Changes in Attachment‐Related Behavioural Problems of Internationally Adopted Toddlers in Finland: Results from the FinAdo Study

This study investigated attachment‐related behavioural problems and their change over time among internationally adopted toddlers (N = 171, boys 40%) in Finland. The parents filled in questionnaires posted in 2007 and again in 2009. At the baseline (on average, 1.9 years from adoption), the mean age of the adoptees was 2.8 years. The comparison group (N = 244, boys 46%) was collected through well‐baby clinics. Results from the paired t‐test and mixed models showed that the adoptees' attachment‐related behavioural problems decreased during the 2‐year follow‐up and that they did not manifest more problems than their age‐mates any more 4 years after adoption. The decrease in behavioural problems was associated with the child's female gender, country of origin and adoptive parents' positive experience about adoption. A child's stereotypic or self‐injurious behaviour was not associated with the change in attachment‐related behaviour over time, although both were associated with behavioural problems. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Healing elements of therapeutic conversation: dialogue as an embodiment of love

From our Bakhtinian perspective, understanding requires an active process of talking and listening. Dialogue is a precondition for positive change in any form of therapy. Using the perspectives of dialogism and neurobiological development, we analyze the basic elements of dialogue, seeking to understand why dialogue becomes a healing experience in a network meeting. From the perspective of therapist as dialogical partner, we examine actions that support dialogue in conversation, shared emotional experience, creation of community, and creation of new shared language. We describe how feelings of love, manifesting powerful mutual emotional attunement in the conversation, signal moments of therapeutic change.     

Quantum Logic as a Fragment of Independence-Friendly Logic

The working assumption of this paper is that noncommuting variables are irreducibly interdependent. The logic of such dependence relations is the author's independence-friendly (IF) logic, extended by adding to it sentence-initial contradictory negation ¬ over and above the dual (strong) negation . Then in a Hilbert space turns out to express orthocomplementation. This can be extended to any logical space, which makes it possible to define the dimension of a logical space. The received Birkhoff and von Neumann quantum logic can be interpreted by taking their disjunction to be ¬(A & B). Their logic can thus be mapped into a Boolean structure to which an additional operator has been added.     

Genetic influences on the association between personality risk factors and alcohol use and abuse

The authors assessed the association of 2 personality dimensions with use and abuse of alcohol in 1,320 twin pairs concordantly reporting nonabstinence at age 18.5 years. The 2 alcohol outcomes differentially relate to the 2 personality dimensions: Alcohol-related problems correlate more highly with social deviance than with excitement seeking (ES), and alcohol consumption correlates more highly with ES than with social deviance. Biometric models fit to the data identified similar patterns in genetic covariance, although differences were more evident in genetic correlations between social deviance and alcohol outcomes than in those for ES. Results suggest that genetic influences underlie the association of personality with alcohol use and subsequent problems and illustrate the utility of informative twin analyses in exploring links between genes, personality, and behavior disorder.     

Information-seeking dialogues: Some of their logical properties

The dialogical games introduced in Jaakko Hintikka, Information-Seeking Dialogues: A Model, (Erkenntnis, vol. 14, 1979) are studied here to answer the question as to what the natural logic or the logic of natural language is. In a natural language certain epistemic elements are not explicitly indicated, but they determine which inference rules are valid. By means of dialogical games, the question is answered: all classical first-order rules have to be modified in the same way in which some of them are modified in the transition to intuitionistic logic. (Furthermore, in some cases quantificational rules have to be modified further.) The rules that are left unmodified by intuitionists are applicable only to the output of certain game rules, but not to others. In. this sense, neither classical nor yet intuitionistic logic is the logic of natural language. We need a new type of nonclassical logic, justified by our information-seeking dialogues.     

Philosophical Research and General Education

What can philosophical research do today to improve the lot of contemporary societies globally? What can anyone do for the purpose? To take the most urgent international problems as an example,what kind of person should the Secretary-General of the UN send to disarm a conflict situation? Perhaps a religious leader,a priest,an imam or a guru? But a leader of which religion?     

Parental monitoring moderates the importance of genetic and environmental influences on adolescent smoking

Although there is a substantial literature on the role of parenting in adolescent substance use, most parenting effects have been small in magnitude and studied outside the context of genetically informative designs, raising debate and controversy about the influence that parents have on their children (D. C. Rowe, 1994). Using a genetically informative twin-family design, the authors studied the role of parental monitoring on adolescent smoking at age 14. Although monitoring had only small main effects, consistent with the literature, there were dramatic moderation effects associated with parental monitoring: At high levels of parental monitoring, environmental influences were predominant in the etiology of adolescent smoking, but at low levels of parental monitoring, genetic influences assumed far greater importance. These analyses demonstrate that the etiology of adolescent smoking varies dramatically as a function of parenting.