The Labor Market Performance of Naturalized Immigrants in Switzerland—New Findings from the Swiss Labor Force Survey

The objective of this paper is to obtain new empirical insights into the integration of naturalized immigrants in Switzerland. In particular, we focus on a comparison of first-generation immigrants with and without Swiss citizenship. The analysis on the basis of the 2008 wave of the Swiss Labor Force Survey is motivated by findings in the literature highlighting the role of the acquisition of citizenship in the integration process. In line with those findings, our results demonstrate that naturalized first-generation immigrants tend to have higher wages than non-naturalized immigrants. An applied Blinder?COaxaca decomposition technique demonstrates that this result is strongly connected to the higher human capital endowments of immigrants who have attained Swiss citizenship. The findings are in line with other case studies stating that immigrants positively select into citizenship.     

Entwicklungsbezogene Pr?vention von Gewalt und Kriminalit?t

This article provides an overview of concepts and empirical evaluations of developmental prevention of delinquency, violence and other forms of antisocial behavior in childhood and youth. At first basic terms and arguments are discussed; then a selection of family, child school and community-oriented programs are briefly presented. There follows an integrative evaluation of the field that is mainly based on systematic reviews and meta-analyses. An integrative model shows that preventive effects depend on many characteristics of the programs, contexts, participants and evaluation methods. In total effect sizes are positive and small but show practical relevance. There is a strong need for more well controlled outcome evaluations with long-term follow-up and more process evaluations of implementation and quality assurance. Future research and practice should be integrated within a long-term and cross-departmental prevention policy.     

The dependence of semantic relatedness effects upon prime processing

The semantic relationship between a prime and a target word has been shown to affect the speed at which the target word is processed. This series of experiments investigated how the semantic priming effect is influenced by the nature of the task performed on the prime word. Subjects were asked to perform either a naming or a letter-search task on the prime word and either a lexical-decision or color-naming task on the target word. When the primes were named, response times for the target words were facilitated in the lexical-decision task and inhibited in the color-naming task. However, these effects were eliminated or reduced to an insignificant level when the primes were searched for letters. We suggest that in order to produce the usual priming effect, the primes have to be processed for meaning rather than probed for constituents.     

A Kantian argument in favor of unimpeded access to health care

The principle that everybody should have access to essential health care goods is in conflict with the notion that property rights should be respected. The Kantian doctrine of rights is explored in order to solve this conflict. Kant's notion of a legislative will is explained and used to show the inherent limits of the legal terms “property” and “ownership” (it can refer only to things external to subjects and to possible objects of choice). What is internal to the subject is outside of the realm of the legislative will. A law excluding those unable to pay from access to essential health care would not be just. A law granting that access would be just.     

Psychophysical features of the transition from pure heat perception to heat pain perception

The psychophysical features of the transition from the pure heat to the heat pain range were studied in 25 healthy subjects (mean age 28.8 years). Thirty short heat stimuli from ?1.6° C to + 1.6° C relative to the pain threshold were applied to the thenar of the left hand with an apparatus containing a Peltier thermode (nine different temperatures at 0.4°C intervals). The subjects rated the sensation intensity on a visual analogue scale. The resulting stimulus/sensation intensity relations could be explained equally well (same goodness of fit) by a model with a power function (PF) and by a model with two linear regression lines (TLR), one for stimulus intensities below and one for those above the pain threshold and intersecting at the pain threshold. The slopes of the TLR model were significantly larger above the pain threshold than below it. The PF model produced exponents between 1.8 and 1.9. We conclude that to describe the transition area, it is sufficient to use simple linear models for both the pure heat and the heat pain ranges.     

Natural resources for morality: commentary

Loewy makes an extraordinary and audacious claim. He does not only reject virtue ethics, casuistry, the "Kantian injunction of respect for persons based on their capacity for self-legislation," and the utilitarian greatest good as possible groundings for clinical ethics. He even offers another grounding that he qualifies explicitly as "universally acceptable." Of course we have to analyze what it is that he offers. But prior to that, we must analyze what he means by "grounding." Grounding suggests an evidence that can neither be rationally grounded again nor rationally questioned but that other concepts can be rationally grounded upon. And it is at least doubtful whether the alternatives he quotes are groundings in that strict sense....     

Sample size and correlational inference

In 4 studies, the authors examined the hypothesis that the structure of the informational environment makes small samples more informative than large ones for drawing inferences about population correlations. The specific purpose of the studies was to test predictions arising from the signal detection simulations of R. B. Anderson, M. E. Doherty, N. D. Berg, and J. C. Friedrich (2005). The results of a simulation study in the present article confirmed and extended previous theoretical claims (R. B. Anderson et al., 2005) that in a yes/no correlation detection task, small-sample advantages should occur but should be restricted to particular decision conditions. In 3 behavioral studies, participants viewed larger or smaller samples of data pairs and judged whether each sample had been drawn from a population characterized by a zero correlation or from one characterized by a greater-than-zero correlation. Consistent with traditional statistical theory, accuracy tended to be greater for larger than for smaller samples, though there was a small-sample advantage in 1 experimental condition. The results are discussed in relation to alternative theoretical and behavioral paradigms such as those of Y. Kareev (e.g., 2005) and K. Fiedler and Y. Kareev (2006).     

Absolute pitch: frequency-range discriminations in pigeons (Columba livia): comparisons with zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) and humans (Homo sapiens)

Absolute pitch (AP) is the ability to classify individual pitches without an external referent. The authors compared results from pigeons (Columba livia, a nonsongbird species) with results (R. Weisman, M. Njegovan, C. Sturdy, L. Phillmore, J. Coyle, & D. Mewhort, 1998) from zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata, a songbird species) and humans (Homo sapiens) in AP tests that required classification of contiguous tones into 3 or 8 frequency ranges on the basis of correlations between the tones in each frequency range and reward. Pigeons' 3-range discriminations were similar in accuracy to those of zebra finches and humans. In the more challenging 8-range task, pigeons, like zebra finches, discriminated shifts from reward to nonreward from range to range across all 8 ranges, whereas humans discriminated only the 1st and last ranges. Taken together with previous research, the present experiments suggest that birds may have more accurate AP than mammals.