Keeping adolescents safe from harm: management strategies of African-American families in a high-risk community

In this study, we investigated changes in parents' use of restrictive and promotive management strategies from early to middle adolescence. We also examined the antecedents of these changes and their effects on adolescents' achievement and mental health. Longitudinal data included 50 African American adolescents and their parents living in a low-income school district. There were three major findings. First, parents, on average, used less restrictive and promotive management strategies from early to middle adolescence. Second, parents who experienced increased depressive symptoms reported using more restrictive management strategies from early to middle adolescence. Third, adolescents whose parents increased their use of restrictive management strategies experienced more anger and lower grade point averages, whereas adolescents whose parents increased their use of promotive management strategies experienced less anger, higher grade point averages, and less absences from early to middle adolescence. These findings suggest that increasing parents' use of promotive rather than restrictive management strategies may be more beneficial in supporting the academic achievement and mental health of adolescents living in high-risk neighborhoods.     

Is there a temporal basis of the word length effect? A response to Service (1998)

Service (1998) carried out a study of the word length effect with Finnish pseudowords in which short and long pseudowords were identical except for the inclusion of certain phonemes differing only in pronunciation length, a manipulation that is impossible in English. She obtained an effect of phonemic complexity but little or no word duration effect per se - a discrepancy from the expectations generated by the well-known working memory model of Baddeley (1986). In the present study using English words, we controlled for phonemic complexity differences by using the same words for the short- and long-word sets, but with instructions inducing shorter or longer pronunciation of the words. We obtained substantial word duration effects. Concerns raised by Service are addressed, and we conclude that both duration and complexity are likely to contribute to the word length effect in serial recall.     

Preservation Theorems Without Continuum Hypothesis

Many results concerning the equivalence between a syntactic form of formulas and a model theoretic conditions are proven directly without using any form of a continuum hypothesis. In particular, it is demonstrated that any reduced product sentence is equivalent to a Horn sentence. Moreover, in any first order language without equality one now has that a reduced product sentence is equivalent to a Horn sentence and any sentence is equivalent to a Boolean combination of Horn sentences.