Best practices for missing data management in counseling psychology

This article urges counseling psychology researchers to recognize and report how missing data are handled, because consumers of research cannot accurately interpret findings without knowing the amount and pattern of missing data or the strategies that were used to handle those data. Patterns of missing data are reviewed, and some of the common strategies for dealing with them are described. The authors provide an illustration in which data were simulated and evaluate 3 methods of handling missing data: mean substitution, multiple imputation, and full information maximum likelihood. Results suggest that mean substitution is a poor method for handling missing data, whereas both multiple imputation and full information maximum likelihood are recommended alternatives to this approach. The authors suggest that researchers fully consider and report the amount and pattern of missing data and the strategy for handling those data in counseling psychology research and that editors advise researchers of this expectation.     

Fitch’s paradox and <Emphasis Type="Italic">ceteris paribus</Emphasis> modalities

The paper attempts to give a solution to the Fitch’s paradox though the strategy of the reformulation of the paradox in temporal logic, and a notion of knowledge which is a kind of ceteris paribus modality. An analogous solution has been offered in a different context to solve the problem of metaphysical determinism.     

A novel study: Investigating the structure of narrative and autobiographical memories

In two experiments we assessed the degree to which memory for events are similar or differ depending on whether they were narrative or autobiographical events. Consistent with previous research on autobiographical memory, memories for events captured the sequential order of events. However, in contrast to autobiographical memory research, ratings of importance did not appear to be related to retrieval speed. An analysis of causal connectivity of the recalled events was significantly related to retrieval speed. Issues of narrative comprehension and memory, autobiographical memory, and their overlap are discussed.     

Adaptation in Visuomanual Tracking Depends on Intact Proprioception

The role of arm proprioception in motor learning was investigated in experiments in which, by moving the arm, subjects followed the motion of a target displayed on a monitor screen. Adaptive capabilities were tested in visuomanual tracking tasks following alterations in the relationship between the observer's actual arm movement and visual feedback of the arm movement given by a cursor motion on the screen. Tracking performance and adaptive changes, measured in terms of spatiotemporal error, tracking trajectory curvature, and spatial gain, were compared in 7 control subjects (CSs) and in 1 deafferented subject (DS). CSs adapted appropriately to altered visuomanual relationships; those changes were present in trials immediately after restoration of normal scaling. In contrast, although the DS modified his tracking strategy from trial to trial according to the altered conditions, he did not show plastic changes in internal visuomanual scaling. Like the results of prismatic adaptation experiments, the present results suggest that arm proprioception contributes to the plastic changes that follow alterations in the scaling of visuomanual gain.     

Three Factors in L2 Reading Ability: Using Rauding Theory to Reanalyze a Study by Nassaji and Geva

This study investigated whether structured or unstructured questioning strategies, combined with two levels of domain knowledge and text coherence, significantly affect text memory and text learning. Results of this study suggest that high domain knowledge and structured questioning strategies are the most reliable predictors of text memory and text learning. Several main effects favoring high domain knowledge arose on text memory and, to a lesser extent, text learning measures. Significant results involving structured questioning techniques (i.e., signal words and generic question stems) were detected primarily through interaction effects and one main effect. While not always significantly superior, generic question stem participants outperformed their signal word and unguided questioning counterparts on the majority of text memory and text learning variables.     

‘Be careful,or you'll act corruptly and make a carved image for yourselves,in the form of a figure,the likeness male or female’ (Deut. 4:16): A commentary on Norenzayan's Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict (2013)

Norenzayan's book is an ambitious attempt to integrate recent research from behavioral economics and social psychology, particularly priming studies, into a book about religion. If the account is meant as an explanation of religion or big religion, it does not succeed. If it has more modest aims, namely to describe how surveillance institutions, of which big religion is one important class, can sometimes lead to cooperation and conflict, then it is quite successful in doing so.     

Neighborhood Crime and School Climate as Predictors of Elementary School Academic Quality: A Cross-Lagged Panel Analysis

Past research has found negative relationships between neighborhood structural disadvantage and students’ academic outcomes. Comparatively little work has evaluated the associations between characteristics of neighborhoods and schools themselves. This study explored the longitudinal, reciprocal relationships between neighborhood crime and school-level academic achievement within 500 urban schools. Results revealed that higher neighborhood crime (and particularly violent crime) predicted decreases in school academic achievement across time. School climate emerged as one possible mechanism within this relationship, with higher neighborhood crime predicting decreases in socioemotional learning and safety, but not academic rigor. All three dimensions of school climate were predictive of changes in academic achievement. Although this research supports a primarily unidirectional hypothesis of neighborhoods’ impacts on embedded settings, additional work is needed to understand these relationships using additional conceptualizations of neighborhood climate.     

Recent frege studies

MICHAEL D. RESNIK, Frege and the philosophy of mathematics. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1980. 244 pp. $16.50.

HANS D. SLUGA, Gottlob Frege. London, Boston and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980. xi + 203 pp. £ 12.95.     

Categoricity Theorems and Conceptions of Set

Two models of second-order ZFC need not be isomorphic to each other, but at least one is isomorphic to an initial segment of the other. The situation is subtler for impure set theory, but Vann McGee has recently proved a categoricity result for second-order ZFCU plus the axiom that the urelements form a set. Two models of this theory with the same universe of discourse need not be isomorphic to each other, but the pure sets of one are isomorphic to the pure sets of the other.This paper argues that similar results obtain for considerably weaker second-order axiomatizations of impure set theory that are in line with two different conceptions of set, the iterative conception and the limitation of size doctrine.