“I’ll do it later”: Type of motivation,self-efficacy and homework procrastination

The aim of this study is to explore the role of motivation in the relations between self-efficacy and procrastination. One hundred seventy-one-fifth-grade students completed questionnaires that assessed the type of motivation the students have for homework, the level to which they procrastinate on doing homework, and their self-efficacy regarding homework. The results indicated that autonomous motivation both mediates and moderates the relations between self-efficacy and procrastination. These results highlight the importance of students’ type of motivation for homework, suggesting procrastination cannot be reduced simply by addressing students’ self-efficacy; but, they must be supported to adopt a more autonomous type of motivation.     

Transmission of Educational Outcomes Across Three Generations: Evidence From Migrant Workers’ Children in China

The migration of parents or children may bring risks to children’s academic performance, but intergenerational effects on the academic performance of migrant workers’ children have been underexplored. This study aims to investigate how grandparents’ socioeconomic status (G1) and parents’ proximal and distal socioeconomic status (G2) influence the academic performance of migrant workers’ children (G3) and the corresponding impacts on the academic performance of migrant and left-behind children. The data used in this study were collected from a survey of 2017 migrant workers conducted in 13 districts and cities of 7 provinces of China in 2014. The results of ordered logistic regression models indicate that G1 grandparent socioeconomic status is positively associated with G2 academic performance and education level. Similarly, G2 parental academic performance and education level are positively linked to G3 academic performance. Parental distal academic performance and education level play an important role in G3 academic performance, but grandparents’ socioeconomic status is not significantly associated with G3 academic performance while controlling for both G1 and G2 variables. In addition, the influence of grandparents’ and parents’ socioeconomic status differs between migrant and left-behind children. Grandparent and parental occupation status only have a significant impact on left-behind children. The educational reproduction of migrant workers’ children has different logics among migrant and left-behind children. Further policies and social services are required to improve the development of migrant workers’ children.

     

A Retrospective Study of Daughters' Emotional Role Reversal with Parents,Attachment Anxiety,Excessive Reassurance-Seeking,and Depressive Symptoms

Emotional role reversal occurs when children provide for the emotional needs of their parents. This reversal of the hierarchical family structure can have negative, enduring costs for daughters who primarily provide, rather than receive, nurturance. More specifically, emotional role reversal was expected to foster attachment anxiety and excessive reassurance-seeking, both of which may promote negative long term effects on daughters' emotional well-being. Female undergraduates (N = 163) from intact families provided self-report data on these constructs. Role reversal with mothers predicted daughters' depressive symptoms. This effect was fully mediated by anxious attachment tendencies. Clinical implications of role reversal are discussed.     

The Nazi Engineers: Reflections on Technological Ethics in Hell

Engineers, architects, and other technological professionals designed the genocidal death machines of the Third Reich. The death camp operations were highly efficient, so these technological professionals knew what they were doing: they were, so to speak, good engineers. As an educator at a technological university, I need to explain to my students—future engineers and architects—the motivations and ethical reasoning of the technological professionals of the Third Reich. I need to educate my students in the ethical practices of this hellish regime so that they can avoid the kind of ethical justifications used by the Nazi engineers. In their own professional lives, my former students should not only be good engineers in a technical sense, but good engineers in a moral sense. In this essay, I examine several arguments about the ethical judgments of professionals in Nazi Germany, and attempt a synthesis that can provide a lesson for contemporary engineers and other technological professionals. How does an engineer avoid the error of the Nazi engineers in their embrace of an evil ideology underlying their technological creations? How does an engineer know that the values he embodies through his technological products are good values that will lead to a better world? This last question, I believe, is the fundamental issue for the understanding of engineering ethics.     

Differential outcomes facilitate same/different concept learning

Commonly recognized, the training procedure one employs often affects the results they obtain. Here, we demonstrate for the first time that abstract-concept learning is affected by employing a differential-outcomes procedure. The differential-outcome effect has been shown to occur for item-specific strategies but has not been established for relational strategies. To test whether different-outcome expectancies can facilitate a relational strategy, eight pigeons were trained and tested in a two-item same/different task with pictures. After pecking an upper picture, they pecked a lower picture if the pictures were the same or a white rectangle if the pictures were different. Two groups of pigeons were rewarded with either different outcomes (sounds and food amounts) or same outcomes. Both groups were trained to criterion with successively larger picture sets (8–1,024 items) and were transfer tested with novel pictures following each acquisition. With the smallest training sets, neither group showed any novel-stimulus transfer. But after acquiring the task with 32 pictures, the different-outcomes group responded more accurately to novel pictures than the same-outcome group. As the training set-size increased, both groups’ transfer performance converged and became equivalent to training performance. These results show for the first time that training with different outcomes facilitates abstract-concept learning.     

All gifts large and small: toward an understanding of the ethics of pharmaceutical industry gift-giving

Much attention has been focused in recent years on the ethical acceptability of physicians receiving gifts from drug companies. Professional guidelines recognize industry gifts as a conflict of interest and establish thresholds prohibiting the exchange of large gifts while expressly allowing for the exchange of small gifts such as pens, note pads, and coffee. Considerable evidence from the social sciences suggests that gifts of negligible value can influence the behavior of the recipient in ways the recipient does not always realize. Policies and guidelines that rely on arbitrary value limits for gift-giving or receipt should be reevaluated.     

Can psychiatry residents be attracted to analytic training? A survey of five residency programs

In the face of fewer psychiatrist applicants for psychoanalytic training, determining the interest of current psychiatric residents in psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychiatry is a pressing concern. To gauge this interest, an anonymous online survey was sent to residents from five psychiatry residency programs in the Midwest and South. Seventy-five residents responded, for a return rate of 42%. The data suggest that residents value psychoanalytic concepts and most plan to incorporate the practice of psychodynamic psychotherapy into their careers after graduation; however, residents have little confidence in their level of skill and the adequacy of their training. While 46% express interest in further psychodynamic psychotherapy training, only 22% express interest in psychoanalytic training. Most cite the cost and time involved as reasons they would not pursue further training. This study demonstrates that psychiatric residents have strong interest in and respect for psychodynamic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. The data suggest that psychiatric residents are a viable pool of applicants for psychoanalytic training, especially if barriers to training can be reduced and creative ways for psychoanalysts to engage residents can be fostered.     

Nonselective access of spelling–sound knowledge for Korean‐English bilinguals

An intense debate in monolingual research concerns the presence of phonological recoding in word recognition. Research supporting the phonological recoding hypothesis in monolingual research suggests the possibility of phonological recoding even in L2 recognition. There has been some experimental evidence showing phonological priming between L1 and L2 for alphabetic bilinguals (e.g., French‐Dutch). In the present study, lexical decision experiments used either L1 or L2 primes with targets from the other language at SOAs of 140 ms and 250 ms for Korean‐English bilinguals. It was found that phonological information activated by either an L1 or L2 prime can interact with phonological information in the other language. That is, L2 shares phonological information with L1, and its spelling–sound knowledge is activated, apparently automatically, at an SOA of 140 ms. The consistent pattern of phonological priming of both L1 and L2 targets at the 140 ms SOA indicates that the spelling–sound knowledge of bilingual lexicons is activated when any linguistic form is presented. Importantly, this indiscriminate activation of spelling–sound knowledge in the Korean‐English bilingual system occurs in the absence of any common orthographic cues because the two languages have totally different writing systems.     

The dreamer's use of space

The dreamer often portrays wishes, conflicts, or current problems in terms of visual-spatial representations and metaphors.The spatial dimensions of dreams frequently signify important affective themes of the dream. In doing so, they serve to continue or reflect processes of self-recognition in relation to the environment, processes that began in early childhood, when the developing child's experience of movement through space played a central role in organizing affect and motivation systems that contribute to emerging schemata of the self. Representations of that movement through space gradually grow to serve a broader symbolic function, as may be seen in the spatial dimensions of both play and dreaming. Spatial relations then become building blocks for aspects of metaphoric and abstract thinking. The resultant personal "geography," a constellation of physical imagery of a body moving through space, retains an important place in mental life as development unfolds. It is complemented and enhanced by the achievement of language, but it never recedes as a core aspect of self. Developmental and neurobiological observations suggest the clinical usefulness of heightened attention to this spatial aspect of dreams. Clinical examples illustrate how attention to the spatial arrangements of a dream and the dreamer's movement through space can enhance access to the affective tone and meaning of the dream.     

Cognitive therapy for irritable bowel syndrome is associated with reduced limbic activity, GI symptoms, and anxiety

This study sought to identify brain regions that underlie symptom changes in severely affected IBS patients undergoing cognitive therapy (CT). Five healthy controls and 6 Rome II diagnosed IBS patients underwent psychological testing followed by rectal balloon distention while brain neural activity was measured with O-15 water positron emission tomography (PET) before and after a brief regimen of CT. Pre-treatment resting state scans, without distention, were compared to post-treatment scans using statistical parametric mapping (SPM). Neural activity in the parahippocampal gyrus and inferior portion of the right cortex cingulate were reduced in the post-treatment scan, compared to pre-treatment (x, y, z coordinates in MNI standard space were -30, -12, -30, P=0.017; 6, 34, -8, P=0.023, respectively). Blood flow values at these two sites in the controls were intermediate between those in the pre- and post-treatment IBS patients. Limbic activity changes were accompanied by significant improvements in GI symptoms (e.g., pain, bowel dysfunction) and psychological functioning (e.g., anxiety, worry). The left pons (-2, -26, -28, P=0.04) showed decreased neural activity which was correlated with post-treatment anxiety scores. Changes in neural activity of cortical-limbic regions that subserve hypervigilance and emotion regulation may represent biologically oriented change mechanisms that mediate symptom improvement of CT for IBS.