employment or economic success: the experience of individuals with disabilities in transition from school to work

This research explores the mediating effects of severity of disability on the employment outcomes of participants with disabilities, taking into account their perception of interest‐job match. Participants were 115 high school students with disabilities who took part in an intensive school‐to‐work transition program that explored occupational interests in relation‐to‐work opportunities. Results of a 1‐way analysis of covariance indicated that severity of disability had a significant effect on the employment outcomes of participants despite interest‐job matching. Although participants experienced positive employment outcomes in terms of job entry, these outcomes may not necessarily translate into higher earnings.     

Temporal associations of cigarette smoking with social influences, academic performance, and delinquency: a four-wave longitudinal study from ages 13-23.

This study examined the temporal associations of cigarette smoking with prosmoking social influences, academic performance, and delinquency in a cohort of 6,527 adolescents surveyed at ages 13, 16, 18, and 23 years. Prosmoking peer and family influences were risk factors for future smoking throughout adolescence, with family influences perhaps also operating indirectly through the adolescent's exposure to prosmoking peers. There were reciprocal associations of youth smoking with parental approval, peer smoking, and poor grades (but not delinquency), with youth smoking emerging as a stronger antecedent than consequence of these psychosocial factors. Few gender differences in these associations were observed. Implications of these findings for efforts to prevent youth smoking are discussed.     

Sitting on the word “chair”: Behavioral support, contextual cues, and the literal use of symbols

Recent work from an embodied-cognition perspective suggests that symbolic understanding involves bodily actions. Indeed, laboratory evidence and cultural phenomena such as magic rituals and symbolic aggression show that the behaviors evoked by a word and its referent can be quite similar to each other. In other circumstances, however, words and objects fail to display the expected degree of functional equivalence: Although we regularly sit on chairs, for example, we normally do not sit on the word “chair.” In two experiments we evaluated whether functional equivalence between word and object depended on behavioral support and contextual stimuli, as suggested by some Pavlovian views of symbolic performance. Children spent more or less time seated on a token of the word “chair,” depending on supports for sitting and background stimuli. This study may help to understand the determinants of response frequency in symbolic understanding.     

Cause by Omission and Norm: Not Watering Plants

People generally accept that there is causation by omission—that the omission of some events cause some related events. But this acceptance elicits the selection problem, or the difficulty of explaining the selection of a particular omissive cause or class of causes from the causal conditions. Some theorists contend that dependence theories of causation cannot resolve this problem. In this paper, we argue that the appeal to norms adequately resolves the selection problem for dependence theories, and we provide novel experimental evidence for it.     

Involvement of the insular cortex in retention of conditioned taste aversion is not time dependent

In fear-associated learning paradigms, hippocampal lesions induce memory deficits of recent but not remote memories, while amygdala lesions produce retention deficits irrespective of the age of the memory. In conditioned taste aversion (CTA), non-hippocampal mediated learning paradigm, the insular vortex (IC) has shown to have a crucial role in consolidation and storage of CTA memory. Due to the functional and anatomical similarities to the hippocampus, a time dependent role of the IC in CTA retention cannot be ruled out. To test whether the IC shows a time dependent role in CTA memory retention, male Wistar rats were CTA trained on saccharin 0.1% (LiCl 0.15M, 2% b/w, 40 min after drinking) and lesioned with ibotenic acid (200-300 nL, 5mg/mL) unilaterally into the IC 1 week or bilaterally 1 or 6 weeks after CTA. CTA memory was completely disrupted in both bilateral lesion groups but unaffected in the unilateral lesioned group. The resulting preference was comparable to that of the bilaterally IC lesioned animals exposed to the taste for the first time, proving that in these animals a complete amnesic state was achieved. Bilaterally IC lesioned rats showed normal discrimination between preferred (sucrose 5%) and non-preferred (quinone) tastes. Our data indicates that the involvement of the IC in CTA is not time dependent and that CTA memories are stored in each hemisphere separately.     

A Critical Analysis of Approaches to the Development of Preventive Interventions for Subcultural Groups

The ultimate success of preventive interventions relies on their ability to engage and influence the growing presence of subcultural groups. To encourage and guide the development of effective preventive intervention for subcultural groups, four approaches are described, illustrated, and critiqued with respect to their considerations of cultural fit, reach, efficacy and adoption. Those approaches are (a) the prevention research cycle, (b) cultural adaptations of evidence-based interventions, (c) investigator-initiated culturally-grounded approaches, and (d) community-initiated indigenous approaches. Special attention is given to recent advances in the specification of stages in the cultural adaptation of interventions. The paper closes with some conclusions and topics in need of greater attention.     

General cognitive functioning and psycholinguistic abilities in children with Smith-Magenis Syndrome

This study is a neuropsycholinguistic research of a rare genetic syndrome with microdeletion that co-occurs with intellectual disabilities and relatively good language abilities, the Smith-Magenis Syndrome (SMS). Nevertheless, there are no cognitive and psycholinguistic profile analyses performed with Spanish population. In this sense, we characterized the cognitive and psycholinguistic profile of a sample with 9 participants with SMS (7 to 11 years of age). The cognitive and psychological profile was assessed with diverse standardized tests: Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children - IV version, Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities and Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. Results suggest a specific cognitive and psychological profile characterized by a low IQ and relative good abilities in integrating information, whereas attention problems and hyperactive behaviors were displayed when interacting with the child during the assessment. This work is the first evidence of the cognitive and psycholinguistic profile characterization in patients with SMS in Spain, and will help to guide a more accurate diagnosis and differential intervention in rare genetic diseases with similar cognitive and psycholinguistic profiles.     

Neurobiological and memory models of risky decision making in adolescents versus young adults

Predictions of fuzzy-trace theory and neurobiological approaches are examined regarding risk taking in a classic decision-making task--the framing task--as well as in the context of real-life risk taking. We report the 1st study of framing effects in adolescents versus adults, varying risk and reward, and relate choices to individual differences, sexual behavior, and behavioral intentions. As predicted by fuzzy-trace theory, adolescents modulated risk taking according to risk and reward. Adults showed standard framing, reflecting greater emphasis on gist-based (qualitative) reasoning, but adolescents displayed reverse framing when potential gains for risk taking were high, reflecting greater emphasis on verbatim-based (quantitative) reasoning. Reverse framing signals a different way of thinking compared with standard framing (reverse framing also differs from simply choosing the risky option). Measures of verbatim- and gist-based reasoning about risk, sensation seeking, behavioral activation, and inhibition were used to extract dimensions of risk proneness: Sensation seeking increased and then decreased, whereas inhibition increased from early adolescence to young adulthood, predicted by neurobiological theories. Two additional dimensions, verbatim- and gist-based reasoning about risk, loaded separately and predicted unique variance in risk taking. Importantly, framing responses predicted real-life risk taking. Reasoning was the most consistent predictor of real-life risk taking: (a) Intentions to have sex, sexual behavior, and number of partners decreased when gist-based reasoning was triggered by retrieval cues in questions about perceived risk, whereas (b) intentions to have sex and number of partners increased when verbatim-based reasoning was triggered by different retrieval cues in questions about perceived risk.     

Responsibility for forgetting

Philosophical Studies - In this paper, we focus on whether and to what extent we judge that people are responsible for the consequences of their forgetfulness. We ran a series of behavioral studies...