Pediatric traumatic brain injury: Language outcomes and their relationship to the arcuate fasciculus

Pediatric traumatic brain injury (TBI) may result in long-lasting language impairments alongside dysarthria, a motor-speech disorder. Whether this co-morbidity is due to the functional links between speech and language networks, or to widespread damage affecting both motor and language tracts, remains unknown.     

Examining a structural model of the relationships among alcohol use,marijuana/hashish use,their effects,and emotional and psychological problems over time in a cohort of high‐risk youths

Using data collected in a longitudinal study of detained juveniles, we test a model of the relationships among alcohol and marijuana or hashish use, reported adverse effects of the use of these substances, and emotional and psychological problems. Significant interrelationships were found among these factors over time. Degree of involvement in alcohol and marijuana or hashish use (measured either by self‐reports or both self‐reports and urine test results) was significantly related at Time 1 with the number of reported averse effects of the use of each specific substance; a similar relationship was found at Time 2 for marijuana or hashish use. In addition, emotional and psychological problems were significantly associated with reported adverse effects of the use of alcohol or marijuana or hashish at each time period. The results further indicate that youths who become more involved in the use of alcohol or marijuana or hashish over time report more adverse effects of their use of each of these substances. These findings highlight a network of interconnected experiences that add insight into the youths’ functioning over time. At the same time, the youths’ Time 2 emotional and psychological problems, reported effects of their alcohol use, and reported effects of their marijuana or hashish use are weakly predicted by the variables in the model; these findings suggest considerable change in these experiences over time. Theoretical and policy implications of these findings are discussed.     

reclaiming the expressive subject: deviance and the art of non-normativity

Situated within the theoretical and philosophical frameworks of Romanticism and expressionism in the arts, the present exposition argues for conceptual renewal in the study of deviance, specifically entailing a reclamation of the expressive subject of deviance. In particular, it is argued that many forms of deviance can and should be understood as fundamentally artistic, embodying creative, expressive, emotive, symbolic, and communicative elements characteristic of art. The emergence of expressionism in the arts is described as issuing from the more general Romantic ethos, characterized through its critique of transformations brought by modernity by an affirmation of the creative, expressive dimension of being human. It is argued that many forms of deviance, at least analogously, embody characteristics of this Romantic ethos. The paper concludes by discussing the need for renewed attention to human subjectivity in the study of deviance, drawing in part from existentialism as a contemporary sociological counterpart to the Romantic ethos.     

Application of the Serious Leisure Perspective to Intrinsically Motivated Serial Homicide

ABSTRACT

This article briefly introduces the multidisciplinary field of leisure sciences before exploring how leisure theory, particularly the Serious Leisure Perspective, can provide important insights into better understanding some forms of serial homicide. It is well known that many serial homicide offenders kill for the pleasure and enjoyment that such behavior provides them. Such expressive cases can be understood as deviant casual, serious, or project-based leisure experience, which helps account for how particular offenders plan, structure, and experience their crimes. Examples of specific serial homicide cases that appear to function primarily as casual, serious, or project-based leisure are presented and discussed.     

Dispositions and the Argument from Science

Central to the debate between Humean and anti-Humean metaphysics is the question of whether dispositions can exist in the absence of categorical properties that ground them (that is, where the causal burden is shifted on to categorical properties on which the dispositions would therefore supervene). Dispositional essentialists claim that they can; categoricalists reject the possibility of such ‘baseless’ dispositions, requiring that all dispositions must ultimately have categorical bases. One popular argument, recently dubbed the ‘Argument from Science’, has appeared in one or another form over much of the last century and purports to win the day for the dispositional essentialist. Taking its cue from physical theory, the Argument from Science treats the exclusively dispositional characterizations of the fundamental particles one finds in physical theory as providing a key premise in what has been called a ‘decisive’ argument for baseless dispositions. Despite sharing the intuition that dispositions can be baseless, I argue that the force and significance of the Argument from Science have been greatly overestimated: no version of the argument is close to decisive, and only one version succeeds in scoring points against the categoricalist. Not only is physical theory more ontologically innocent than defenders of baseless dispositions seem to appreciate, most versions of the Argument from Science neglect important ways that dispositions could be grounded by categorical properties.     

On psychoanalytic autobiography

This article considers how one might define ‘psychoanalytic autobiography’, using statements from theorists of ‘life-writing’ and extracts from autobiographers (some of them psychoanalysts), together with their own commentaries on the genre. The focus is less on content and more on the nature of the art form, with a view to noting analogies with the psychoanalytic process. These analogies are to be found, in particular, in the qualities of transference dialogue; in the art of transformative or communicative projective identification; and in the contrast between self-indulgent and constructive types of memory. Psychoanalytic autobiography is seen as a mode of remaking the self – not omnipotently but through exploratory self-analysis, frequently following the familiar pattern of loss and rediscovery. It entails a special imagined relationship with the unknown reader, and a sense of being guided by a detached observational eye equivalent to that which Bion terms the ‘third party’ in a psychoanalytic situation.     

Principles of cultural psychology and the Hindu avatar tradition: A study of Mother Meera through personal narratives

Using principles from cultural psychology, we describe and analyse the senior author's experience of dissonance while visiting Mother Meera, a contemporary Hindu avatara, in order to receive her darshan, the blessing derived from the gaze of a self-realised person. Feelings of love and acceptance were contrasted with the disturbing feelings evinced by the exclusion of emotionally disturbed and physically handicapped individuals. Using the principle of intentional persons and intentional worlds co-constructing each other, socio-organic and role-centred conceptions of personhood found in South Asia are contrasted with separative and individual rights-based conceptions of individuals in North Atlantic cultures. Other theoretical formulations from cultural psychology including those concerning narrative are employed in order to illustrate the felt intensity of dissonance between the experiences of love and that of exclusion.     

Learning Count Nouns and Adjectives: Understanding the Contributions of Lexical Form Class and Social-Pragmatic Cues

In two experiments, one hundred ninety-two 3-year-olds, 4-year-olds, and adults heard a novel word for a target object and then were asked to extend the label to one of two test objects, one matching in shape-based object category (the shape match) and the other matching in a property other than shape (the property match). We independently manipulated the lexical form class cues (count noun, adjective) and social-pragmatic cues (point actions, property-highlighting actions) accompanying the label. The impact of these two types of cue on extension differed markedly across age groups. Adults and 4-year-olds extended the word to the property match significantly more often when the term was modeled as an adjective and when it was presented with property-highlighting actions; but adults extended both adjectives and count nouns systematically to the property match when the speaker highlighted the non-shape property, whereas 4-year-olds systematically extended only adjectives to the property match under these conditions. Three-year-olds extended the word to the property match significantly more often when the label was modeled as an adjective but were not significantly affected by the social-pragmatic cues; and they failed to extend either adjectives or count nouns systematically to the property match when the speaker highlighted the non-shape property. We discuss the results in terms of the proposal that word learning draws on cues from multiple sources and the nature of the “shape bias” in lexical development.     

The development and analysis of tutorial dialogues in AutoTutor Lite

The goal of intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) that interact in natural language is to emulate the benefits that a well-trained human tutor provides to students, by interpreting student answers and appropriately responding in order to encourage elaboration. BRCA Gist is an ITS developed using AutoTutor Lite, a Web-based version of AutoTutor. Fuzzy-trace theory theoretically motivated the development of BRCA Gist, which engages people in tutorial dialogues to teach them about genetic breast cancer risk. We describe an empirical method to create tutorial dialogues and fine-tune the calibration of BRCA Gist’s semantic processing engine without a team of computer scientists. We created five interactive dialogues centered on pedagogic questions such as “What should someone do if she receives a positive result for genetic risk of breast cancer?” This method involved an iterative refinement process of repeated testing with different texts and successively making adjustments to the tutor’s expectations and settings in order to improve performance. The goal of this method was to enable BRCA Gist to interpret and respond to answers in a manner that best facilitated learning. We developed a method to analyze the efficacy of the tutor’s dialogues. We found that BRCA Gist’s assessment of participants’ answers was highly correlated with the quality of the answers found by trained human judges using a reliable rubric. The dialogue quality between users and BRCA Gist predicted performance on a breast cancer risk knowledge test completed after exposure to the tutor. The appropriateness of BRCA Gist’s feedback also predicted the quality of answers and breast cancer risk knowledge test scores.