What children do on the Internet: domains visited and their relationship to socio-demographic characteristics and academic performance.

HomeNetToo is a longitudinal field study designed to examine the antecedents and consequences of home Internet use in low-income families. Participants included 140 children, mostly 13-year-old African American (83%) boys (58%), living in single-parent households (75%) where the median annual income was $15,000 (USD). This report focuses on children's Internet activities, socio-demographic characteristics related to their Internet activities, and the relationship between academic performance and Internet activities. Overall, findings indicate that low-income children initially use the Internet primarily for entertainment. As home Internet use loses its novelty children become more focused in their Internet activities, reducing the number of websites they visit and visiting more websites targeted to their specific interests. Pornography websites are popular initially, especially among boys, but their popularity decreases dramatically after 3 months. Age, race, and sex have little influence on which websites are most popular. Academic performance predicts subsequent Internet activities, and Internet activities predict subsequent academic performance. Directions for future research to identify mechanisms that mediate the relationship between Internet activities and academic performance and implications for the digital divide are discussed.     

Binge drinking and violence against dating partners: the mediating effect of antisocial traits and behaviors in a multinational perspective

Research has consistently shown a link between alcohol use and partner violence (PV). Little is known concerning the strength of this association across cultures and genders, and few have assessed possible mediators. This study assesses the link between binge drinking and PV among 7,921 college students in 38 sites around the world, and investigates the mediating role of antisocial traits and behaviors (ASTB). A significant association was found between binge drinking and PV, the strength of which differed by site but not by gender. ASTB fully mediated this association. The mean level of binge drinking at each site did not significantly influence the strength of the association between binge drinking and PV.     

Gender symmetry in prevalence, severity, and chronicity of physical aggression against dating partners by university students in Mexico and USA

The paper reports results from analyses of the physical aggression against dating partners by four samples of university students in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, Mexican Americans and Non-Mexican Whites in El Paso and Lubbock Texas, and New Hampshire (N=1,544). The percent reporting partner violence (PV) was high in all samples, but also differed significantly between samples. The lowest rate was in New Hampshire (29.7%), followed by Texas, Non-Mexican Whites (30.9%), Texas Mexican American (34.2%), and the highest rate was in Juarez (46.1%). When only severe assaults were compared, the differences between samples was similar, i.e., lowest in New Hampshire and highest in Juarez. In all four samples, there was no significant difference between males and females in either the overall prevalence of physical aggression or the prevalence of severe attacks. Among the 553 couples where one or both of the partners were violent, in almost three quarters of the cases (71.2%) there was gender symmetry in the sense that both partners engaged in this type of behavior. When only one partner was violent, this was twice as likely to be the female partner (19.0%) as the male partner (9.8%). Among the 205 couples where there was an act of severe aggression, symmetry was less prevalent (56.6%), but when only one partner was violent, it was again twice as likely to be the female partner (29.8% female only versus 13.7 male partner only). These results are consistent with the gender symmetry in PV found in many studies. They extend those results by showing that gender symmetry prevails in four different cultural contexts. The presence of gender symmetry in these different cultural contexts, combined with studies showing that women are injured more often and more seriously by partner-assaults, and studies showing that women initiate PV as often as men, suggests that programs and policies aimed at primary prevention of PV by women are crucial to ending PV and for reducing the victimization of men and women.     

Where am I? Distal cues use requires sensitivity to start location change in the rat

Place learning is impaired when a single plus maze is moved between adjacent locations 33-120 cm apart. This maze translation creates distinct start locations but maintains a single goal location with respect to distal cues. Hippocampal cell recording data suggest the majority of place fields are tied to apparatus boundaries, not to distal cues, when an apparatus is moved these distances to the left or right. Thus, rats may fail to appreciate the existence of multiple start locations with respect to distal cues when the maze is moved in this way and their start location on the surface is constant. Performance on the single plus maze problem was improved when texture cues were correlated with different start locations. Place learning was supported when multiple start locations were provided on a single large surface (double plus maze), even though rats did not explore the entire surface. Place learning was also supported when random extensions were added to a double plus maze such that start locations, relative to surface boundaries, were not informative as to goal location. This outcome suggests sensitivity to multiple start locations is required for distal cue use in translational place problems.     

Of texts and contexts: reflections upon the publication of The Jung-White Letters

In addition to his many other personae, Jung was a writer and an author, which means a creator, whose written works underlie and authorize a field of thought and clinical work, i.e., analytical psychology. Not widely recognized is that many of his authored texts were stimulated by important and intense personal relationships. Freud and Victor White loom large, the first standing behind major early analytical texts like Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido and Psychological Types, the second behind later texts on culture, religion, and Christian theology. The publication of The Jung-White Letters reveals the significance of his relationship with Victor White for the authoring of Answer to Job.     

Care and the self: biotechnology,reproduction, and the good life

This paper explores a novel philosophy of ethical care in the face of burgeoning biomedical technologies. I respond to a serious challenge facing traditional bioethics with its roots in analytic philosophy. The hallmarks of these traditional approaches are reason and autonomy, founded on a belief in the liberal humanist subject. In recent years, however, there have been mounting challenges to this view of human subjectivity, emerging from poststructuralist critiques, such as Michel Foucault's, but increasingly also as a result of advances in biotechnology itself. In the face of these developments, I argue that the theoretical relevance and practical application of mainstream bioethics is increasingly under strain. Traditionalists will undoubtedly resist. Together, professional philosopher-bioethicists, public health policymakers, and the global commercial healthcare industry tend to respond conservatively by shoring up the liberal humanist subject as the foundation for medical ethics and consumer decision-making, appealing to the familiar tropes of reason, autonomy, and freedom.     

Rhesus monkeys (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Macaca mulatta</Emphasis>) discriminate between knowing and not knowing and collect information as needed before acting

Humans use memory awareness to determine whether relevant knowledge is available before acting, as when we determine whether we know a phone number before dialing. Such metacognition, or thinking about thinking, can improve selection of appropriate behavior. We investigated whether rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) are capable of a simple form of metacognitive access to the contents of short-term memory. Monkeys chose among four opaque tubes, one of which concealed food. The tube containing the reward varied randomly from trial to trial. On half the trials the monkeys observed the experimenter baiting the tube, whereas on the remaining trials their view of the baiting was blocked. On each trial, monkeys were allowed a single chance to select the tube containing the reward. During the choice period the monkeys had the opportunity to look down the length of each tube, to determine if it contained food. When they knew the location of the reward, most monkeys chose without looking. In contrast, when ignorant, monkeys often made the effort required to look, thereby learning the location of the reward before choosing. Looking improved accuracy on trials on which monkeys had not observed the baiting. The difference in looking behavior between trials on which the monkeys knew, and trials on which they were ignorant, suggests that rhesus monkeys discriminate between knowing and not knowing. This result extends similar observations made of children and apes to a species of Old World monkey, suggesting that the underlying cognitive capacities may be widely distributed among primates.