Parents,friends and immigrant youths' academic engagement: A mediation analysis

Parents and friends can help facilitate the academic engagement of newcomer immigrant youth during the early post-migration years. Using an accelerated longitudinal design and the integrative risk and resilience framework, we examined how parent home involvement and friendships were directly and indirectly associated with the development of newcomer immigrant youths' academic engagement. We used data from three waves (Years 3–5) of the Longitudinal Immigrant Student Adaptation study where a culturally diverse group of immigrant youth (N = 354, ages 10–17, M_timeinUS = 3.98 years, SD = 1.39) in the United States reported on their perceptions of parent home involvement (educational values and communication) and friendship (educational values and academic support) in Year 3 and on their academic engagement (behavioural and emotional) across 3 years. Findings showed high-stable behavioural and emotional engagement and direct positive associations between perceptions of parent home involvement and initial levels of behavioural and emotional engagement and between perceptions of friend educational values and initial levels of emotional engagement. Additionally, perceptions of parents' educational values indirectly contributed to initial levels of emotional engagement through positive associations with perceptions of friends' educational values. These findings can inform family–school partnerships and school-interventions targeting newcomer immigrant youths' engagement.     

Fluctuating maximal God

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion - This paper explores a variety of perfect being theism that combines Yujin Nagasawa’s maximal God thesis with the view that God is not...     

Margarita Von Lüttichau: Intermediary between Jung and Bill Wilson

This paper details Von Lüttichau’s relationship with Carl Jung and Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), and her role as intermediary in the relationship between the two men. Her contribution within this mediator role has not been previously recognized but is an important factor in explaining how Jung became introduced to the AA 12-step format and validated the effectiveness of group work. After the Second World War, Von Lüttichau travelled between America and Switzerland and introduced the writings and ideas of Wilson and Jung to each other and acted as an intermediary between both titans. Jung gave Von Lüttichau extraordinarily detailed instructions on how the 12-step programme of AA could be applied to ‘general neurotics’. Von Lüttichau’s private papers provide a bridge between Jung and Wilson’s correspondence and help to piece together gaps in both Jungian and AA history.     

Foot Motion Character During Forward and Backward Walking With Shoes and Barefoot

Abstract

Backward walking (BW) has been extensively used in athletic training and orthopedic rehabilitation as it may have value for enhancing balance. This study identified the differences in foot intersegment kinematics (forward walking (FW) vs. time-reversed BW) and plantar pressure parameters of 16 healthy habitually shod individuals walking FW and BW using flexible shoes (SH) and under barefoot conditions (BF). BW was found to have shorter stride length (SL) and higher stride frequency (SF) under BF conditions compared with SH, which indicates a better BW gait stability under BF conditions. Decreased HX/FF dorsiflexion at HO in BW induces less plantar aponeurosis tension which may inhibit the windlass mechanism compared to FW walking. Increased forefoot relative to hindfoot (FF/HF) pronation and sequentially hindfoot relative to tibia (HF/TB) eversion combined with medially distributed plantar pressure and a higher plantar contact area in the medial side in BW–BF maybe beneficial in maintaining balance. These results indicate that BW training may be more reliable under BF conditions compared to the SH conditions based on greater sensory information feedback from the plantar area resulting in better biomechanical behavior.     

Effects of cognitive behavioural therapy and return-to-work intervention for patients on sick leave due to stress-related disorders: Results from a randomized trial

The aim of this study was to evaluate specific effects for patients with adjustment or exhaustion disorder, the Stress subgroup (n = 152), regarding symptom severity and sick leave after CBT, a return-to-work intervention (RTW-I), and a combination of them (COMBO), using data from a randomized trial. In the original study, primary care patients on sick leave (N = 211) were randomized to CBT (n = 64), RTW-I (n = 67), or COMBO (n = 80). Blinded Clinician Severity Rating (CSR) of symptoms and sick leave registry data were primary outcomes. Subgroup analyses showed that for the Stress subgroup, CBT led to greater reduction of symptoms than RTW-I posttreatment, but COMBO did not differ from CBT or RTW-I. Regarding sick leave, there was no difference between treatments in the Stress subgroup. An exploratory analysis of the treatment effects in a subgroup of patients with depression, anxiety or insomnia indicates that RTW-I reduced sick leave faster than CBT. We conclude that CBT may be promising as an effective treatment of stress and exhaustion disorder.     

Enhanced Verbal Statistical Learning in Glossolalia

Glossolalia (“speaking in tongues”) is a rhythmic utterance of word-like strings of sounds, regularly occurring in religious mass gatherings or various forms of private religious practices (e.g., prayer and meditation). Although specific verbal learning capacities may characterize glossolalists, empirical evidence is lacking. We administered three statistical learning tasks (artificial grammar, phoneme sequence, and visual-response sequence) to 30 glossolalists and 30 matched control volunteers. In artificial grammar, participants decide whether pseudowords and sentences follow previously acquired implicit rules or not. In sequence learning, they gradually draw out rules from repeating regularities in sequences of speech sounds or motor responses. Results revealed enhanced artificial grammar and phoneme sequence learning performances in glossolalists compared to control volunteers. There were significant positive correlations between daily glossolalia activity and artificial grammar learning. These results indicate that glossolalists exhibit enhanced abilities to extract the statistical regularities of verbal information, which may be related to their unusual language abilities.     

Experience With a Linguistic Variant Affects the Acquisition of Its Sociolinguistic Meaning: An Alien-Language-Learning Experiment

How do speakers learn the social meaning of different linguistic variants, and what factors influence how likely a particular social–linguistic association is to be learned? It has been argued that the social meaning of more salient variants should be learned faster, and that learners' pre-existing experience of a variant will influence its salience. In this paper, we report two artificial-language-learning experiments investigating this. Each experiment involved two language-learning stages followed by a test. The first stage introduced the artificial language and trained participants in it, while the second stage added a simple social context using images of cartoon aliens. The first learning stage was intended to establish participants' experience with the artificial language in general and with the distribution of linguistic variants in particular. The second stage, in which linguistic stimuli were accompanied by images of particular aliens, was intended to simulate the acquisition of linguistic variants in a social context. In our first experiment, we manipulated whether a particular linguistic variant, associated with one species of alien in the second learning phase, had been encountered in the first learning phase. In the second experiment, we manipulated whether the variant had been encountered in the same grammatical context. In both cases we predicted that the unexpectedness of a new variant or a new grammatical context for an old variant would increase the variant's salience and facilitate the learning of its social meaning. This is what we found, although in the second experiment, the effect was driven by better learners. Our results suggest that unexpectedness increases the salience of variants and makes their social distribution easier to learn, deepening our understanding of the role of individual language experience in the acquisition of sociolinguistic meaning.     

Metacognitions in patients with hallucinations and obsessive-compulsive disorder: the superstition factor

On the basis of the analogy between intrusive thoughts and auditory hallucinations established by Morrison et al. [(1995). Intrusive thoughts and auditory hallucinations: a cognitive approach. Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 23, 265-280], the present work compares the metacognitive beliefs and processes of five groups of patients (current hallucinators, never-hallucinated people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, recovered hallucinators, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) patients, and a clinical control group) and a non-clinical group. The results show that of the five metacognitive factors considered in this study, two were found to be different in the current hallucinators group in comparison to any other group in the design. Likewise, it is found that the metacognitive beliefs of the current hallucinators coincide with those of the OCD patients in various factors, particularly that relating to superstition, and this is interpreted as lending support to the model of Morrison et al. (1995). Furthermore, the results are discussed in the light of existing research on Thought-Action Fusion, stressing the role that may be played by superstitious beliefs and magical thinking in auditory hallucinations and OCD.     

Spatial frequency processing in schizophrenia: trait or state marker?

B. F. O'Donnell et al. found impaired discrimination performances at low and medium spatial frequencies in patients with schizophrenia. In this study, the authors replicated this finding in a group of remitted, unmedicated, and highly functioning outpatients with spared IQ and attentional functions. However, the deficit was restricted to low spatial frequencies (0.5 cycles/degree), which suggests that this deficit is a trait marker of schizophrenia.