Prospective Study of Major Loss Life Events and Risk for Suicidal Thoughts and Behaviors Among Adolescents and Young Adults

This prospective, naturalistic study examined the association between major loss life experiences, other psychiatric risk factors (depression, hopelessness, and anxiety), and suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs) among adolescents followed through young adulthood for up to 14 years. Major loss life events were related to subsequent increases in STBs. Major loss life events were primarily related to increases in suicide ideation in the presence of lower levels of other risk factors. There was a bidirectional relationship between major losses and other risk factors. Implications for the association between loss experiences, other risk factors, and future STBs are discussed.     

Symbolically speaking: a connectionist model of sentence production

The ability to combine words into novel sentences has been used to argue that humans have symbolic language production abilities. Critiques of connectionist models of language often center on the inability of these models to generalize symbolically (Fodor & Pylyshyn, 1988; Marcus, 1998). To address these issues, a connectionist model of sentence production was developed. The model had variables (role‐concept bindings) that were inspired by spatial representations (Landau & Jackendoff, 1993). In order to take advantage of these variables, a novel dual‐pathway architecture with event semantics is proposed and shown to be better at symbolic generalization than several variants. This architecture has one pathway for mapping message content to words and a separate pathway that enforces sequencing constraints. Analysis of the model's hidden units demonstrated that the model learned different types of information in each pathway, and that the model's compositional behavior arose from the combination of these two pathways. The model's ability to balance symbolic and statistical behavior in syntax acquisition and to model aphasic double dissociations provided independent support for the dual‐pathway architecture.     

Adolescents' Decisions About Verbal and Physical Aggression

This investigation examines the ability of the theory of reasoned action (TRA) to explain and predict adolescents' verbal (i.e., insulting) and physical (i.e., fighting) aggression, as well as behaviors that encourage aggression such as watching a fight or telling others about a fight that is going to happen. Subjects were 488 seventh‐grade boys and girls enrolled in 2 public junior high schools in a large Midwestern U.S. city. Subjects completed a survey assessing components of the TRA as they related to the 4 behaviors under investigation. Consistent with the TRA, analysis revealed that attitudes and subjective norms predicted behavioral intent, and intent predicted behavior, for watching a fight, spreading rumors about a fight, and insulting. For fighting, however, attitudes, but not subjective norms, predicted behavioral intent, and intent predicted behavior. Implications for the TRA as well as for the development of youth violence prevention and intervention programs are discussed.