The impact of sex,achievement domain,and conceptual orientation on causal attributions

Sex differences in achievement domain and achievement orientation were examined to better understand women's achievement. College students (84 women, 59 men) were asked to write brief accounts of a past success and a past failure and to provide causal attributions for each. More women recalled affiliative-process events, and proportionally more men recalled mastery-impact events. The relationship of topic domain and conceptual orientation to causal attributions was apparent only for accounts of failure. Topic domain and conceptual orientation interacted with sex to further influence stability attributions. When women conceptualized failure as a process, they emphasized attributions to effort and luck, while men accounted for the process failure by ability and task. When the failure was conceptualized in terms of final impact, the sex pattern of attributions was reversed.     

SCHEDULE-INDUCED DRINKING: ELICITATION,ANTICIPATION, OR BEHAVIORAL INTERACTION?

We carried out five experiments with rats on fixed-time schedules in order to define the relation between drinking and individual food-pellet presentations. In Experiment 1, unsignaled extra food occurred at the end of occasional fixed intervals, and we compared subsequent drinking patterns with drinking before the extra food presentation. In Experiment 2 we presented signaled and unsignaled extra food and measured elicited and anticipatory drinking patterns. In Experiment 3, we observed the persistence of modified drinking patterns when several consecutive intervals ended with extra pellets. In Experiments 4 and 5, we varied the magnitude of food delivery across (rather than within) sessions to replicate published findings. Results show that schedule-induced drinking is neither elicited by food presentations nor induced by stimuli associated with a high food rate. All subjects seemed to follow a simple rule: during any stimulus signaling an increase in the local probability of food delivery within a session, engage in food-related behavior to the exclusion of drinking. Schedule-induced drinking appears to be the result of dynamic interactions among food-related behavior, drinking, and other motivated behavior, rather than a direct effect of the contingencies of food reinforcement.     

Description and Immediate Impacts of a Preventive Intervention for Conduct Problems

A population-based randomized intervention trial for the prevention of conduct problems (i.e., oppositional defiant disorder and conduct disorder) is described. The LIFT (Linking the Interests of Families and Teachers) intervention was designed for all first- and fifth-grade elementary school boys and girls and their families living in at-risk neighborhoods characterized by high rates of juvenile delinquency. The 10-week intervention strategy was carefully targeted at proximal and malleable antecedents in three social domains that were identified by a developmental model of conduct problems. From 12 elementary schools, 671 first and fifth graders and their families participated either in the theory-based universal preventive intervention or in a control condition. The intervention consisted of parent training, a classroom-based social skills program, a playground behavioral program, and systematic communication between teachers and parents. A multiple measure assessment strategy was used to evaluate participant satisfaction and participation, fidelity of implementation, and the immediate impacts of the program on targeted antecedents.     

Teaching World Religions without Teaching “World Religions”

Tomoko Masuzawa and a number of other contemporary scholars have recently problematized the categories of “religion” and “world religions” and, in some cases, called for its abandonment altogether as a discipline of scholarly study. In this collaborative essay, we respond to this critique by highlighting three attempts to teach world religions without teaching “world religions.” That is, we attempt to promote student engagement with the empirical study of a plurality of religious traditions without engaging in the rhetoric of pluralism or the reification of the category “religion.” The first two essays focus on topical courses taught at the undergraduate level in self‐consciously Christian settings: the online course “Women and Religion” at Georgian Court University and the service‐learning course “Interreligious Dialogue and Practice” at St. Michael's College, in the University of Toronto. The final essay discusses the integration of texts and traditions from diverse traditions into the graduate theology curriculum more broadly, in this case at Loyola Marymount University. Such confessional settings can, we suggest, offer particularly suitable – if somewhat counter‐intuitive – contexts for bringing the otherwise covert agendas of the world religions discourse to light and subjecting them to a searching inquiry in the religion classroom.     

“Anxious Suicidality”: A New Subtype of Childhood Suicide Ideation?

The current study examined the presence of anxiety in children with suicide ideation. From a sample of 100 inpatients, children who displayed suicide ideation (n = 27) were selected and divided into two groups, high and low anxiety. Findings indicated that children with suicide ideation and anxiety were less happy and satisfied, experienced more negative life events, and were more distractible and intense than children with suicide ideation only. Additionally, according to their self-reports, parents of children with high anxiety reported more obsessive-compulsive and anxiety symptoms as well as greater hostility than parents of children with low anxiety. The authors have identified a subgroup of children with suicide ideation who are highly anxious and can be termed as experiencing “anxious suicidality.”     

Delinquency prevention through training parents in family management

Nearly two decades of clinical research at the Oregon Social Learning Center (OSLC) have helped to shape a theory of antisocial behavior in boys. Models depicting the theory are presented and discussed. In addition, family management variables such as "discipline," "monitoring," "positive parenting," and "problem solving" are described as used in clinical applications. Total aversive behavior (TAB), based on home observations, and parent daily report (PDR), based on telephone interviews, are examined as outcome indicators for a variety of studies investigating the efficacy of the OSLC social interactional therapy. Several recent reports of treatment for adjudicated adolescents and their families are included; law violations are the dependent measures in those studies. Examples of the interface between clinical work and theory at OSLC are presented. Questions of generalization of the clinical methodology to large urban populations, and access to parents who most need to learn the parenting techniques are noted.