Prevention of Problem Behavior Through Annual Family Check-Ups in Early Childhood: Intervention Effects From Home to Early Elementary School

This randomized intervention trial examined the effects of yearly Family Check-Ups (FCUs) and tailored parent management training on parent report of problem behavior from age 2 to 5 years and teacher report of oppositional behavior at age 7.5. A multiethnic risk sample of 731 families in 3 distinct geographical settings who were receiving assistance from the Women, Infants, and Children Nutritional Supplement (WIC) program were randomly assigned to a yearly FCU. Intention to treat (ITT) analyses were used to examine overall intervention effects, and complier average causal effect (CACE) modeling was used to examine the effects of annual intervention engagement in the FCU on parent reports of child problem behavior from age 2 to 5 and teacher reports of problem behavior at age 7.5. ITT intervention effects were found regarding parent report at ages 2 to 5 and teacher report at age 7.5, indicating less growth in problem behavior for children in the intervention group than for those in the control group. CACE modeling of intervention engagement revealed that the effect sizes on parent- and teacher-reported problem behavior increased as a function of the number of yearly FCUs caregivers participated in. Findings suggest that embedding yearly FCU services within the context of social, health, and educational services in early childhood can potentially prevent early-onset trajectories of antisocial behavior. The increases in effect size with successive FCU engagement underscores the importance of a motivational approach to parenting support among high-risk families.     

Economic,Environmental and Moral Acceptance of Renewable Energy: A Case Study—The Agricultural Biogas Plant at Pěčín

The production of renewable energy in agricultural biogas plants is being widely criticized because—among other things—most of the feedstock comes from purpose-grown crops like maize. These activities (generously subsidized in the Czech Republic) generate competitive pressure to other crops that are used for feeding or food production, worsening their affordability. Unique pretreatment technology that allows substitution of the purpose-grown crops by farming residues (such as husk or straw) was built 6 years ago on a commercial basis in Pě?ín (Czech Republic) under modest funding and without publicity. The design of the concept; financial assessment and moral viewpoint were analyzed based on practical operating data. It showed that the apparatus improves economic, environmental and moral acceptance as well. However, according to the government’s view, public funding for this type of processing was shortened, “because waste materials represent a lower cost”. The impact of such governance was analyzed as well.     

TDQ-60 – a color picture-naming test for adults and elderly people: validation and normalization data

Word-finding difficulties are usually assessed with picture-naming tests. In this article, we present the TDQ-60, a new test designed to assess acquired lexical access deficits, taking into account semantics and psycholinguistic variables. The article includes three studies. Study 1 describes the development phase of the TDQ-60. In study 2, healthy control participants and individuals with a diagnosis of the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia were assessed to establish the convergent and discriminant validity of the TDQ-60. Finally, in Study 3, a group of 305 young and elderly French-speaking adults from Quebec were assessed in order to provide normative data. The results demonstrate that the TDQ-60 has good convergent validity and good discriminant validity. This study also provides normative data in which were considered the effect of age and education.The TDQ-60 is a new valid picture-naming test, controlled for psycholinguistic variables and designed to identify the influence of semantics on lexical access in spoken production.     

Knowledge‐lies re‐examined

Sorensen says that my assertion that p is a knowledge‐lie if it is meant to undermine your justification for believing truly that ～p, not to make you believe that p and that, therefore, knowledge‐lies are not intended to deceive. It has been objected that they are meant to deceive because they are intended to make you more confident in a falsehood. In this paper, I propose a novel account according to which an assertion that p is a knowledge‐lie if it is intended not to provide evidence that p but to make you stop trusting all testimonies concerning whether p (in a room full of obvious liars, you will trust no one), which is how they undermine your testimonial knowledge. Because they are not intended to provide evidence that bears on the truth of p, they are not intended to make you more confident in a falsehood; therefore, knowledge‐lies are not intended to deceive. This makes them a problem for the traditional account, which takes the intention to deceive as necessary for lying, and an interesting example of Kant's idea that allowing lies whenever one feels like it would bring it about that statements in general are not believed.     

Procura-PALavras (P-PAL): A Web-based interface for a new European Portuguese lexical database

In this article, we present Procura-PALavras (P-PAL), a Web-based interface for a new European Portuguese (EP) lexical database. Based on a contemporary printed corpus of over 227 million words, P-PAL provides a broad range of word attributes and statistics, including several measures of word frequency (e.g., raw counts, per-million word frequency, logarithmic Zipf scale), morpho-syntactic information (e.g., parts of speech [PoSs], grammatical gender and number, dominant PoS, and frequency and relative frequency of the dominant PoS), as well as several lexical and sublexical orthographic (e.g., number of letters; consonant–vowel orthographic structure; density and frequency of orthographic neighbors; orthographic Levenshtein distance; orthographic uniqueness point; orthographic syllabification; and trigram, bigram, and letter type and token frequencies), and phonological measures (e.g., pronunciation, number of phonemes, stress, density and frequency of phonological neighbors, transposed and phonographic neighbors, syllabification, and biphone and phone type and token frequencies) for ~53,000 lemmatized and ~208,000 nonlemmatized EP word forms. To obtain these metrics, researchers can choose between two word queries in the application: (i) analyze words previously selected for specific attributes and/or lexical and sublexical characteristics, or (ii) generate word lists that meet word requirements defined by the user in the menu of analyses. For the measures it provides and the flexibility it allows, P-PAL will be a key resource to support research in all cognitive areas that use EP verbal stimuli. P-PAL is freely available at http://p-pal.di.uminho.pt/tools.     

Electrophysiological correlates of emotional crossmodal processing in binge drinking

Emotional crossmodal integration (i.e., multisensorial decoding of emotions) is a crucial process that ensures adaptive social behaviors and responses to the environment. Recent evidence suggests that in binge drinking—an excessive alcohol consumption pattern associated with psychological and cerebral deficits—crossmodal integration is preserved at the behavioral level. Although some studies have suggested brain modifications during affective processing in binge drinking, nothing is known about the cerebral correlates of crossmodal integration. In the current study, we asked 53 university students (17 binge drinkers, 17 moderate drinkers, 19 nondrinkers) to perform an emotional crossmodal task while their behavioral and neurophysiological responses were recorded. Participants had to identify happiness and anger in three conditions (unimodal, crossmodal congruent, crossmodal incongruent) and two modalities (face and/or voice). Binge drinkers did not significantly differ from moderate drinkers and nondrinkers at the behavioral level. However, widespread cerebral modifications were found at perceptual (N100) and mainly at decisional (P3b) stages in binge drinkers, indexed by slower brain processing and stronger activity. These cerebral modifications were mostly related to anger processing and crossmodal integration. This study highlights higher electrophysiological activity in the absence of behavioral deficits, which could index a potential compensation process in binge drinkers. In line with results found in severe alcohol-use disorders, these electrophysiological findings show modified anger processing, which might have a deleterious impact on social functioning. Moreover, this study suggests impaired crossmodal integration at early stages of alcohol-related disorders.     

Relationships between identity domains and life satisfaction in minority and majority youth in Albania,Bulgaria, Czech Republic,Kosovo, and Romania

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine relationships between identity domains (educational and relational identity) and life satisfaction in a cross-national perspective, by targeting minority (Roma) and majority youth in Albania, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Kosovo, and Romania. Based on the three-factor identity formation model, we investigated the interplay between three identity processes (i.e., commitment, in-depth exploration, and reconsideration of commitment) and life satisfaction. Participants were 1860 adolescents aged 12–19 years from Albania (n = 350), Bulgaria (n = 398), the Czech Republic (n = 293), Kosovo (n = 542), and Romania (n = 277). They completed self-reports of the Utrecht-Management of Identity Commitments Scale (U-MICS) and the Life Satisfaction Scale (SWLS). We adopted a structural equation modelling approach to test (a) measurement invariance of identity and life satisfaction models across groups and (b) associations between identity domains (educational and relational) and life satisfaction. Findings indicated measurement invariance for identity and life satisfaction measures across cultural groups. In the total sample, life satisfaction was consistently associated with high commitment, high in-depth exploration, and low reconsideration of commitment in the educational identity domain. Sample-specific associations highlighted important cultural differences. Implications of these findings for identity and well-being in minority and mainstream youth across the countries under investigation are discussed.     

Information and Communication Technology in the Work of Catholic Priests

ABSTRACT

This article presents data gathered in a doctoral study, the aim of which was to identify information needs and behavior patterns of Croatian Catholic priests for pastoral work. Results of the research focus only on the role of information and communication technology and using electronic sources by the priests in the liturgy and caregiving role. The research was conducted using quantitative and qualitative methodology (print questionnaires and semi-structured interviews). A total of 327 respondents took part in the quantitative study and twenty respondents were interviewed. Although research results showed that many respondents are not very familiar with the information and communication technology, most of them still occasionally use computers for making documents and consult the Internet for finding religious information in pastoral work. Computers and the Internet to a larger degree are used by younger and well-educated priests who have the least experience regarding management of the parishes in major locations. Since the results indicated that parish priests mostly seek religious and secular information on the Internet, it is recommended that the Catholic Church in Croatia offer them increased electronic resources for pastoral work.