The Understanding of Word Definitions in School-Age Children

This study investigated children’s understanding of unfamiliar noun and verb definitions in tasks that were manipulated for syntactic and semantic properties of definitions. The study was also designed to examine the relation between understanding word definitions and the skills of syntactic awareness and making inferences. A total of 117 children over three upper elementary grades (3, 4, 5) participated in the study. The definitional tasks were presented in multiple choice format, with each definition followed by four context sentences. In the syntactic/semantic condition, which included nouns and verbs, the context sentences were manipulated for syntactic and semantic properties. In the semantic condition, which included only nouns, the context sentences were manipulated only for semantics. All children also completed a syntactic awareness task and a making inferences task. Results indicated that children did not make significant grade improvements in the semantic task, but did so in the syntactic/semantic task, suggesting the dependence of syntactic cues on definitional understanding. Findings further suggested that inferencing and syntactic awareness are important to children’s ability in understanding a definition for an unfamiliar word and to integrating that meaning into a context sentence.     

Just Savings and the Difference Principle

The issue of just savings between generations presents an important,and for the most part unappreciated, problem for Rawls's theory ofdistributive justice. This paper argues that the just savingsprinciple, as Rawls formulates it in his recent work, standsin tension with the difference principle. When thought through,the just savings principle – and more precisely the foundationon which it rests – give us reason to reject the differenceprinciple in favor of a less egalitarian principle ofdistributive justice.     

Multicultural Training in Spirituality: An Interdisciplinary Review

Is spiritual diversity a neglected dimension in preparation for multicultural competency? The authors present an interdisciplinary overview of research related to multicultural training in spirituality and religion to address this issue. Findings indicate that counseling program leaders have minimal preparation in spiritual and religious diversity and interventions. In addition, spiritual and religious themes appear to be minimally included in counseling program curricula. Some evidence also indicates that religious and spiritual diversity is not considered as important in multicultural training as are other kinds of diversity. A movement to include spirituality and religious content in accreditation guidelines, however, points to a possible shift to expand preparation for religious and spiritual competency. The article concludes with implications for counselor preparation and supervision.     

The Gendering of Adolescents' Childbearing and Educational Plans: Reciprocal Effects and the Influence of Social Context

We examined the role of gender in relation to adolescents' educational and childbearing plans, the extent to which these plans were interdependent, and the differential effect of gender and social context. The High School and Beyond data were used to estimate a 2-stage least squares model of the reciprocal effect of plans and the influence of social context on plans by gender (N = 6,086). Results indicated that girls expected the timing of childbearing to affect their educational attainment, but boys did not. Educational plans had a greater, positive effect on girls' childbearing plans relative to boys. Family and school contexts also differentially affected girls' and boys' plans. We concluded that gender was important to the development to these adolescents' plans.     

Playing dead: an unconscious fantasy, bodily focused defenses, and their roots in infancy

A patient's unconscious fantasy of being her mother's dead baby emerged during the course of a long analysis, and was understood as her expression and explanation, constructed and elaborated throughout her development, of a fundamental and formative early infant state and experience. This patient's identification with a baby who had died before she was born was connected to her major complaint, a pervasive feeling that she could not act with intention, and to her obsessive ruminations, compulsive actions, and masochistic attacks on her body. The bodily based aspects and focus of these defenses were autistic-like, self-directed activities that can be understood as having their roots in what was experienced as catastrophic loss in the earliest weeks and months of life. Infant research, particularly on contingency detection, is especially useful in clarifying the ways in which these defenses may form, and in reconstructing and tracing the trajectories and intricate transformations of body ego, self- and other representations, and defenses from their earliest beginnings to their current manifestations in patients' fantasies and symptoms.     

Understanding how speed affects performance of polyrhythms: transferring control as speed increases

Pianists (N = 9) memorized and performed polyrhythms over a range of speeds from 1 to 16 notes/s. Using several fingers of each hand to press the keys on a piano keyboard, they performed the 5:3 polyrhythm by playing "3s" with one hand simultaneously with "5s" in the other. All the participants were able to maintain overall tempos and rhythms to within 10% of target speeds despite increasing difficulty. Increasing speed led to a transfer of control at about 6 notes/s, with a modular system operating above that speed. The participants were also able to engage in timing coupling at all speeds, even when the hands belonged to different people.     

Limits of visual acuity in the frontal field of the rock pigeon (Columba livia)

The eye of the rock pigeon is typical of a granivorous lateral-eyed bird, in that it has both a laterally projecting central fovea and a second high-density cellular area in peripheral retina (area dorsalis) which projects to the binocular frontal field below the beak. Such a dual system is faced with potentially different optical restraints arising from central and peripheral vision. We asked whether the frontal axis can support high resolution vision from a refractive resting position (predicted to be 25-33 cm; Fitzke et al, 1985 Journal of Physiology 369 33-44) to some near point of accommodation. We measured the visual acuity on the frontal axis in five pigeons using an operant discrimination of high-contrast square-wave gratings at a series of distances from 7 to 80 cm from the eye. The peak average acuity was 11.04 cycles deg(-1), which occurred 10 cm from the eye. The average of the maximum acuity of each bird at 10 cm was 12.8 +/- 1.1 cycles deg(-1), a value equal to the Nyquist frequency calculated from the peak ganglion cell density of the area dorsalis. However, this maximum acuity was restricted to a narrow depth in space, located around 10 cm from the eye, and at greater distances fell exponentially such that acuity was 50% of its maximum at 35 cm and less than 1 cycle deg(-1) at 100 cm. We propose that the range of high-acuity vision is limited in the frontal field by either increased refractive power and/or inaccuracy in frontal accommodation, and is optimized for a preferred far point located 10 cm from the eye.     

MMPI-2 personality profiles of high-functioning adults with autism spectrum disorders

The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-Second Edition was administered to 20 adults with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) who fell in the average to above average range of intelligence and 24 age-, intelligence-, and gender-matched college students. Large group differences, with the ASD group scoring higher, were found on the L validity scale, Clinical Scales 2 (D) and 0 (Si), Content scale Social Discomfort (SOD), Supplementary scale Repression (R), and Personality Psychopathology Five (PSY-5) scale INTR (Introversion). The proportion of ASD adults scoring in the clinical range on these scales was between 25% and 35%. High scores on these scales are consistent with the clinical picture of Asperger syndrome and high-functioning autism in adulthood. Future directions and implications for identifying adults in need of a specialized autism assessment are discussed.     

Images and goals

We propose that mental images are derived from goals. Goals are represented in a complex hierarchy and form a major part of the "working self". Images reflect the existence of specific goals and also act to maintain goals by facilitating the derivation of beliefs from the content of an image. Images in psychopathology may reflect the operation of dysfunctional goals: goals that are unconstrained and which increase discrepancy (experienced as anxiety) within the goal system. Another feature of the goal system is that it is conservative and avoids change. By this view some aspects of distortions in intrusive images of traumatic experiences might be viewed as a defence against goal change. Conversely generating new images might lead to the formation of new goals. These ideas are applied to the findings of the papers in this special issue of Memory and to several new case studies.