Culture-based perceptions of academic achievement among low-income elementary students

This study examined the influence of culture on students' perceptions of academic success. Students read scenarios depicting hypothetical classmates achieving success through the cultural themes of individualism, competition, communalism, or verve. Students reported their social endorsement for the hypothetical classmates. A 2x4 repeated measures analysis, examining the effects of cultural group and cultural theme on students' endorsement, revealed an interaction between the two variables. African American students were significantly more accepting of communal and vervistic high-achieving peers than European American students. European American students endorsed individualistic and competitive high achievers significantly more than African American students. These and other findings suggest that the value students attach to academic success should not be understood in the absence of cultural considerations.     

Recharging cognition with DC brain polarization

Electrical direct current (DC) has been applied to the human head throughout history for various reasons and with claims of behavioral effects and clinical benefits. This technique has recently been rediscovered and its effects validated with modern quantitative techniques and experimental designs. Despite the very weak current used, DC polarization applied to specific brain areas can alter verbal fluency, motor learning and perceptual thresholds, and can be used in conjunction with transcranial magnetic stimulation. Compact and safe, this old technique seems poised to allow major advances cognitive science and therapy.     

Imaging or imagining? A neuroethics challenge informed by genetics

From a twenty-first century partnership between bioethics and neuroscience, the modern field of neuroethics is emerging, and technologies enabling functional neuroimaging with unprecedented sensitivity have brought new ethical, social and legal issues to the forefront. Some issues, akin to those surrounding modern genetics, raise critical questions regarding prediction of disease, privacy and identity. However, with new and still-evolving insights into our neurobiology and previously unquantifiable features of profoundly personal behaviors such as social attitude, value and moral agency, the difficulty of carefully and properly interpreting the relationship between brain findings and our own self-concept is unprecedented. Therefore, while the ethics of genetics provides a legitimate starting point--even a backbone--for tackling ethical issues in neuroimaging, they do not suffice. Drawing on recent neuroimaging findings and their plausible real-world applications, we argue that interpretation of neuroimaging data is a key epistemological and ethical challenge. This challenge is two-fold. First, at the scientific level, the sheer complexity of neuroscience research poses challenges for integration of knowledge and meaningful interpretation of data. Second, at the social and cultural level, we find that interpretations of imaging studies are bound by cultural and anthropological frameworks. In particular, the introduction of concepts of self and personhood in neuroimaging illustrates the interaction of interpretation levels and is a major reason why ethical reflection on genetics will only partially help settle neuroethical issues. Indeed, ethical interpretation of such findings will necessitate not only traditional bioethical input but also a wider perspective on the construction of scientific knowledge.     

Semantics for existential graphs

This paper examines Charles Peirce's graphical notation for first-order logic with identity. The notation forms a part of his system of existential graphs, which Peirce considered to be his best work in logic. In this paper a Tarskian semantics is provided for the graphical system.     

The Role of Candidate Sex in Voter Decision-Making

Recent studies investigating the role of candidate sex in voter decision-making have not found discrimination against women candidates. Thus, voter bias is often dismissed as part of the explanation for the drastic underrepresentation of women in high elective office. In a dual sample of Wyoming and California college students, bias against women candidates was found to be a factor in the vote choice. Studies that examine only one sample of voters in one region may be prematurely dismissing the possible existence of gender discrimination in some regions or cultures within the United States.     

Toward a Psychology of Loss

This article argues for the development of an interdisciplinary psychology of loss that is focused on people's pervading commonsense experience and recognition of loss in their own and others' lives. This field may be defined as broader than related fields such as traumatology, thanatology, and stress and coping. The psychology of loss focuses on the perception of major loss deriving from events such as death and divorce, but also on the perception of major loss in connection with such diverse phenomenna as loss of employment, los of bodily functioning, and being the target of violence or prejudice, including genocide. An important research topic for this field concerns people's stories of how major losses are interrelated in their lives. It is argued that perceived loss is a critical phenomenal state that must be dealt with in adaptation to most significant stressors.     

Using Brief Functional Analysis to Select Interventions for Oral Reading

Reading interventions were applied in a brief multielement format to examine their effectiveness at improving the oral reading fluency of three students referred for reading problems. Although each student had different profiles across experimental analyses, effective interventions were identified and a mini-replication confirmed the pattern of results in each case.     

Groups as gatekeepers to genomic research: conceptually confusing, morally hazardous, and practically useless

Some argue that human groups have a stake in the outcome of population-genomics research and that the decision to participate in such research should therefore be subject to group permission. It is not possible, however, to obtain prior group permission, because the actual human groups under study, human demes, are unidentifiable before research begins. Moreover, they lack moral standing. If identifiable social groups with moral standing are used as proxies for demes, group approval could be sought, but at the expense of unfairly exposing these surrogates to risks from which prior group approval is powerless to protect them. Unless population genomics can proceed without targeting socially defined groups, or can find other ways of protecting them, it may fall to individuals to protect the interests of the groups they care about, and to scientists to warn their subjects of the need to do so.