Actions Pour l’intégration Socioprofessionnelle Des Travailleurs Issus De L’immigration: La Valorisation Identitaire Comme Mode d’Accompagnement Spécifique

In industrialized countries, economic problems linked to the changing world and working habits potentially impact all workers; however, immigrant workers experience additional difficulties owing to their status as foreigners or as people of foreign origin. While these employment obstacles are varied, the problems are not absolute and do not affect all foreign job seekers with the same intensity. Moreover, various attitudes can be effective when faced with certain obstacles. We call them “bypassing strategies”: the behaviour of foreign job seekers trying to negotiate these obstacles. This article presents and discusses several cases of adult training and job seeker support initiatives from French-speaking Belgium; within a specific context, these experiences are based on the concept of “professional and identity development” of immigrant workers.     

Comparing associative, statistical, and inferential reasoning accounts of human contingency learning

For more than two decades, researchers have contrasted the relative merits of associative and statistical theories as accounts of human contingency learning. This debate, still far from resolution, has led to further refinement of models within each family of theories. More recently, a third theoretical view has joined the debate: the inferential reasoning account. The explanations of these three accounts differ critically in many aspects, such as level of analysis and their emphasis on different steps within the information-processing sequence. Also, each account has important advantages (as well as critical flaws) and emphasizes experimental evidence that poses problems to the others. Some hybrid models of human contingency learning have attempted to reconcile certain features of these accounts, thereby benefiting from some of the unique advantages of different families of accounts. A comparison of these families of accounts will help us appreciate the challenges that research on human contingency learning will face over the coming years.     

Relating reference points and weights in MOLP

A frequent problem for decision makers (DMs) analysing decisions involving multiple objectives is the identification and selection of the most preferred option from the set of non‐dominated solutions. Two techniques, weighted sum optimization and reference point optimization, have been developed to address this problem for multiobjective linear programming problems (MOLP). In this paper, we examine the relationship between these two techniques. We demonstrate that the values of the dual variables associate with auxiliary constraints of the reference point technique are equal to the weight values used to compute the same non‐dominated solution via the weighted sum technique. This insight will enable the development of new interactive solution procedures for MOLPs which allow the DM to readily switch from one method to the other during the search for the most preferred non‐dominated solution. The advantages of the approach are discussed in the paper. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Ethical leadership: A social learning perspective for construct development and testing

Leaders should be a key source of ethical guidance for employees. Yet, little empirical research focuses on an ethical dimension of leadership. We propose social learning theory as a theoretical basis for understanding ethical leadership and offer a constitutive definition of the ethical leadership construct. In seven interlocking studies, we investigate the viability and importance of this construct. We develop and test a new instrument to measure ethical leadership, examine the proposed connections of ethical leadership with other constructs in a nomological network, and demonstrate its predictive validity for important employee outcomes. Specifically, ethical leadership is related to consideration behavior, honesty, trust in the leader, interactional fairness, socialized charismatic leadership (as measured by the idealized influence dimension of transformational leadership), and abusive supervision, but is not subsumed by any of these. Finally, ethical leadership predicts outcomes such as perceived effectiveness of leaders, followers’ job satisfaction and dedication, and their willingness to report problems to management.     

On negation: Pure local rules

This is an initial systematic study of the properties of negation from the point of view of abstract deductive systems. A unifying framework of multiple-conclusion consequence relations is adopted so as to allow us to explore symmetry in exposing and matching a great number of positive contextual sub-classical rules involving this logical constant—among others, well-known forms of proof by cases, consequentia mirabilis and reductio ad absurdum. Finer definitions of paraconsistency and the dual paracompleteness can thus be formulated, allowing for pseudo-scotus and ex contradictione to be differentiated and for a comprehensive version of the Principle of Non-Triviality to be presented. A final proposal is made to the effect that—pure positive rules involving negation being often fallible—a characterization of what most negations in the literature have in common should rather involve, in fact, a reduced set of negative rules.     

An encompassing framework for Paraconsistent Logic Programs

We propose a framework which extends Antitonic Logic Programs [Damásio and Pereira, in: Proc. 6th Int. Conf. on Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Springer, 2001, p. 748] to an arbitrary complete bilattice of truth-values, where belief and doubt are explicitly represented. Inspired by Ginsberg and Fitting's bilattice approaches, this framework allows a precise definition of important operators found in logic programming, such as explicit and default negation. In particular, it leads to a natural semantical integration of explicit and default negation through the Coherence Principle [Pereira and Alferes, in: European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1992, p. 102], according to which explicit negation entails default negation. We then define Coherent Answer Sets, and the Paraconsistent Well-founded Model semantics, generalizing many paraconsistent semantics for logic programs. In particular, Paraconsistent Well-Founded Semantics with eXplicit negation (WFSX_p) [Alferes et al., J. Automated Reas. 14 (1) (1995) 93–147; Damásio, PhD thesis, 1996]. The framework is an extension of Antitonic Logic Programs for most cases, and is general enough to capture Probabilistic Deductive Databases, Possibilistic Logic Programming, Hybrid Probabilistic Logic Programs, and Fuzzy Logic Programming. Thus, we have a powerful mathematical formalism for dealing simultaneously with default, paraconsistency, and uncertainty reasoning. Results are provided about how our semantical framework deals with inconsistent information and with its propagation by the rules of the program.     

Theological Education with Hispanic Persons: Teaching Distinctiveness

The article explores the distinctiveness of Hispanic or Latino/a persons and implications for teaching practice in theological education. It reports on findings from a workshop for non‐Hispanic faculty that was conducted at the Hispanic Summer Program in 1901. The content is broadly defined, and the context and persons of theological education are considered in addressing the particular learning characteristics that can typify Hispanic persons. The work draws upon the pioneering work of Dr. Eldin Villafañe (The Liberating Spirit) who identifies cultural distinctiveness among Hispanic persons in the United States. Suggestions related to each of those characteristics are proposed for teaching practice with the expectation that transformation in practice can foster greater inclusion of Hispanic persons in theological education.     

Occasional reinforced trials during extinction can slow the rate of rapid reacquisition

Two appetitive conditioning experiments with rats examined reacquisition after conditioned responding was eliminated by either extinction or by a partial reinforcement procedure in which reinforced trials were occasionally presented among many nonreinforced trials. In Experiment 1, reacquisition to a conditional stimulus (CS) that had been conditioned and extinguished was more rapid than acquisition in a group that had received no prior conditioning. However, the addition of occasional reinforced trials to extinction slowed this rapid reacquisition effect. Experiment 2 replicated the result and showed that a procedure in which the CS and the unconditional stimulus (US) were unpaired in extinction interfered even further with reacquisition. The results suggest that rapid reacquisition is ordinarily produced when reinforced trials provide a contextual cue that can renew responding by signaling other acquisition trials (Ricker & Bouton, 1996). The effects of partial reinforcement in extinction are surprising from several theoretical perspectives and have useful clinical implications.     

Immersion and emotion: their impact on the sense of presence.

The present study is designed to test the role of immersion and media content in the sense of presence. Specifically, we are interested in the affective valence of the virtual environments. This paper describes an experiment that compares three immersive systems (a PC monitor, a rear projected video wall, and a head-mounted display) and two virtual environments, one involving emotional content and the other not. The purpose of the experiment was to test the interactive role of these two media characteristics (form and content). Scores on two self-report presence measurements were compared among six groups of 10 people each. The results suggest that both immersion and affective content have an impact on presence. However, immersion was more relevant for non-emotional environments than for emotional ones.     

Increased distractibility in schizotypy: Independent of individual differences in working memory capacity?

Individuals with schizophrenia typically show increased levels of distractibility. This has been attributed to impaired working memory capacity (WMC), since lower WMC is typically associated with higher distractibility, and schizophrenia is typically associated with impoverished WMC. Here, participants performed verbal and spatial serial recall tasks that were accompanied by to-be-ignored speech tokens. For the few trials wherein one speech token was replaced with a different token, impairment was produced to task scores (a deviation effect). Participants subsequently completed a schizotypy questionnaire and a WMC measure. Higher schizotypy scores were associated with lower WMC (as measured with operation span, OSPAN), but WMC and schizotypy scores explained unique variance in relation to the mean magnitude of the deviation effect. These results suggest that schizotypy is associated with heightened domain-general distractibility, but that this is independent of its relationship with WMC.