Coupling of Eye,Finger, Elbow,and Shoulder Movements During Manual Aiming

Temporal and spatial coupling of point of gaze (PG) and movements of the finger, elbow, and shoulder during a speeded aiming task were examined. Ten participants completed 40-cm aiming movements with the right arm, in a situation that allowed free movement of the eyes, head, arm, and trunk. On the majority of trials, a large initial saccade undershot the target slightly, and 1 or more smaller corrective saccades brought the eyes to the target position. The finger, elbow, and shoulder exhibited a similar pattern of undershooting their final positions, followed by small corrective movements. Eye movements usually preceded limb movements, and the eyes always arrived at the target well in advance of the finger. There was a clear temporal coupling between primary saccade completion and peak acceleration of the finger, elbow, and shoulder. The initiation of limb-segment movement usually occurred in a proximal-to-distal pattern. Increased variability in elbow and shoulder position as the movement progressed may have served to reduce variability in finger position. The spatial-temporal coupling of PG with the 3 limb segments was optimal for the pick up of visual information about the position of the finger and the target late in the movement.     

Keep the Faith,for Christ's Sake!

The central Lutheran doctrine of justification through faith served to critique the theology of the medieval Roman church but remains an important, though underutilized, theological resource today. The Lutheran emphasis on faith as trust in God's promise of mercy for Christ's sake is an important corrective to the contemporary culture of privatized faith, offering both a personal and a corporate relationship with a gracious God.     

Partial word knowledge in the absence of recall

Attributes of words can be known even when the words are not currently retrievable. Although repeatedly demonstrated for semantic and contextual dimensions, the evidence is ambiguous for structural characteristics. The present research demonstrates significant above-chance first-letter knowledge across four ordinal levels of retrieval confidence for nonretrieved words—tip of the tongue (TOT), high familiar, low familiar, unfamiliar. Contrary to prior research, there was minimal evidence for syllable number knowledge, even at highest confidence levels. Initial letter recognition in the absence of retrieval resembles the recognition without identification in episodic memory (Cleary, Current Directions in Psychological Science 17: 353–357, 2008), and such implicit familiarity may contribute more generally to confidence assessments of word knowledge in both semantic and episodic memory domains. Furthermore, this outcome suggests that word feature priming in the form of partial phonological activation may occur to some extent for all words during a retrieval attempt, and even for ones that are judged to be unknown.     

A Longitudinal Assessment of the Associations Among Response Access, Attention Problems, and Aggression during Childhood

Children with ADHD symptoms often display social competence deficits, yet mechanisms for their social difficulties remain unclear. Using data from the normative sample of non-intervention respondents (N?=?387; 50 % male; 49 % non-European-American; age at initial assessment: M?=?6.5 years, SD?=?0.48) in the Fast Track project (Lochman and CPPRG Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 63:549–59, 1995), the social-information processing ability of accessing responses for social situations was modeled across four time points from kindergarten to third grade. Teacher-rated aggression and ADHD symptoms were included as predictors of the intercept and slope. Low ADHD symptoms were associated with a decline in aggressive responses across childhood, whereas high ADHD symptoms were linked to an increase in aggressive responses that decelerated between second and third grade. Regarding competent responses, low ADHD symptoms predicted increases in competent responses, but this increase decelerated between second and third grade. High ADHD symptoms were also associated with a slight increase in competent responses into first grade, but competent responses decreased from first to third grade. Neither aggression nor the interaction of ADHD symptoms and aggression accounted for a significant amount of variance in aggressive or competent responses. Future research should identify if differences in response access associated with high and low ADHD symptoms link to difficulties making and keeping friendships.     

Attitudes Toward Euthanasia and Justifying Reasons Of Elderly Israelis and Their Family Members

Abstract

The purpose of the current study was to reach an interpretive understanding of the reasons underlying favorable and unfavorable attitudes of Israeli elderly adults and their family members toward euthanasia. The informants were 47 individuals representing 19 families who were asked for their attitudes toward four case studies that represented withholding and withdrawing treatment, active euthanasia, and physician-assisted death. Results of the grounded theory analysis revealed that most of the participants favored withholding life-sustaining treatment and that almost half of them thought active euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide were morally acceptable as long as the decision was made by the individual patient himself or herself (voluntary). The reasons that justified their attitude positions were named according to six dimensions: promoting life, promoting death, self-control, dele-gators, allowing to die, and one-way street. The analysis further examined similar reasons that were provided as justifications for attitudes by two or more family members. These family reason dimensions were labeled according to their similarities to various ethical perspectives, including character ethics, natural laws, liberal individualism, communitarianism, beneficence, and casuistry. The research highlighted the importance of self-control as a core concern of individuals and family members when addressing the moral issues surrounding euthanasia.     

CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS AS SOURCES OF STRENGTH OR OBSTACLES FOR MOTHERS COPING WITH HIV

The current study explores the impact of HIV disease on the interpersonal relationships and social support experiences of mothers living with HIV. Analysis of interviews with 25 mothers with HIV focused on their perceptions of the impact of HIV on close relationships with significant others, including family of origin, children, friends, intimate partners, and parents. The results revealed the following major relationship challenges that mothers had to cope with after the discovery of their HIV-positive status: weighing reasons for and against disclosure of their HIV status, whether HIV disclosure brings relationship partners closer together, finding future caregivers for young children if one's health declines, and coordinating safer-sex practices with sexual partners, especially with the many males who are reluctant to use condoms. The study suggests the importance of understanding both the positive and negative aspects of social interactions in coping with HIV and the struggles that mothers have with the consequences of the HIV diagnosis for both themselves and their significant others.     

Fluency Profiling System: An automated system for analyzing the temporal properties of speech

The temporal characteristics of speech can be captured by examining the distributions of the durations of measurable speech components, namely speech segment durations and pause durations. However, several barriers prevent the easy analysis of pause durations: The first problem is that natural speech is noisy, and although recording contrived speech minimizes this problem, it also discards diagnostic information about cognitive processes inherent in the longer pauses associated with natural speech. The second issue concerns setting the distribution threshold, and consists of the problem of appropriately classifying pause segments as either short pauses reflecting articulation or long pauses reflecting cognitive processing, while minimizing the overall classification error rate. This article describes a fully automated system for determining the locations of speech–pause transitions and estimating the temporal parameters of both speech and pause distributions in natural speech. We use the properties of Gaussian mixture models at several stages of the analysis, in order to identify theoretical components of the data distributions, to classify speech components, to compute durations, and to calculate the relevant statistics.     

Religious exploration and conversion in forced displacement: a case study of Syrian Muslim refugees in Lebanon receiving assistance from Evangelical Christians

The idea of religious conversion as a break with one’s past and a change in identity and belonging is precarious when religious practices are considered in a context of displacement. Forced migrants’ sense of identity often becomes volatile when social and political pressures lead them to break with various aspects of their past lives. During a season of displacement, refugees and forced migrants may begin to attend religious meetings of a tradition different to that of their family or cease engaging in religious activities at all. Using the humanitarian engagement of Lebanese Evangelical churches with Syrian Muslim refugees as a case study, this article explores some of the unique dynamics in religious engagement in refugee communities. Many Syrian refugees began to attend church and study Christianity and this did indeed seem to have some sort of ‘spiritual’ influence on them, although few considered making a more radical change in their identity.     

They are afraid of the animal, so therefore I am too: Influence of peer modeling on fear beliefs and approach-avoidance behaviors towards animals in typically developing children

This study investigated the effect of filmed peer modeling on fear beliefs and approach–avoidance behaviors towards animals in 8- to 10-year-old typically developing children. Ninety-seven children randomly received either a positive or negative modeling film in which they saw peers interact with a novel animal. Before and after this film, children’s fear beliefs and avoidance tendencies towards the modeled and non-modeled control animal were measured. A behavioral approach task was also administered post-modeling. Following positive peer modeling, children’s fear beliefs and avoidance tendencies towards the modeled but also towards the non-modeled animal decreased significantly. After negative modeling, children’s fear beliefs towards the modeled animal increased significantly, but did not change for the non-modeled animal. Negative modeling did not change avoidance tendencies for the modeled animal, while it decreased children’s avoidance of the non-modeled animal. No significant effects were observed on the behavioral approach task. These results support Rachman’s indirect pathway of modeling/vicarious learning as a plausible mechanism by which children can acquire fears of novel stimuli and stresses the important fear-reducing effects of positive peer modeling. Clinical implications and directions for future research are discussed.     

Elevated trajectories of externalizing problems are associated with lower awakening cortisol levels in midadolescence

A growing body of research suggesting a negative association between basal levels of cortisol and persistent antisocial behavior has emerged. The present study examined relations between awakening cortisol levels and antisocial trajectories from ages 5 to 15 years among individuals in the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. Antisocial behavior was defined by semiparametric group modeling techniques, which revealed antisocial patterns parallel to Moffitt's (1993) taxonomy of antisocial trajectories. In contrast to the claim that biological diatheses are uniquely characteristic of individuals who demonstrate an early-onset pattern of antisocial behavior, our results suggest that individuals with elevated patterns of antisocial behavior between 5 and 15 years of age-irrespective of the timing of onset or desistance-are more likely to evidence lower awakening cortisol levels compared with individuals with persistently low levels of antisocial behavior.