The Rate and Characteristics of Suicide Attempters in the Native Hawaiian Adolescent Population

Native Hawaiian high school students, N = 1779, were surveyed for symptoms of psycho-pathology and suicide attempts in the previous 6 months. Seventy-seven (4.3%) of the students reported making a suicide attempt. There were no significant differences in prevalence rates for males and females. Depression, anxiety, aggression, substance abuse symptoms, and low family support, but not peer support, were significantly correlated with suicide attempts. On logistic regression, depression, substance abuse, and family support independently predicted attempts. The lack of gender difference may indicate a cultural characteristic of the Hawaiian population that differentiates it from mainstream American populations but likens it to the Native American population.     

Role Models for Lower Class Negro Boys

Much has been written about ways in which lower class Negro students can be motivated to seek middle class goals. Providing middle class role models for these students is one technique that is usually recommended, but seldom discussed analytically. The popular practice of providing only Negro adult role models to Negro children is challenged as being an activity that impedes the movement of lower class Negroes into the mainstream of American life.     

The Public and Private Use of Consensus-Raising Excuses

ABSTRACT Two experiments tested the proposition that people use consensus-raising excuses more in private than in public when the audience has information that could refute subjects' claims about others In Experiment 1, subjects received success or failure feedback and made public or private attributions to ability, effort, task difficulty, and luck In Experiment 2, subjects received positive or negative feedback and evaluated themselves and others on the trait Task difficulty attributions and evaluations of others are consensus-raising measures Consistent with our hypothesis, subjects receiving negative feedback in Experiment 1 claimed that the task was more difficult, and in Experiment 2 evaluated the other more negatively in private than in public.     

Cognitive Tendencies in Analogical Forecasting1

This article attempts to identify some cognitive tendencies involved in analogical forecasting of the outcomes of medical treatment. Sixty-one medical doctors were involved in two experimental tasks concerned with prediction of the outcomes of a new medical treatment when the result with a first patient was known to be either negative or positive. The same subjects were also tested by the Short Optimism/Pessimism Questionnaire (SO/PQ) to explore relationships between life attitude and the cognitive tendencies observed in the experiment. The following findings were reported: (1) The first step of forecasting was recognized as a Data Evaluation Process (DEP), where the physician decides if the given data are sufficient to forecast the result of the same treatment with a new patient. (2) Two cognitive tendencies were identified: non-data-suggested tendency—drawing a conclusion opposite to the data given; and data-suggested tendency—drawing an optimistic conclusion when forecasting from “positive” data and a pessimistic conclusion when forecasting from “negative” data. The second tendency appeared to be dominant; however, the “positive” data created a stronger atmosphere to draw conclusions on a negative outcome. (3) It was stated that analogical forecasting involves two integrated processes, i.e., concluding and asserting. If the integration process is not complete, the subject is drawing analogical conclusions with a low confidence. (4) An optimistic life attitude appeared to be an important factor in determining analogical forecasting.     

Rhetoric and “doing philosophy”

By drawing new distinctions labelled appeal and response to replace traditional rhetorical modes of written discourse, the essay sketches a new perspective about what philosophers are doing rhetorically in doing philosophy. To think of philosophers as simply engaged in argument is an oversimplification and a distortion of what philosophers do. Crucial to doing philosophy are four activities: (1) definition and redefinition of problems and issues that form both the focus of the canonical historical literature of philosophy and what goes on in contemporary philosophy as a discipline, (2) the development and use of formal languages and technical vocabularies to abbreviate and label complexity and to disambiguate and precise distinctions necessary to deal with problems and issues, (3) the development and exploration of argumentative appeals for acceptance or refutation of answers to questions raised by the philosophical problematic, and (4) the development and exploration of explanatory responses to questions raised by the problematic. In so far as these four activities are driven and sanctioned by the current, self-defining philosophical problematic, contemporary philosophy as a body of knowledge is historical, cumulative, and marked by progress, and the doing of philosophy is fundamentally the making of written appeals and responses about its problematic.