The influence of maternal child-rearing attitudes and teaching behaviors on preschoolers' delay of gratification

This study was an exploratory examination of the influence of mothers' teaching behaviors, strategies, and child-rearing attitudes on their children's ability to delay gratification. In an externally imposed delay of gratification situation, 30 mothers from a rural university community taught their children strategies that could help them refrain from touching a brightly wrapped present when the mothers left the room. Results showed that mothers of children who did not delay gratification exhibited teaching behaviors and child-rearing attitudes consistent with a permissive parenting style, whereas mothers of children who did delay gratification exhibited teaching behaviors and child-rearing attitudes consistent with an authoritative parenting style. The results of this study are discussed with respect to the development of children's self-control and self-regulatory abilities.     

Item selection rules in a Computerized Adaptive Test for the assessment of written English

Item selection rules in a Computerized Adaptive Test for the assessment of written English. e-CAT is a Computerized Adaptive Test for the evaluation of written English knowledge, using the item selection rule most commonly employed: the maximum Fisher information criterion. Some of the problems of this criterion have a negative impact in the estimation accuracy and in the item bank security. In this study, the performance of this item selection rule is compared, by means of simulation, with two other rules: selecting the item with maximum Fisher information in an interval (Veerkamp y Berger, 1997) and a new criterion, called "maximum Fisher information in an interval with geometric mean". In general, this new rule shows smaller measurement error and smaller item overlap rates. It seems, thus, recommendable, as it allows the simultaneous improvement of estimation accuracy and the maintenance of the item bank security of e-CAT.     

The state of the psychological contract and its relation with employees' psychological health

In the present paper the role of the state of the psychological contract to predict psychological health results is studied in a sample of 385 employees of different Spanish companies. Results indicate that the state of the psychological contract significantly predicts life satisfaction, work-family conflict and well-being beyond the prediction produced by the content of the psychological contract. In addition, trust and fairness, two dimensions of the state of psychological contract, all together contribute to explain these psychological health variables adding value to the role as predictor of fulfillment of the psychological contract. The results support the approach argued by Guest and colleagues.     

A Chilean version of the Efficient Personality Questionnaire for Adolescents

This investigation aims at adapting the test for Efficient Personality in educational contexts to Chilean reality. This instrument measures the construct efficient personality , made up of four levels of the self: strengths, requests, challenges and relationships. The original version has 58 items. In order to adapt it to our reality, 30 items were modified. The instrument was applied to a sample of 594 third and fourth secondary level students from four educational institutions of Vi?a del Mar. The new version of the instrument (23 items) presents a .85 reliability coefficient. The factorial analysis shows a structure of four basic factors which explain 50.42 % of the total variance. These factors, which are very similar those proposed in the original instrument, are named as academic self realization, social self realization, solving efficiency, and self steem. The second order factors analysis reveals a single factors structure that explains 43,28 % of the total variance, thus confirming the presence of the only factor that would correspond to the efficient personality construct presented.     

Interpretations of Einstein’s Equation E = mc 2

Interpretations of Einstein’s equation differ primarily concerning whether E = mc² entails that mass and energy are the same property of physical systems, and hence whether there is any sense in which mass is ever ‘converted’ into energy (or vice versa). In this paper, I examine six interpretations of Einstein’s equation and argue that all but one fail to satisfy a minimal set of conditions that all interpretations of physical theories ought to satisfy. I argue that we should prefer the interpretation of Einstein’s equation that holds that mass and energy are distinct properties of physical systems. This interpretation also carries along the view that while most cases of ‘conversion’ are not genuine examples of mass being ‘converted’ into energy (or vice versa), it is possible that the there are such ‘conversions’ in the sense that a certain amount of energy ‘appears’ and an equivalent of mass ‘disappears’. Finally, I suggest that the interpretation I defend is the only one that does not blur the distinction between what Einstein called ‘principle’ and ‘constructive’ theories. This is philosophically significant because it emphasizes that explanations of Einstein’s equation and the ‘conversion’ of mass and energy must be top‐down explanations.     

Exploring task-set reconfiguration with random task sequences

Switching between two different tasks normally results in an impairment in people's performance known as a switch cost, typically measured as an increase in reaction time (RT) and errors compared to a situation in which no task switch is required. Researchers in task switching have suggested that this switch cost is the behavioural manifestation of the task set reconfiguration processes that are necessary to perform the upcoming task. However, an examination of the literature in task switching reveals apparently contradictory results about the nature of task set reconfiguration processes. In Experiment 1, we addressed this issue by comparing participants' performance in two different experimental conditions: predictable task switching and random task switching. In the predictable switch condition the switch cost completely vanished after the first repetition of the new task. However, in the random switch condition, while the difference between switch and repetition trials was not significant, we observed a significant reduction in RT between the first and second repetition of the new task. In Experiment 2, we further investigated the pattern of task set reconfiguration in the random switch situation. The results showed a progressive reduction of participants' response latencies across repetitions of the same task. The present study demonstrates that, whereas the results in predictable switching conditions are compatible with an exogenous-reconfiguration hypothesis, random task switching produces a more gradual, decay-like switch cost reduction with task repetition.     

A Proof-theoretical Analysis of Semiconstructive Intermediate Theories

In the 80's Pierangelo Miglioli, starting from motivations in the framework of Abstract Data Types and Program Synthesis, introduced semiconstructive theories, a family of large subsystems of classical theories that guarantee the computability of functions and predicates represented by suitable formulas. In general, the above computability results are guaranteed by algorithms based on a recursive enumeration of the theorems of the whole system. In this paper we present a family of semiconstructive systems, we call uniformly semiconstructive, that provide computational procedures only involving formulas with bounded complexity. We present several examples of uniformly semiconstructive systems containing Harrop theories, induction principles and some well-known predicate intermediate principles. Among these, we give an account of semiconstructive and uniformly semiconstructive systems which lie between Intuitionistic and Classical Arithmetic and we discuss their constructive incompatibility.     

Beyond the “hot-and-cold” game: A demonstration of computer-controlled shaping

Shaping, or the method of successive approximations, is widely taught in introductory psychology and the psychology of learning as a procedure for establishing new behavior. This article illustrates a computer-controlled shaping demonstration that allows the user to specify several critical parameters of the shaping process and that then shapes the user’s mouse movements toward an arbitrary virtual (invisible) target on the computer screen. The relative effectiveness of different shaping parameters can be assessed by examining several dependent measures, such as the distance of the cursor from the target across time and the rate at which reinforcers were earned. This demonstration allows students to move beyond the notion that shaping is simply the application of the “hot-and-cold” game and to understand that there is a science underlying the art of shaping.     

One-year prediction of cognitive decline following cognitive-stimulation from real-world data

Clinical evidence based on real-world data (RWD) is accumulating exponentially providing larger sample sizes available, which demand novel methods to deal with the enhanced heterogeneity of the data. Here, we used RWD to assess the prediction of cognitive decline in a large heterogeneous sample of participants being enrolled with cognitive stimulation, a phenomenon that is of great interest to clinicians but that is riddled with difficulties and limitations. More precisely, from a multitude of neuropsychological Training Materials (TMs), we asked whether was possible to accurately predict an individual's cognitive decline one year after being tested. In particular, we performed longitudinal modelling of the scores obtained from 215 different tests, grouped into 29 cognitive domains, a total of 124,610 instances from 7902 participants (40% male, 46% female, 14% not indicated), each performing an average of 16 tests. Employing a machine learning approach based on ROC analysis and cross-validation techniques to overcome overfitting, we show that different TMs belonging to several cognitive domains can accurately predict cognitive decline, while other domains perform poorly, suggesting that the ability to predict decline one year later is not specific to any particular domain, but is rather widely distributed across domains. Moreover, when addressing the same problem between individuals with a common diagnosed label, we found that some domains had more accurate classification for conditions such as Parkinson's disease and Down syndrome, whereas they are less accurate for Alzheimer's disease or multiple sclerosis. Future research should combine similar approaches to ours with standard neuropsychological measurements to enhance interpretability and the possibility of generalizing across different cohorts.