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.     

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.     

Choice of medical specialty: analysis of students' needs.

The purposes of this study were to assess the career development needs of entering medical students as measured by the Medical Career Development Inventory and to examine gender differences in responses to the inventory. A total of 115 entering medical students (representing two entering classes) took the inventory two months prior to matriculation. Analysis suggested that this sample of entering students had formed a vocational identity and that they had evaluated the suitability and viability of a commitment to a physician's career. However, the participants had not formed a clear picture of their specialty interest and goals. No significant gender differences were indicated. A recommended career assistance workshop is presented as appropriate for these students' needs.     

The role of syllabic and orthographic properties of letter cues in solving word fragments

The present research examined the role of phonological and orthographic properties of cues in mediating the retrieval of words from the mental lexicon. The task required subjects to resolve fragmented words when provided with semantically related cues (e.g., spiteful:---DIC----). Phonological properties of the letter cues were manipulated such that the letters either corresponded to the syllables (e.g., DIC in vindictive) or nonsyllables (NDI) in the word. Orthographic properties of the letter cues were manipulated by selecting letter groups that either co-occurred frequently in the language or did not. In two experiments, results revealed little or no effect of the phonological variable (syllables) but a reliable effect of the orthographic variable (letter-cue frequency). Letter cues with a low frequency of co-occurrence in the language led to better completion of the fragmented words. We interpret these findings as support for models of lexical representation that are based on orthographic properties (e.g., Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989) rather than those based on phonological constraints.