Is It a Name or a Fact? Disambiguation of Reference Via Exclusivity and Pragmatic Reasoning

Adults reason by exclusivity to identify the meanings of novel words. However, it is debated whether, like children, they extend this strategy to disambiguate other referential expressions (e.g., facts about objects). To further inform this debate, this study tested 41 adults on four conditions of a disambiguation task: label/label, fact/fact, label/fact, and fact/label (Scofield & Behrend, 2007 ). Participants also provided a verbal explanation for their referent selections to tease apart the underlying processes. Results indicated that adults successfully discerned the target object in the label/label and label/fact condition, yet not the remaining two conditions. Verbal reports indicated that the strategy utilized to disambiguate differed depending upon communicative context. These findings confirm that the tendency to reason by exclusivity becomes restricted to word‐learning situations with growing linguistic and communicative experience.     

The Impact of Wellness‐Focused Supervision on Mental Health Counseling Practicum Students

Professional counseling organizations tout the importance of wellness for counselors and counselors‐in‐training. The authors used a wellness‐focused supervision model with mental health practicum students to assess the model's degree of treatment effect at improving students' wellness over the course of the semester. Participants' demographics included three women, one man, three European Americans, and one Latino/a. Single‐case design results revealed that ongoing wellness‐focused interventions are helpful in improving participants' level of wellness; implications for practice are provided.     

Investigating Predictors of Superior Face Recognition Ability in Police Super‐recognisers

There are large individual differences in the ability to recognise faces. Super‐recognisers are exceptionally good at face memory tasks. In London, a small specialist pool of police officers (also labelled ‘super‐recognisers’ by the Metropolitan Police Service) annually makes 1000's of suspect identifications from closed‐circuit television footage. Some suspects are disguised, have not been encountered recently or are depicted in poor quality images. Across tests measuring familiar face recognition, unfamiliar face memory and unfamiliar face matching, the accuracy of members of this specialist police pool was approximately equal to a group of non‐police super‐recognisers. Both groups were more accurate than matched control members of the public. No reliable relationships were found between the face processing tests and object recognition. Within each group, however, there were large performance variations across tests, and this research has implications for the deployment of police worldwide in operations requiring officers with superior face processing ability. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Spontaneous Interentity Coordination in a Dissipative Structure

Humans and other creatures display remarkable interorganism coordination. For ecological theorists, interorganism coordination poses a challenge because it appears to be an especially “representation-hungry” phenomenon (Clark, 1999 Clark, A. (1999). An embodied cognitive science? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 3, 345–351.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Ecological researchers have proposed that interorganism coordination arises from fundamental laws of pattern formation and synchronization. A key example in support of the ecological approach to coordination is the phase locking of 2 or more weakly coupled metronomes. Here we provide a complementary example of interentity coordination in a system that is more closely analogous to living systems. We show that two self-organizing dissipative structures, coupled in a single electrical field, spontaneously exhibit fairly complex motion coordination. Further, the degree of coordination predicts the rate of entropy production for the system as a whole. We suggest that the complex behavior of motion coordination fulfills a rudimentary end-directedness of the system: evolve to states that create higher rates of entropy production.     

Grandiose Narcissism and Fairness in Social Exchanges

The present study explored how the personality variable, grandiose narcissism, was associated with various responses to unfairness such as retaliation, forgiveness and avoidance. Participants completed personality questionnaires and read a series of scenarios that depicted unfair treatment. They then answered questions concerning how they would respond to each scenario. Results revealed that grandiose narcissists were less likely to acquiesce and more likely to engage in revenge toward or avoid the person who treated them unfairly. Grandiose narcissism tended not to be associated with forgiveness in response to specific examples of unfair treatment. The consequences of narcissists’ more negative behavior during social exchanges are discussed, as are suggestions for future studies.     

Put Yourself at the Helm: Charting New Territory,Correcting Course,and Weathering the Storm of Career Trajectories

What bearing have you set you set your sights on? How do you navigate the ever-changing swells and winds of our professional landscape? Are you feeling a nebulous desire for change, that your career is not going in the direction you were expecting, worry about lack of future opportunities, or even a deep dissatisfaction in your current position? You are not alone. The formation of the Committee on Advanced Training for Certified Genetic Counselors (CATCGC) was partly in response to such sentiments, expressed within a vibrant dialogue amongst members of the genetic counseling community. The CATCGC sought to understand how genetic counselors chart courses for their careers by conducting a Decision Points exercise during a pre-conference symposium (PCS) at the 2014 NSGC Annual Education Conference. Participants were asked to identify a decision point at which they were most satisfied with their careers and one at which they were least satisfied and to describe the situation, their personal goals and intentions, any actions they took, and the outcomes. Qualitative analysis in the constructivist tradition was conducted on participants’ responses and facilitators’ notes from the PCS to explore what personal meanings were made of the decision points; twelve themes related to Career High Points, Low Points, and how genetic counselors made career transitions were identified. Using a constructivist framework, themes are presented in the context of the authors’ personal experiences, and the authors’ share their reflections on these data. We wrote this article to offer you a window into your peers’ experiences - the good, the bad, and the ugly - hoping to encourage and challenge you to reflect deeply, no matter where you are on your career journey.     

Behavioral Telehealth Consultation with Families of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

In this study, desktop video teleconferencing was used to facilitate behavioral consultation at a distance with three parents of school‐age children with autism spectrum disorders. Parents were supported via desktop video teleconferencing as they conducted functional analyses and learned to implement an antecedent manipulation strategy, functional communication training, and a consequence‐based strategy. Parents then conducted a brief multi‐element treatment comparison to evaluate the preliminary effectiveness of each intervention strategy on their child's challenging behavior. The results of this study provide additional support to previous research suggesting that a telehealth model of behavioral consultation may be an effective way to assist parents of children with autism spectrum disorders address challenging behavior that disrupts family routines. Suggestions for future research are discussed. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Emotion Regulation Difficulties Moderate the Association Between Heavy Episodic Drinking and Dating Violence Perpetration Among College Men

Because of high rates of heavy drinking and dating violence (psychological or physical aggression toward a dating partner) among college men, we examined whether emotion regulation difficulties moderated the association between heavy drinking and dating violence perpetration. One hundred and fifty-eight men were recruited from a large northwestern U.S. university between April 2014 and August 2014. Participants completed an online survey that assessed their emotion regulation difficulties as well as their past year history of heavy episodic drinking (HED; consuming 5+ drinks in 2 hr) and dating violence perpetration. Generalized linear models revealed that the positive association between HED and dating violence perpetration was stronger for men with greater impulse control difficulties and for those who reported limited access to emotion regulation strategies. In addition to continued efforts to reduce heavy drinking among college men, interventions targeting emotion regulation difficulties should be incorporated into standard dating violence intervention and prevention efforts to further reduce the likelihood of dating violence perpetration in this population.     

Efficient <Emphasis Type="Italic">n</Emphasis>-gram analysis in R with <Literal>cmscu</Literal>

We present a new R package, cmscu, which implements a Count-Min-Sketch with conservative updating (Cormode and Muthukrishnan Journal of Algorithms, 55(1), 58–75, 2005), and its application to n-gram analyses (Goyal et al. 2012). By writing the core implementation in C++ and exposing it to R via Rcpp, we are able to provide a memory-efficient, high-throughput, and easy-to-use library. As a proof of concept, we implemented the computationally challenging (Heafield et al. 2013) modified Kneser–Ney n-gram smoothing algorithm using cmscu as the querying engine. We then explore information density measures (Jaeger Cognitive Psychology, 61(1), 23–62, 2010) from n-gram frequencies (for n=2,3) derived from a corpus of over 2.2 million reviews provided by a Yelp, Inc. dataset. We demonstrate that these text data are at a scale beyond the reach of other more common, more general-purpose libraries available through CRAN. Using the cmscu library and the smoothing implementation, we find a positive relationship between review information density and reader review ratings. We end by highlighting the important use of new efficient tools to explore behavioral phenomena in large, relatively noisy data sets.     

A value focused model for a C4 network1

This effort provides a quantitative method that incorporates the objectives of a C4I system. A systematic methodology, which incorporates expert opinion and operational necessities, is provided to evaluate communications networks. While the specific weighting and measures for a value hierarchy will depend upon the operational environment and the decision makers, a framework to develop such a hierarchy is provided. The approach produced graphical displays that provide a great deal of insight into the tradeoffs which could be made and the driving factors behind the system scores. Copyright © 2000 US Government