoms of prospective depression (t(262) = ?2.04, p = .04; r_{effect size} = 0.13) and PTSD (t(195) = ?2.08, p = .04; r_{effect size} = 0.15) following a tornado. However, only PSS was significant in substance use t(139) = 2.20, p = .03; r_{effect size=}0.18) and conflict (t(138) = ?4.05, p < .0001; r_{effect size=}0.33) in our sample. Implications regarding adolescent DT, the transdiagnostic nature of PSS, and the clinical applications of our findings in the aftermath of a natural disaster are discussed.     

Distinct neuronal patterns of positive and negative moral processing in psychopathy

Psychopathy is a disorder characterized by severe and frequent moral violations in multiple domains of life. Numerous studies have shown psychopathy-related limbic brain abnormalities during moral processing; however, these studies only examined negatively valenced moral stimuli. Here, we aimed to replicate prior psychopathy research on negative moral judgments and to extend this work by examining psychopathy-related abnormalities in the processing of controversial moral stimuli and positive moral processing. Incarcerated adult males (N = 245) completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging protocol on a mobile imaging system stationed at the prison. Psychopathy was assessed using the Hare Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (PCL-R). Participants were then shown words describing three types of moral stimuli: wrong (e.g., stealing), not wrong (e.g., charity), and controversial (e.g., euthanasia). Participants rated each stimulus as either wrong or not wrong. PCL-R total scores were correlated with not wrong behavioral responses to wrong moral stimuli, and were inversely related to hemodynamic activity in the anterior cingulate cortex in the contrast of wrong > not wrong. In the controversial > noncontroversial comparison, psychopathy was inversely associated with activity in the temporal parietal junction and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These results indicate that psychopathy-related abnormalities are observed during the processing of complex, negative, and positive moral stimuli.     

Witnessing postevents does not change memory traces,but can affect their retrieval

The results of three experiments suggest that a memory trace for an event is not altered by witnessing similar events, but that postevents can interfere with its retrieval. On an immediate recall test, details from an original story (e.g. wrench) were recalled less often if a subsequent story mentioned a ‘screwdriver’ than if it did not. The interference effect occurred if people were asked to recall details fromboth stories (tool —— ——), but not if people were asked to recall primarily from the first story. Thus, the interference effect in immediate recall was averted if the target trace could be activated selectively (Experiments 1a and 1b). A more general interference effect was found after a day. Fewer targets from the original story were recalled if the second story was presented just before the test than if both stories occurred a day earlier. Thus, the second story interfered with recall only if it emphasized contextual retrieval cues that did not match the trace for the targets (Experiment 2). Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.