Early childhood education and crime

This article presents new evidence on the crime-reducing impacts of a high-quality, intensive early childhood program with long-term follow-up, evaluated by a randomized controlled trial. Proportionately, more women than men decrease their criminal activity after participating in the program. This gender difference arises because of the worse home environments for girls, with corresponding greater scope for improvement by the program. For both genders, treatment effects are larger for the least-advantaged children, as measured by their mother's education at baseline. The dollar value of the social cost of criminal activity averted is higher for men because they commit more costly violent crimes.     

Evaluating Fund Performance by Compromise Programming with Linear‐Quadratic Composite Metric: An Actual Case on The CaixaBank in Spain

This paper proposes an additive measure on the basis of compromise programming to evaluate fund performance from multiple criteria, of which the most usual are profitability and risk. This proposal is motivated by the fact that compromise programming is a sound decision support model to obtain scores of alternatives by minimizing weighted distances to an ideal point, the weights reflecting the investor's preferences for the criteria. To define the distance objective function, the linear‐quadratic composite metric is used, which combines advantages of linear and non‐linear objective functions. A critical advantage of compromise programming for fund performance evaluation is that the model can be extended to more than two financial criteria while other measures currently used (either ratio‐based or leverage‐based measures) only consider two criteria, say, profitability and risk. In the application, three investor's profiles are defined, which involve different weighting systems and lead to different fund rankings. These rankings are compared with domination relationships, the latter formulating if a fund is dominated or non‐dominated by convex combinations of other funds. Numerical tables are provided with data, computational process and results, which are analysed. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Decrease of Precurrent Behavior as Training Increases: Effects of Task Complexity

The Psychological Record - When someone is described as memorizing a phone number, part of what is being asserted is that the person is capable of dialing the number without looking it up in the...     

Inhibition Tasks Are Not Associated with a Variety of Behaviours in College Students

Executive functions are (EF) top-down control processes involved in regulating thoughts, ignoring distractions, and inhibiting impulses. It is widely believed that these processes are critical to self-control and, therefore, that performance on behavioural task measures of EF should be associated with individual differences in everyday life outcomes. The purpose of the present study was to test this assumption, focusing on the core executive function facet of inhibition. A sample of 463 undergraduates completed five laboratory inhibition tasks, along with three self-report measures of self-control and 28 self-report measures of life outcomes. Results showed that although most of the life outcome measures were associated with self-reported self-control, only one of the outcomes was associated with inhibition task performance at the latent-variable level, and this association was in the unexpected direction. Furthermore, few associations were found at the individual task level. These findings challenge the criterion validity of lab-based inhibition tasks. More generally, when considered alongside the known lack of convergent validity between inhibition tasks and self-report measures of self-control, the findings cast doubt on the task's construct validity as measures of self-control processes. Potential methodological and theoretical reasons for the poor performance of laboratory-based inhibition tasks are discussed. © 2020 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Family play,reading, and other stimulation and early childhood development in five low-and-middle-income countries

This paper used longitudinal data from five studies conducted in Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, Ethiopia, and Rwanda to examine the links between family stimulation and early childhood development outcomes (N = 4904; M_age = 51.5; 49% girls). Results from random-effects and more conservative child-fixed effects models indicate that across these studies, family stimulation, measured by caregivers’ engagement in nine activities (e.g., reading, playing, singing), predicted increments in children's early numeracy, literacy, social-emotional, motor, and executive function skills (standardized associations ranged from 0.05 to 0.11 SD). Study-specific models showed variability in the estimates, with null associations in two out of the five studies. These findings indicate the need for additional research on culturally specific ways in which caregivers may support early development and highlight the importance of promoting family stimulation to catalyze positive developmental trajectories in global contexts.

Research Highlights

• Research on the links between family stimulation and early childhood development in low-and-middle-income countries (LMICs) is limited.
• We used longitudinal data from studies conducted in five LMICs to examine the links between family stimulation and early childhood development outcomes.
• Results suggest that family stimulation predicted increments in children's numeracy, literacy, social-emotional, motor, and executive function skills.
• We found variability in the observed estimates, with null associations in two out of the five studies, suggesting the need for additional research in LMICs.