Cumulative Risk,Emotion Dysregulation,and Adjustment in South African Youth

Research on cumulative risk is growing, however, little work has occurred in low- or middle-income countries, and few studies have focused on processes linking risk to outcomes. This study explored relations between components of cumulative risk and adjustment in a sample of 324 South African youth (M age?=?13.11 years; SD?=?1.54 years; 65% female; 56% Black/African; 14% Colored; 23% Indian; 7% White), and tested competing models of emotion dysregulation as a mediator or moderator of risk—adjustment links. Data was collected from youth and their female caregivers during home interviews. Structural equation models and regression analyses accounting for age and sex contributions revealed that emotion dysregulation mediated associations between sociodemographic risk and internalizing symptoms, externalizing problem behavior, and drug use severity, and moderated links between psychosocial risk and internalizing symptoms and externalizing problem behavior. For the mediator models, sociodemographic risk was associated with impaired emotion regulation, which in turn was linked with heightened adjustment difficulties. For the moderator models, psychosocial risk was linked with adjustment problems only when emotion dysregulation was high. These data indicate the importance of disentangling components of cumulative risk. Future research within the South African cultural context might build on these findings by adapting and testing school- or family-based prevention or intervention programs that include modules on emotion regulation.     

On being guided – a typology of career guidance in EU discourses*

With this article we want to illustrate how the central publications of the European Union legitimate a role of Career Guidance Services (CGS) that help in establishing a desired form of social order. Using the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse, we reconstructed four typical metaphorical conceptualisations of CGS that go along with desirable and taken-for-granted subject positions. The results reveal the assigned active role of CGS in establishing a specific vision of and in transforming the European society. We conclude by outlining the ways in which critique is expressed within the discourse and by highlighting the inherent ambivalences of these practices of critique.     

Normative Sample of the PEAK Relational Training System: Generalization Module with Comparison to Individuals with Autism

With the rising number of individuals diagnosed with autism and other developmental disabilities comes an increased need for effective assessment and treatment options. Previous research has indicated that applied behavior analytic techniques are among the most empirically supported and utilized treatments for this population; however, curriculum and assessment tools rooted in utilizing these techniques have very little empirical support for their reliability and validity. The current studies sought to assess the performance of both a normative sample and a sample with autism on one such assessment tool: The PEAK Generalization Module. Altogether, 183 typically developing children participated in study 1 and 84 children with a diagnosis of autism participated in study 2. The results indicated that the normative sample demonstrated a strong positive correlation between the PEAK Generalization Assessment and age, whereas the sample with autism demonstrated no significant relationship between the two. Further analysis indicates that the PEAK Generalization Assessment may be an appropriate tool for assessing individuals with autism across a wide range of ages, and provides a preliminary benchmark against which to measure both current functioning and progress in individuals with developmental disabilities.     

Learning in the brain–computer interface: insights about degrees of freedom and degeneracy from a landscape model of motor learning

In this paper, we examine the role of degrees of freedom and their degeneracy in learning in the brain–computer interface paradigm. Though the traditional notion of degrees of freedom in motor learning gave emphasis to muscle and joint activity, the broader concept of dimensions of behavior is relevant to brain–computer interface learning where there is no muscle activity. The role of degeneracy in the dimensions of brain activity is proposed to enhance learning through robustness to stability loss and adaptability in the search for new stable states. Principles for the application of augmented information for learning to coordinate and control the degenerate degrees of freedom in the brain–computer interface are outlined.     

马克思基于人的“自我异化”对资产阶级-资本主义世界的解释

洛维特认为,在黑格尔、费尔巴哈和马克思之间存在一种概念的历史谱系,那就是他们在各自的思想中都探讨了人,对人做出了定义,所不同的是,人在他们思想中的地位和对人的探讨的科学性是不一致的.人在黑格尔的绝对精神的体系中没有独立的地位和客观性;费尔巴哈将人定义为抽象的"我-你"关系,从而使人失去了他的社会历史基础;马克思则通过对人存在于其中的社会生产方式的分析,实现了对人的真实的阐释.同时,马克思试图克服资本主义条件下所产生的人的自我异化现象,并以共产主义社会中"真正的人道主义"来标识人的解放,来打破在资本主义社会中人的目的和手段、对象和人、使用价值和交换价值、主体和客体间相互关系的颠倒.     

Cognitive manipulation of GSR extinction: Analogues for conditioning therapies

Cognitive determinants of GSR activity during extinction trials were examined following conditioning. Conditioned GSRs extinguished rapidly when subjects were informed the UCS would not again be administered, compared to subjects not given this information. Of greater interest was the finding that (false) high feedback concerning subjects’ responsivity to the Cs+ during extinction served to maintain GSR activity at a higher level than subjects receiving (false) low feedback. The relationship was observed within both information conditions. Implications are drawn for both aversive conditioning therapy and systematic desensitization.     

When the past becomes history: effects of temporal order on explanations of trends

When people are asked to ‘explain’ a time series consisting of population statistics, they will suggest factors responsible for later events rather than for earlier events. This is shown in Experiment 1 for pairs of events and in Experiment 2 for triads of events with one deviant member. When the deviant statistic is the most recent one, it will in most cases be singled out for explanation. When it comes first, it is rarely explained, but accepted as a given fact. This is seen as an instance of the temporal order effect, where the first event in a pair or a series is taken for granted, whereas later events are considered more ‘mutable’, i.e. they could have been different. In line with this, later statistics are considered to be more in need of support from additional information than earlier statistics (Experiment 3). The focus on temporally later events can be distinguished from other primacy and recency effects by being due to chronological order, rather than order of presentation. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

To read two pages,I need 5 minutes,but give me 5 minutes and I will read four: how to change productivity estimates by inverting the question

Past research has shown that people underestimate the time they need to complete large tasks, whereas completion times for smaller tasks are often overestimated, suggesting higher productivity estimates for larger than for smaller tasks. By replacing the traditional question about how much time a given work will take with a question about how much work can be completed within a given amount of time, we also found the opposite pattern. Both trends could reflect a general tendency to underestimate large amounts (of work as well as time) relatively to small ones. This ‘magnitude bias’ was explored in two studies where students estimated reading tasks, a third where IT‐professionals estimated software projects, and a fourth where participants imagined a familiar walk, divided into time segments or part distances of varying lengths. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Race and older mothers' differentiation: a sequential quantitative and qualitative analysis

The goal of this paper is to demonstrate a process by which qualitative and quantitative approaches are combined to reveal patterns in the data that are unlikely to be detected and confirmed by either method alone. Specifically, we take a sequential approach to combining qualitative and quantitative data to explore race differences in how mothers differentiate among their adult children. We began with a standard multivariate analysis examining race differences in mothers' differentiation among their adult children regarding emotional closeness and confiding. Finding no race differences in this analysis, we conducted an in-depth comparison of the Black and White mothers' narratives to determine whether there were underlying patterns that we had been unable to detect in our first analysis. Using this method, we found that Black mothers were substantially more likely than White mothers to emphasize interpersonal relationships within the family when describing differences among their children. In our final step, we developed a measure of familism based on the qualitative data and conducted a multivariate analysis to confirm the patterns revealed by the in-depth comparison of the mothers' narratives. We conclude that using such a sequential mixed methods approach to data analysis has the potential to shed new light on complex family relations.