THE EARTH CHARTER AND JOURNEY OF THE UNIVERSE: AN INTEGRATED FRAMEWORK FOR BIODEMOCRACY

The principles of the Earth Charter and the cosmological story of Journey of the Universe provide a unique synergy for rethinking a sustainable future. The Great Story inspires the Great Work of the transformation of the political, social, and economic orders. Such a synergy can contribute to the broadened understanding of sustainability as including economic, ecological, social, and spiritual well‐being. This integrated understanding may be a basis for creating biodemocracies, which will involve long‐term policies, programs, and practices for a planetary future that is not only ethically sustainable, but also sustaining for human energies.     

ESTABLISHING DERIVED TEXTUAL ACTIVITY SCHEDULES IN CHILDREN WITH AUTISM

Children with autism are frequently taught to follow picture activity schedules to increase independence in task engagement and transitions. As textual behavior allows for greater independence and efficiency in responding, schedules should rapidly become textual in form. Previous research has shown the effectiveness of conditional discrimination training and superimposition and fading procedures in establishing textual control. The current study evaluated the effectiveness of these procedures in establishing derived textual control in activity schedules. Participants included two children with autism (ages 3 and 8 years). Following the demonstration of proficiency in picture activity schedules, participants were exposed to superimposition and fading and conditional discrimination training in an alternating treatments design. Pretest–posttest measures were used to evaluate emergent relations among stimuli. Conditional discrimination training was superior to stimulus fading for emergent relations. The participants showed no clear difference between the procedures related to derived textual control. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An Investigation into Unethical Behavior Intentions Among Undergraduate Students: A Malaysian Study

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of the dimensions of the theory of planned behavior, gender and course majors on unethical behavior intentions among Generation Y undergraduates. The sample of this study comprises 245 undergraduates from a private higher education institution (PHEI) in Malaysia. The instrument of this study is developed based on concepts developed from extant literature. Reliability and validity is accessed using Cronbach’s Alpha and Exploratory Factor Analysis respectively. Social desirability bias was monitored utilizing concepts adapted from Phillips and Clancy (American Journal of Sociology, 77(5), 921–940, 1972). Multiple Linear Regression and Independent sample T-tests were used for hypotheses testing. As a whole, results indicate that egoism, utilitarianism and magnitude of consequences exerted significant influence on unethical behavior intentions. Peer influence was not significant. In terms of gender, unethical intentions among males were influenced by egoism and peer influenced while females by utilitarianism and magnitude of consequences. Business majors did not consider magnitude of consequences significant in unethical behavior intentions. Ethical values form the fundamentals of ethical culture within organizations and a business environment which is increasingly based on self-regulation. Ethics is an essential part of the holistic personal development of future business leaders. As such, by understanding ethical attitudes and perceptions, we can draw implications for the further enhancements of teaching and learning of Business Ethics in academia as well as the development of ethical culture in the Malaysian context. Educators, parents and society also need to realise their role in the ethical development of these future Malaysian leaders. The framework of this study could be extended to actual behaviors, adult samples and also account for religiosity and age. This study utilizes the established dimensions and framework of the Theory of Planned Behavior in bridging the gap of research in unethical behavior within the context of a PHEI in Malaysia.     

Text Comprehension in Middle Aged Adults: Is There Anything Wrong?

Two experiments tested text comprehension skills in adults varying in age from 20 to 69 years. A coherence judgment task (n = 39), in which the pragmatic connection of two sentences had to be evaluated, did not yield any age effects. Both error rates and reaction times were largely independent of age. In a word recognition paradigm (n = 60), testing the strength of different text representation levels, there was a gradual, linear decrease in performance with age, accompanied by a similarly gradual increase in processing times. The results confirm that aging affects comprehension under high memory demands, but spares the conceptual, situation-based levels. Most importantly, it was shown that these changes become apparent during middle age already. Implications for education and neuropsychology are discussed.     

Analyzing Components of Reading On Performance Assessments: An Expanded Simple View

This research examined the validity of the theoretical model of reading outlined by the Simple View of Reading when measuring reading ability with a performance-based reading test. Participants were 95 fourth-grade, students randomly sampled from four schools in an urban district. The test we studied employed a mixture of traditional (multiple-choice) and performance assessment approaches (constructed-response items that required written responses). Our findings indicated that writing ability emerged as an important source of individual differences in explaining overall reading ability, even when we deconstructed the test into a multiple-choice-only score.     

Balm in Gilead: Spiritual Dimensions in Counseling African American Women

The authors describe African American cultural and spiritual traditions that are the bedrock for therapeutic work with this population. Through the use of a clinical case, they link African American women's emotional issues with healing interventions borrowed from their rich heritage of religious and spiritual rituals and practices.     

Genetic Testing Considerations in Breast Cancer Patients

Genetic testing is now feasible for a growing number of cancers. Although the implications for unaffected relatives have been widely described, the impact of the tests on affected individuals are often not recognized. We present and discuss four cases that highlight some of the issues—for example, feelings of guilt and anxiety, intrafamilial conflict, and support needs—that may arise in testing affected individuals. We offer some suggestions to aid in the approach to such testing.     

Effectiveness of family therapy: a meta-analysis

The effectiveness of family therapy is assessed in a meta-analysis of 19 studies. At post-treatment, the average patient with family therapy is better off than 76% of the patients with an alternative treatment, a minimal treatment or no treatment. This effect is comparable to that assessed of other psycho-therapies at post-treatment. Our data suggest, that the effect of family therapy increases during the first year after treatment, but that the effect may diminish sharply 18 months after the end of therapy. However, more studies with extended follow-ups will be needed before firm conclusions about the long-term effectiveness of family therapy can be advanced.     

Pitch and Manual Gestures

Gestures and speech parallel or complement each other semantically and pragmatically. Previous studies have postulated a similarly close correlation between intonation and gesture. This study microanalyzed the gestures of three subjects frame by frame and matched the movements with direction of pitch changes for each syllable in 90 intonation groups. The speech was analyzed using spectrographs. Coordinating direction of pitch and manual gesture movements is an option available to speakers, but it is not biologically mandated.