Re-empowering a disabled family network

In this paper, we will present a case history of a disabled network which includes a multiproblem family and the social service agencies serving it. We will describe a five-step model for effective intervention into the entire system. Social service agents frequently become overwhelmed and therefore impotent in their attempts to help multiproblem families. In such cases, agents reflect the family's dysfunction by becoming dysfunctional themselves and their actions serve to increase the family's alienation from its community by reinforcing its stigmatized self-image. Our model focuses on building boundaries and creating hierarchies which encourage individuation within the family and empowers the network to effectively meet family needs.     

Post-training glucose administration attenuates forgetting of passive-avoidance conditioning in 18-day-old rats.

The study of memory modulation in infant rats has typically focused on reminder/retrieval treatments involving reexposure to components of the internal or external training context. Rarely have studies employed pharmacological treatments to investigate the neurochemical substrates of memory storage in preweanling rats. The present study investigated the effect of 100 mg/kg of glucose, a common memory modulator in adult mammals, on memory for passive-avoidance conditioning in 18-day-old Sprague-Dawley rats. Subjects that were administered an immediate post-training injection of glucose performed significantly better, on a retention test 24 h following training, than those animals that received saline. The glucose group also performed comparably to a control group that was tested 10 min following training. These results are consistent with those of the memory modulation literature in adults and suggest that the rapid rate of forgetting in immature organisms may be the result of a deficiency in a general memory modulatory system.     

Technology-based versus in-person deposit contract treatments for promoting physical activity

Deposit contracts involve participants depositing their own money and earning it back contingent on behavior change. Deposit contracts are empirically supported treatments for promoting health behavior, but they have a history of poor uptake. We compared the effectiveness and acceptability of technology-based versus in-person deposit contracts for promoting physical activity with 12 individuals. Participants' daily step counts were monitored using Fitbits across 6 weeks, and treatment preferences were assessed at the end of the study. The 2 types of treatments were equally effective in increasing physical activity, but the technology-based deposit contracts were preferred by most participants. Most participants also reported that their preference was related to convenience. Technology-based implementation may be one way to improve deposit contract uptake, while maintaining similar effectiveness compared to in-person procedures.     

THE JUSTICE IN MERCY

It is natural to wonder how mercy is related to justice. I focus in this essay on a more limited question: how should we relate mercy and retributive justice? My suggestion is that attending to our situation as moral agents can help us solve this conundrum. I offer a pessimistic reading of our situation. Because of original sin and related forms of bad moral luck, we have limited control over our attitudes and actions. This has a surprisingly hopeful upshot, since our unfortunate condition makes it appropriate to respond to one another mercifully. I suggest that this response can take two forms. Without collapsing justice into mercy, it is right to make our approach to justice and punishment more merciful and to recognize the fittingness of “erring” on the side of mercy when we are uncertain how to apportion blame.     

Diagnosis and prevention of atherosclerotic cerebral infarction

Atherosclerotic disease accounts for approximately 25% of ischemic strokes. Atherosclerotic stroke is caused mainly by embolic events from the carotid artery bifurcation or the aortic arch, although intracranial thrombosis can occur, more often in African Americans, Asians, and diabetes patients. Primary prevention of stroke is critical for patients with risk factors for atherosclerosis, including hypertension, diabetes, smoking and hypercholesterolemia. Stroke can be prevented in patients with established atherosclerotic disease by identification and management of patients with carotid artery stenosis by non-invasive testing. Particular attention must be paid to patients with transient symptoms of brain ischemia.     

Linking Religious Upbringing to Young Adult Moral Formation

Recent scholarship has conceptualized morality in terms of multidimensional, intuitive traits that influence what people regard as right or wrong. Ample literature shows that religious factors are closely related to moral traits. However, little research has explored links between religious upbringing and adult moral outcomes. This study uses longitudinal data from the National Study of Youth and Religion to examine how diverse forms of religious socialization in adolescence are related to two well-validated social-scientific conceptions of morality in young adulthood: Haidt's moral foundations and Schwartz’ values typology. Using regression analyses and Lindeman, Merenda, and Gold (LMG) decomposition methods, I show that different aspects of religious upbringing are linked to the development of both moral foundations and values. Religious factors play a stronger role than either sociodemographics or parent political ideology in predicting young adult moral characteristics. Results highlight the centrality of religious upbringing to the state and trajectory of the population-level moral structure.     

Children's attributions of intentions to an invisible agent

Children ages 3-9 years were informed that an invisible agent (Princess Alice) would help them play a forced-choice game by "telling them, somehow, when they chose the wrong box," whereas a matched control group of children were not given this supernatural prime. On 2 unexpected event trials, an experimenter triggered a simulated unexpected event (i.e., a light turning on/off; a picture falling), and children's behavioral response to these events (i.e., moving their hand to the opposite box) was coded. Results showed a significant Age GroupxExperimental Condition interaction; the only children to reliably alter their behavior in response to the unexpected events were the oldest children (M=7 years 4 months), who were primed with the invisible agent concept. For children's posttest verbal explanations, also, only these children saw the unexpected events as being referential and declarative (e.g., "Princess Alice did it because I chose the wrong box"). Together, these data suggest that children may not regularly begin to see communicative signs as embedded in unexpected events until they are around 7 years of age.     

Prawn-in-a-tube procedure: habituation or associative learning in cuttlefish?

The prawn-in-a-tube procedure (J. B. Messenger, 1973a) has been used almost exclusively to study associative learning in cuttlefish. In two experiments, the authors sought to determine whether the decline in attack responses observed in this procedure was best accounted for by habituation or associative learning. Results of Experiment 1 revealed an asymmetrical stimulus-specificity effect that could be interpreted as either an instance of habituation or of associative learning. Results of Experiment 2 demonstrated that the response decline could not be reversed following the presentation of a dishabituatory stimulus. The combined results of these experiments support the conclusion that the response decline is best viewed as a resulting of associative processes. The authors considered whether the response decline represents extinction or passive avoidance.     

Relatives Children Say

In an experiment designed to elicit restrictive relatives clauses, 28 children ranging in age from 2:2 to 3:10 provided a corpus of communicatively appropriate relative clauses. In evaluating this corpus, we found that most children produced mostly adult relative clauses most of the time. Detailed study of these utterances uncovered a few error patterns, which we analyzed in light of several considerations (e.g., the overall frequency of an error type, its distribution across children and items, its relation to the construction under study, and the similarity of the error to what children do elsewhere). Only one error pattern, namely some children's production of inappropriate relative pronouns, is argued to reflect a systematic feature of language development. We conclude that children's ability to represent the syntactic structure of the embedded clause is on target very early.