A postpartum telephone program of reassurance,information, and early intervention in a family practice

This paper presents a program developed in a family practice office to provide reassurance, guidance, and early detection and intervention for mothers and their new infants in the first month of the infant's life. Telephone calls from an office nurse at 2 weeks of age followed by a written questionnaire demonstrated a dichotomy between the mothers' expressions of their physical and emotional problems. Feeding was the most prominently expressed concern, but we also found that complaints or worries about feeding were also an acceptable way to initiate intervention for more serious problems.     

Disaster mental health services following the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing: modifying approaches to address terrorism

How did the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing differ from prior disasters and what implications did it have for disaster mental health services and service delivery? The federal disaster mental health approach in this country developed largely out of experiences with natural disasters. The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing differed in several important ways, including the large number of human casualties, higher rates of psychopathology, and an extended period of concern due to the criminal investigation and trials, which suggested the need to consider modifications in the program. Outreach was extensive, but psychiatric morbidity of direct victims was greater than that of victims of natural disasters, emphasizing the need for attention to the triage and referral process. Other concerns that warrant consideration include practices related to record keeping and program evaluation.     

Modifying Children's Gender-Typed Musical Instrument Preferences: The Effects of Gender and Age

Previous research has indicated that children display gender-typed musical instrument preferences. Two studies were conducted to determine (a) whether these preferences can be modified by presenting counter-examples (i.e., instruments played by gender-inappropriate musicians) and (b) whether child gender or age (kindergarten vs. 4th grade) influences the efficacy of such interventions. A videotape presentation format was employed in Study 1 and drawings in Study 2. Children exposed to counter-examples were less stereotyped than those who saw the instruments without musicians (Study 1) or with gender-appropriate musicians (Studies 1 & 2). Age did not influence children's responsiveness to the counter-examples, but boys were more resistant to the intervention than girls. There was some evidence that the counter-examples were effective not simply because children were attracted to same-sex musicians. Instead, children's instrument choices also appeared to be motivated by a desire to avoid behaving like musicians of the other-sex. Potential strategies for increasing children's responsiveness to instrument counter-examples (e.g., multiple exemplars; portrayal of positive consequences) were also discussed.     

Children's Testimony: A Review of Research on Memory for Past Experiences

This review of children's testimony focuses on research related to memory for past experiences. The aspects of the memory system that are involved in testimony are discussed and the development of autobiographical memory is examined. Relevant research findings are summarized in the context of an information-processing model of memory and the implications of this work for clinical practice are outlined. We conclude that (1) under certain conditions, even very young children can remember and report past experiences with some accuracy over very long periods of time; (2) substantial and significant developmental differences have been demonstrated in children's abilities to provide eyewitness testimony; (3) children can be influenced in a variety of ways to provide complete and elaborated reports of events that never occurred; and (4) even experts cannot always tell the difference between true and false reports.     

Components of events and processes

Rips and Estin (1998) provided evidence that mental events such as dreaming are more homogeneous than physical events such as checking out a book; that is, their parts are more difficult to distinguish. In their experiment, participants listed more distinctive properties for the parts of physical events than for the parts of mental events. However, the physicality of stimuli was confounded with temporal aspects. Mental stimuli tended to be processes, and physical stimuli, events. This study tested homogeneity with new stimuli separating out the factors of physicality and aspect. Consistently, both physicality and aspect had significant effects on the perceived homogeneity of activities, as measured by the number of listed parts, the number of distinctive properties of each part, and homogeneity ratings. The study shows that homogeneity is strongly influenced by aspect but that physicality remains a robust factor for homogeneity, even after taking aspect into account.     

The affect heuristic and the attractiveness of simple gambles

Prior studies have observed that the attractiveness of playing a simple gamble (7/36 to win $9; otherwise win nothing) is greatly enhanced by introducing a small loss (7/36 win $9; otherwise lose 5¢). The present studies tested and confirmed an explanation of this finding based on the concept of evaluability and the affect heuristic. Evaluators of the “no‐loss” gamble lack a precise feeling for how good $9 is, hence give it little weight in their judgment. In the second gamble, comparison with the small loss makes $9 “come alive with feeling” and become weighted in the judgment, thus increasing the attractiveness of the gamble. These results demonstrate the importance of contextual factors in determining affect and preference for simple risk‐taking opportunities. They show that the meaning, utility, and weighting of even a very familiar monetary outcome such as $9 is not fixed, but depends greatly on these contextual factors. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

It’s one thing to rule them all and another thing to bind them

In this paper we offer a response to one argument in favour of Priority Monism, what Jonathan Schaffer calls the nomic argument for monism. We proceed in three stages. We begin by introducing Jonathan Schaffer’s Priority Monism and the nomic argument for that view. We then consider a response to the nomic argument that we presented in an earlier paper (Baron and Tallant in Philos Phenomenol Res 93:583–606, 2016). We show that this argument suffers from a flaw. We then go on to offer a different response to the nomic argument. The core idea is that the current laws of physics are not integrated in the manner that Schaffer requires to get the nomic argument for monism off the ground.

     

Visual motherese? Signal‐to‐noise ratios in toddler‐directed television

Younger brains are noisier information processing systems; this means that information for younger individuals has to allow clearer differentiation between those aspects that are required for the processing task in hand (the ‘signal’) and those that are not (the ‘noise’). We compared toddler‐directed and adult‐directed TV programmes (TotTV/ATV). We examined how low‐level visual features (that previous research has suggested influence gaze allocation) relate to semantic information, namely the location of the character speaking in each frame. We show that this relationship differs between TotTV and ATV. First, we conducted Receiver Operator Characteristics analyses and found that feature congestion predicted speaking character location in TotTV but not ATV. Second, we used multiple analytical strategies to show that luminance differentials (flicker) predict face location more strongly in TotTV than ATV. Our results suggest that TotTV designers have intuited techniques for controlling toddler attention using low‐level visual cues. The implications of these findings for structuring childhood learning experiences away from a screen are discussed.     

Instantiation as location

Many familiar forms of property realism identify properties with sui generis ontological categories like universals or tropes and posit a fundamental instantiation relation that unifies objects with their properties. In this paper, I develop and defend locationism, which identifies properties with locations and holds that the occupation relation that unifies objects with their locations also unifies objects with their properties. Along with the theoretical parsimony that locationism enjoys, I argue that locationism resolves a puzzle for actualists regarding the ontological status of uninstantiated properties. I also note some promising applications of the locationist framework to the metaphysics of quantities and possible worlds.     

Is burnout solely job‐related? A critical comment

Within the field‐dominating, multidimensional theory of burnout, burnout is viewed as a work‐specific condition. As a consequence, the burnout syndrome cannot be investigated outside of the occupational domain. In the present paper, this restrictive view of burnout's scope is criticized and a rationale to decide between a work‐specific and a generic approach to burnout is presented. First, the idea that a multidimensional conception of burnout implies a work‐restricted scope is deconstructed. Second, it is shown that the burnout phenomenon cannot be confined to work because chronic, unresolvable stress – the putative cause of burnout – is not limited to work. In support of an integrative view of health, it is concluded that the field‐dominating, multidimensional theory of burnout should abandon as groundless the idea that burnout is a specifically job‐related phenomenon and define burnout as a multi‐domain syndrome. The shift from a work‐specific to a generic approach would allow both finer analysis and wider synthesis in research on chronic stress and burnout.