The Role of Pre- and Postnatal Timing of Family Risk Factors on Child Behavior at 36 months

Children growing up in disharmonious families with anxious/depressed mothers are at risk for emotional and behavioral difficulties, however whether these associations reflect postnatal environment, prenatal exposure, or an overall liability is still unclear. This study used prospectively collected data from 24,259 participants of the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study (MoBa). Mothers reported on anxiety/depression and family disharmony twice in pregnancy and twice post pregnancy, as well as on their child’s physical aggression and crying behavior at age 36 months. First, results from an autoregressive cross-lagged model showed a substantial stability in both maternal anxiety/depression and family disharmony from pregnancy to 18 months postnatal, but there was no indication that family disharmony led to maternal anxiety/depression, or the other way around. Second, structural equation models further suggests that the main risk derived from an overall liability, that is, a lasting effect of family risks that spanned the two time periods.     

Temporal coordination and adaptation to rate change in music performance

People often coordinate their actions with sequences that exhibit temporal variability and unfold at multiple periodicities. We compared oscillator- and timekeeper-based accounts of temporal coordination by examining musicians' coordination of rhythmic musical sequences with a metronome that gradually changed rate at the end of a musical phrase (Experiment 1) or at the beginning of a phrase (Experiment 2). The rhythms contained events that occurred at the same periodic rate as the metronome and at half the period. Rate change consisted of a linear increase or decrease in intervals between metronome onsets. Musicians coordinated their performances better with a metronome that decreased than increased in tempo (as predicted by an oscillator model), at both beginnings and ends of musical phrases. Model performance was tested with an oscillator period or timekeeper interval set to the same period as the metronome (1:1 coordination) or half the metronome period (2:1 coordination). Only the oscillator model was able to predict musicians' coordination at both periods. These findings suggest that coordination is based on internal neural oscillations that entrain to external sequences.     

Community responses to a suicidal crisis: implications for suicide prevention

We conducted a cross‐sectional, random‐digit‐dial survey to evaluate public responses to a hypothetical question: “If someone you knew was suicidal, what would you do first?” Younger people were more likely to call a suicide hotline, and less likely to go to an emergency room (ER) or call 911; immigrants (in the U.S. <15 years) were more likely to call 911, and less likely to call a suicide hotline; African Americans were more likely to go to the ER and call 911; Hispanics were more likely to call 911 but less likely to call a suicide hotline. These results suggest that public messages about hotlines and emergency options for suicidal patients need to be tailored to relevant population characteristics including age, education, ethnicity, and language preferences.     

Loneliness and Suicidal Risk in Young Adults: Does Believing in a Changeable Future Help Minimize Suicidal Risk Among the Lonely?

This study examined loneliness and future orientation as predictors of suicidal risk, namely, depressive symptoms and suicide ideation, in a sample of 228 college students (54 males and 174 females). Results of regression analyses indicated that loneliness was a significant predictor of both indices of suicidal risk. The inclusion of future orientation was found to significantly augment the prediction model of both depressive symptoms and suicide ideation, even after accounting for loneliness. Noteworthy, beyond loneliness and future orientation, the Loneliness × Future Orientation interaction term was found to further augment both prediction models of suicidal risk. Consistent with the notion that future orientation is an important buffer of suicidal risk, among lonely students, those with high future orientation, compared to low future orientation, were found to report significantly lower levels of depressive symptoms and suicide ideation. Some implications of the present findings for studying both risk and protective factors associated with suicidal risk in young adults are discussed.     

Source credibility and the processing of refutation texts

The knowledge revision components framework (KReC) outlines the basic comprehension processes and text factors that can be accentuated to increase the potential for knowledge revision during reading. The goal of the present study was to explore source credibility as one such text factor. In Experiment 1, we established the utility of a set of refutation texts in influencing knowledge revision. Participants read ten refutation and ten control texts. The participants had faster reading times and higher posttest scores for the refutation than for the control texts, providing evidence for knowledge revision. In Experiment 2, we examined the influence of source credibility under normal reading conditions. Participants read 20 refutation texts, ten with high-credibility and ten with low-credibility sources. The reading times and posttest scores suggested that knowledge revision unfolded successfully, independent of credibility. Using the same texts, in Experiment 3 we examined the influence of direct instructions that made the credibility of the source of information more salient. When the credibility of the source was made salient, the revision process was disrupted in the low-credibility condition, as evidenced by slower reading times and lower posttest scores than in the high-credibility condition. The results add to our understanding of the factors that constrain knowledge revision during the reading of refutation texts, and are discussed in the context of the extant literature and KReC.     

Attachment theory within clinical supervision: application of the conceptual to the empirical

Attachment theory, which has demonstrated application in caregiver-child, romantic, and psychotherapeutic relationships, also appears to be supervision relevant. But bad blood between attachment theory and psychoanalysis may well have hampered considering the relevance of attachment theory for psychoanalytic supervision. This project sought to investigate the application of attachment theory to the supervision situation, with the potential implications of our findings for psychoanalytic supervision being considered. Attachment styles, leader–follower dynamics, and attachment-based expectations were explored as predictors of supervisor-trainee working alliance using a prospective, longitudinal study design. Findings revealed the importance of measuring supervision-specific attachment, the particularly problematic nature of supervisee avoidant attachment, and the potential contribution of a leader–follower framework for understanding supervisory attachment. These attachment concepts may well be useful in, and additive for, psychoanalytic supervision practice.     

The Use of Codified Law in the Rabbinic Courts of Frankfurt am Main on the Eve of the Enlightenment

During the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, rabbinic scholars of law in Franco-German communities had an at best ambivalent attitude toward the codification of Jewish law. Even Rabbi Joseph Caro’s Shul?an ˋArukh, first printed in Venice in 1565, was not well received by all. While students of the law from the lower ranks seem to have embraced the code, many leading rabbis—particularly those in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Poland—rejected it. In the course of the mid-seventeenth century, attitudes shifted, and Shul?an ˋArukh became the place for commentaries and learned discussions of the law. By the eighteenth century, rabbinic courts were using Shul?an ˋArukh as the basis of their legal decision making. This is confirmed, at least for Frankfurt am Main, through an examination of the legal diary of Rabbi Nathan Maas (d. 1794). In his diary, Maas not only summarized cases that he heard but also sometimes offered rationales for the court’s decisions. These précis make constant reference to Shul?an ˋArukh and its commentaries while never entering into an analysis of talmudic sources. This cannot have been because of a lack of ability, for Maas and his colleagues on the Frankfurt court were well-known scholars who published talmudic commentaries of substance. The use of a code, even by such authorities, may have been for utilitarian reasons, that is, to speed up the judicial process.     

A New Normalization Strategy for the Implicational Fragment of Classical Propositional Logic

The introduction and elimination rules for material implication in natural deduction are not complete with respect to the implicational fragment of classical logic. A natural way to complete the system is through the addition of a new natural deduction rule corresponding to Peirce’s formula (((A → B) → A) → A). E. Zimmermann [6] has shown how to extend Prawitz’ normalization strategy to Peirce’s rule: applications of Peirce’s rule can be restricted to atomic conclusions. The aim of the present paper is to extend Seldin’s normalization strategy to Peirce’s rule by showing that every derivation Π in the implicational fragment can be transformed into a derivation Π′ such that no application of Peirce’s rule in Π′ occurs above applications of →-introduction and →-elimination. As a corollary of Seldin’s normalization strategy we obtain a form of Glivenko’s theorem for the classical {→}-fragment.     

A bilateral advantage for storage in visual working memory

Various studies have demonstrated enhanced visual processing when information is presented across both visual hemifields rather than in a single hemifield (the bilateral advantage). For example, Alvarez and Cavanagh (2005) reported that observers were able to track twice as many moving visual stimuli when the tracked items were presented bilaterally rather than unilaterally, suggesting that independent resources enable tracking in the two visual fields. Motivated by similarities in the apparent capacity and neural substrates that mediate tracking and visual working memory (WM), the present work examined whether or not a bilateral advantage also arises during storage in visual WM. Using a recall procedure to assess working memory for orientation information, we found a reliable bilateral advantage; recall error was smaller with bilateral sample displays than with unilateral displays. To demonstrate that the bilateral advantage influenced storage per se rather than just encoding efficiency, we replicated the observed bilateral advantage using sequentially presented stimuli. Finally, to further characterize how bilateral presentations enhanced storage in working memory, we measured both the number and the resolution of the stored items and found that bilateral presentations lead to an increased probability of storage, rather than enhanced mnemonic resolution. Thus, the bilateral advantage extends beyond the initial selection and encoding of visual information to influence online maintenance in visual working memory.     

Monitoring same/different discrimination behavior in time and space: Finding differences and anticipatory discrimination behavior

Discrimination behavior in a standard, two-alternative forced choice same/different task is usually measured by the pigeon’s pecking one or the other of two arbitrary report areas. We found that pigeons make anticipatory, discriminative responses to the visual display during the stimulus observing period prior to the availability of the report areas; the spatial distribution of these anticipatory discriminative responses strongly correlated with the upcoming choice response. These anticipatory pecks provide evidence that the process of discrimination occurs well before the moment of choice and that key aspects of this process can be revealed by looking at the distribution of observing responses. We also manipulated the variability of the displayed items to study the nature of these anticipatory responses; again, the spatial distribution of responding during the stimulus observing period strongly correlated with the upcoming choice response. The distribution of these prechoice pecks supports the theory that pigeons search for differences in the displayed items. If differences are found, then pigeons prepare to report “different”; if not, then they report “same.”