Ajustement rôle parental et rôle professionnel,un synchroniseur externe des rythmes attentionnels de l’enfant

The aim of this study was to investigate in families of two working parents the effects of parents’ work organisation and work-related stress on the level and rhythmicity of their children's attention in school. Four hundred and sixty children between five and 10 years of age, divided into three age groups, completed crossing-out tests. Each parent completed a coded and anonymous questionnaire. The results, analysed using a repeated measures ANOVA (α = 0.05), suggest that the mother's and father's work organisation and work-related stress impact on the child's attention differently according to age. Irregular professional activities, difficult to foresee and out of step with social life, as well as mental strain and accumulated stress could affect the regulatory function of the family on the child's receptiveness to learn at school.     

Pedagogy for diversity: mediating between tradition and equality in schools

The aim of this paper is to provide evidence‐based guidance for educational practitioners and, in particular, for those in leadership positions in schools, on good practice in developing and implementing school level strategies and actions to promote an appreciation of diversity in schools and society.     

Moral Self-Knowledge in Kantian Ethics

Kant’s duty of self-knowledge demands that one know one’s heart—the quality of one’s will in relation to duty. Self-knowledge requires that an agent subvert feelings which fuel self-aggrandizing narratives and increase self-conceit; she must adopt the standpoint of the rational agent constrained by the requirements of reason in order to gain information about her moral constitution. This is not I argue, contra Nancy Sherman, in order to assess the moral goodness of her conduct. Insofar as sound moral practice requires moral self-knowledge and moral self-knowledge requires a theoretical commitment to a conception of the moral self, sound moral agency is for Kant crucially tied to theory. Kant plausibly holds that self-knowledge is a protection against moral confusion and self-deception. I conclude that although his account relies too heavily on the awareness of moral law to explain its connection to moral development, it is insightful and important in Kantian ethics.     

Presentation of Mexican Americans to a Memory Disorder Clinic

Despite the rapidly growing nature of the Mexican American population in the United States, relatively little is known regarding cognitive aging among this minority group compared to non-Hispanic, white individuals. The current study was conducted to describe the nature of cognitive and affective characteristics of Mexican American patients with dementia or other cognitive disorders on initial presentation to a Memory Disorder Clinic. Archival data were reviewed from this specialty clinic for 219 patients who were evaluated for the first time over a 2-year period. Twenty-two Mexican American patients were identified, and a sample of 22 matched non-Hispanic white patients was derived for comparison. When compared to non-Hispanic white patients, Mexican Americans were found in fewer numbers, reported higher levels of anxiety and depression, and produced lower scores on neurocognitive assessments. Results support the notion that Mexican American patients present for cognitive assessment and treatment at a greater stage of impairment severity as compared to non-Hispanic whites.     

Suicidal Thinking and Perfectionism: The Role of Goal Adjustment and Behavioral Inhibition/Activation Systems (BIS/BAS)

The current study investigated the associations among perfectionism, goal adjustment, behavioral activation sensitivity (BAS), behavioral inhibition sensitivity (BIS), and suicidal thinking. Participants (n = 255) completed the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale, the BIS/BAS scale, the Goal Adjustment scale, and a measure of suicidal thinking. The findings showed that socially prescribed perfectionism was the only perfectionism dimension associated with suicidal thinking. Goal reengagement (but not goal disengagement) is an important construct in the suicidal process. A series of hierarchical regression analyses showed that goal reengagement moderates and mediates the effect of socially prescribed perfectionism on suicidal thinking. BIS was also associated with suicidal behavior but its effect was mediated via socially prescribed perfectionism. The theoretical and treatment implications of the relationships between socially prescribed perfectionism, goal reengagement, and suicidal thinking and between BIS, socially prescribed perfectionism, and suicidal thinking are discussed. Future research is required to determine whether these relationships are predictive of suicidal thinking and behavior over time.     

Response to Wesley J. Wildman’s “Behind, Between, and Beyond Anthropomorphic Models of Ultimate Reality”

This is a response to Wesley J. Wildman’s “Behind, Between, and Beyond Anthropomorphic Models of Ultimate Reality.” While I agree with much of what Wildman writes, I raise questions concerning standards for evaluating models of ultimate reality and the plausibility of ranking such models. This paper was delivered during the APA Pacific 2007 Mini-Conference on Models of God.     

Familial Association and Frequency of Learning Disabilities in ADHD Sibling Pair Families

In a sample of 235 families with at least two children with Attention-Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), the frequency and familial association of learning disabilities (LD) were assessed. Familiality was examined both between sibling pairs and between parents and their children. Two methods for defining LD, a discrepancy-based and a low-achievement model, were employed to examine the occurrence of LD in this sample. The specific types of LD examined included Reading Disability (RD), Math Disability (MD), and Writing Disability (WD). The prevalence rates were highest for RD, followed by WD then MD. The two definitions of LD yielded similar prevalence rates but identified different groups of children with vastly different IQ scores. Strong familial association was demonstrated for RD both between sibling pairs and between parents and children, with weaker association for WD. There was evidence of nonrandom mating for LD among parents, but not for ADHD or for ADHD + LD. Despite the high comorbidity of ADHD and LD among parents, the presence of ADHD in the parents did not predict child LD supporting independent familial factors underlying ADHD and LD.     

Abductive reasoning in neural-symbolic systems

Abduction is or subsumes a process of inference. It entertains possible hypotheses and it chooses hypotheses for further scrutiny. There is a large literature on various aspects of non-symbolic, subconscious abduction. There is also a very active research community working on the symbolic (logical) characterisation of abduction, which typically treats it as a form of hypothetico-deductive reasoning. In this paper we start to bridge the gap between the symbolic and sub-symbolic approaches to abduction. We are interested in benefiting from developments made by each community. In particular, we are interested in the ability of non-symbolic systems (neural networks) to learn from experience using efficient algorithms and to perform massively parallel computations of alternative abductive explanations. At the same time, we would like to benefit from the rigour and semantic clarity of symbolic logic. We present two approaches to dealing with abduction in neural networks. One of them uses Connectionist Modal Logic and a translation of Horn clauses into modal clauses to come up with a neural network ensemble that computes abductive explanations in a top-down fashion. The other combines neural-symbolic systems and abductive logic programming and proposes a neural architecture which performs a more systematic, bottom-up computation of alternative abductive explanations. Both approaches employ standard neural network architectures which are already known to be highly effective in practical learning applications. Differently from previous work in the area, our aim is to promote the integration of reasoning and learning in a way that the neural network provides the machinery for cognitive computation, inductive learning and hypothetical reasoning, while logic provides the rigour and explanation capability to the systems, facilitating the interaction with the outside world. Although it is left as future work to determine whether the structure of one of the proposed approaches is more amenable to learning than the other, we hope to have contributed to the development of the area by approaching it from the perspective of symbolic and sub-symbolic integration.