Fetal Risks,Relative Risks,and Relatives' Risks

Several factors related to fetal risk render it more or less acceptable in justifying constraints on the behavior of pregnant women. Risk is an unavoidable part of pregnancy and childbirth, one that women must balance against other vital personal and family interests. Two particular issues relate to the fairness of claims that pregnant women are never entitled to put their fetuses at risk: relative risks and relatives' risks. The former have been used—often spuriously—to advance arguments against activities, such as home birth, that may incur risk; the latter implicate the nature of relationships in determining the acceptability of coercing or precluding activities. Motivated reasoning by clinicians and judges leads to inaccurate risk assessments, and judgments based on false claims to objectivity. Such judgments undermine the moral and legal standing of pregnant women and do not advance the interests of fetuses, pregnant women, families, or states.     

Kicking over the Traces: A Note in Response to Zurif and Piñango (1999)

Zurif and Piñango (1999) claimed that they excluded the four agrammatic patients reported by Druks and Marshall (1991) from their review article because two of the patients were nonnative speakers of Hebrew and because the Hebrew sentences we used in our investigations were ungrammatical. In Druks and Marshall (1991) we have shown that the presence or the absence of a trace in two types of Hebrew passives had no effect on the patients' performance. Two patients, without comprehension deficits, performed equally well on both types of passives and two patients, with comprehension deficits, were equally impaired on both types. We remind Zurif and Piñango of our previous response to the claims of ungrammaticality of our materials (Druks & Marshall, 1992) and argue that there were no justifiable reasons for excluding these cases from the review. We also comment on Zurif and Piñango's (1999) and Grodzinsky's (2000) new proposal that the association of agrammatic comprehension should be with Broca's aphasia and not with agrammatism.     

Prefrontal cortex and hippocampus subserve different components of working memory in rats

Both the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and hippocampus are implicated in working memory tasks in rodents. Specifically, it has been hypothesized that the mPFC is primarily engaged in the temporary storage and processing of information lasting from a subsecond to several seconds, while the hippocampal function becomes more critical as the working memory demand extends into longer temporal scales. Although these structures may be engaged in a temporally separable manner, the extent of their contributions in the "informational content" of working memory remains unclear. To investigate this issue, the mPFC and dorsal hippocampus (dHPC) were temporarily inactivated via targeted infusions of the GABA(A) receptor agonist muscimol in rats prior to their performance on a delayed alternation task (DAT), employing an automated figure-eight maze that required the animals to make alternating arm choice responses after 3-, 30-, and 60-sec delays for water reward. We report that inactivation of either the mPFC or dHPC significantly reduced DAT at all delay intervals tested. However, there were key qualitative differences in the behavioral effects. Specifically, mPFC inactivation selectively impaired working memory (i.e., arm choice accuracy) without altering reference memory (i.e., the maze task rule) and arm choice response latencies. In contrast, dHPC inactivation increased both reference memory errors and arm choice response latencies. Moreover, dHPC, but not mPFC, inactivation increased the incidence of successive working memory errors. These results suggest that while both the mPFC and hippocampus are necessarily involved in DAT, they seem to process different informational components associated with the memory task.     

Stressors Experienced by Women Within Marine Corps Families: A Qualitative Study of Discourse Within an Online Forum

The social constructionist perspective frames this exploration of the socioemotional and relational aspects of stress experienced by significant others of active duty Marines. Interpretive methods were applied to data from an online forum for Marine Corps wives, fiancées, and girlfriends. Open coding revealed six stressors: (a) stuck in a state of flux, (b) going through changes, (c) relational uncertainty, (d) loneliness, (e) alienation, and (f) anxiety related to deployment. Axial coding revealed three properties underlying these stressors: (a) issues of control and helplessness, (b) concerns over privileging individual or relational goals, and (c) the matter of locus of blame.     

Korean dance performance influences on prospective tourist cultural products consumption and behaviour intention

We examined to what extent viewing the Korean dance performance by Beyond The Scene (BTS) at the 2018 Melon Music Awards influenced global viewers’ purchase of Korean cultural products and tourism behaviour intention. We surveyed 230 prospective tourists from the USA (black adult females = 50%; mean age = 34.9, SD = 1.116) in terms of their preference for Korean cultural products and intention to visit Korea. We conducted structural equation modelling to map the paths among cultural product preferences and tourism intentions. We found that viewing the Korean dance performance by BTS not only increased the purchase of Korean cultural products among participants, but also their tourism behaviour intention. We also found that the purchase of Korean cultural products by participants was associated with increased Korea tourism behaviour intention. We conclude from these data that viewing cultural performances by would-be tourists and their purchase preferences are important for promoting tourism through cultural industries.     

Relationship of Adult Representations of Childhood Parenting and Personality Tendencies to Adult Stressors and Political Ideology

Undergraduate students in a Southeastern US University (n = 232) responded to an inventory that included retrospective measures of their parents’ style of parenting (authoritarian vs. authoritative) and their own childhood psychological tendencies (insecurity vs. confidence), as well as their adult stressors and political orientation. Authoritative parenting positively correlated with childhood confidence and negatively correlated with both childhood insecurity and adult stressors. Conversely, authoritarian parenting was positively associated with childhood insecurity and adult stressors but was not significantly correlated with childhood confidence. For the most part, parenting styles, early childhood tendencies, and adult stressors were unrelated to adult political ideology, contrary to previous longitudinal research reporting these connections.     

Adolescent Violence: The Protective Effects of Youth Assets

The authors explored adolescent physical fighting and weapon carrying, using in‐home interviews with 1,098 middle/high school students and their parents. Logistic regression analyses examined the relationship between youth assets and the risk behaviors while controlling for demographic information. Both demographic factors and assets were associated with no physical fighting, and 6 of 9 assets were linked to not carrying a weapon. These findings indicate that certain assets may protect youth from physical fighting and carrying a weapon.     

A unified approach to exploratory factor analysis with missing data,nonnormal data,and in the presence of outliers

Factor analysis is regularly used for analyzing survey data. Missing data, data with outliers and consequently nonnormal data are very common for data obtained through questionnaires. Based on covariance matrix estimates for such nonstandard samples, a unified approach for factor analysis is developed. By generalizing the approach of maximum likelihood under constraints, statistical properties of the estimates for factor loadings and error variances are obtained. A rescaled Bartlett-corrected statistic is proposed for evaluating the number of factors. Equivariance and invariance of parameter estimates and their standard errors for canonical, varimax, and normalized varimax rotations are discussed. Numerical results illustrate the sensitivity of classical methods and advantages of the proposed procedures.This project was supported by a University of North Texas Faculty Research Grant, Grant #R49/CCR610528 for Disease Control and Prevention from the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, and Grant DA01070 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The results do not necessarily represent the official view of the funding agencies. The authors are grateful to three reviewers for suggestions that improved the presentation of this paper.