Effects of maternal employment patterns on adolescents' substance use and other risk-taking behaviors

Employment for mothers with school-age children has generated great concern regarding its possible harmful effects on adolescents and their families. We examined the influence of maternal employment on the risk-taking behavior of adolescents in two-parent families. Three hundred and eighty-nine high school students completed a 48-item survey in which they indicated their mother's and father's employment patterns, and their own risk-taking behaviors (e.g., substance use, driving while under the influence). Results showed no significant effects of maternal employment on adolescent risk-taking behaviors.     

Level of Performance and Distribution of Errors in the Progressive Matrices Test: A Comparison of Ethiopian Immigrant and Native Israeli Adolescents

The performance of 250 Ethiopian Jews, ages 14–15, on the Progressive Matrices Standard (PMS) test, was compared to that of 1740 Israeli Jews, ages 9–15. The results showed that the Ethiopians' level of performance was similar to that of the young Israeli children's group (ages 9–10). Moreover, the distribution of errors found for the Ethiopian immigrant adolescents was not similar to that found for Israelis of the same age –- it resembled the distribution of errors found for Israeli 9- and 10-year-olds. It is suggested that the low performance of the Ethiopian immigrants reflects cognitive delay rather than cognitive difference.     

Burnout and risk of cardiovascular disease: evidence, possible causal paths, and promising research directions

Burnout is characterized by emotional exhaustion, physical fatigue, and cognitive weariness, resulting from prolonged exposure to work-related stress. The authors review the accumulated evidence suggesting that burnout and the related concept of vital exhaustion are associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease and cardiovascular-related events. The authors present evidence supporting several potential mechanisms linking burnout with ill health, including the metabolic syndrome, dysregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis along with sympathetic nervous system activation, sleep disturbances, systemic inflammation, impaired immunity functions, blood coagulation and fibrinolysis, and poor health behaviors. The association of burnout and vital exhaustion with these disease mediators suggests that their impact on health may be more extensive than currently indicated.     

Meaningful processing of meaningless stimuli: the influence of perceptual experience on early visual processing of faces

The N170 is an event-related potential component associated with extrastriate visual mechanisms involved in detecting human faces and leading to their characteristic structural encoding. Consequently the N170 discriminates the processing of stimuli providing physiognomic information from the processing of other, similarly complex, visual patterns. We have used this effect to explore the top-down influence of newly acquired experience on the initial visual categorization of physiognomic stimuli. Schematic faces having the inner components mislocated did not elicit an N170 effect in naive participants. However, after normally configured versions of the schematic faces were exposed, suggesting what the ambiguous patterns represented, the same patterns elicited an N170 effect as conspicuous as that elicited by regular schematic faces. This priming effect, which changed the visual processing of distorted faces in extrastriate regions, could not be explained by post-perceptual decisions. Although accounts based on changes in focal attention, or within-vision constraints could not be categorically rejected, this outcome might suggest cognitive penetrability of early visual categorization.     

Training‐induced recovery of low‐level vision followed by mid‐level perceptual improvements in developmental object and face agnosia

Long‐term deprivation of normal visual inputs can cause perceptual impairments at various levels of visual function, from basic visual acuity deficits, through mid‐level deficits such as contour integration and motion coherence, to high‐level face and object agnosia. Yet it is unclear whether training during adulthood, at a post‐developmental stage of the adult visual system, can overcome such developmental impairments. Here, we visually trained LG, a developmental object and face agnosic individual. Prior to training, at the age of 20, LG's basic and mid‐level visual functions such as visual acuity, crowding effects, and contour integration were underdeveloped relative to normal adult vision, corresponding to or poorer than those of 5–6 year olds (Gilaie‐Dotan, Perry, Bonneh, Malach & Bentin, 2009). Intensive visual training, based on lateral interactions, was applied for a period of 9 months. LG's directly trained but also untrained visual functions such as visual acuity, crowding, binocular stereopsis and also mid‐level contour integration improved significantly and reached near‐age‐level performance, with long‐term (over 4 years) persistence. Moreover, mid‐level functions that were tested post‐training were found to be normal in LG. Some possible subtle improvement was observed in LG's higher‐order visual functions such as object recognition and part integration, while LG's face perception skills have not improved thus far. These results suggest that corrective training at a post‐developmental stage, even in the adult visual system, can prove effective, and its enduring effects are the basis for a revival of a developmental cascade that can lead to reduced perceptual impairments.     

Are There Moral Limits to Military Deception?

It is widely agreed that deception of the enemy can be morally permissible in war. However, the question of the morally acceptable limits to deception in war has barely been explored in contemporary ethics. This paper defends the thesis that there are no moral limits on military deception per se, that is, no limits based on the ethics of truthfulness. Rather, all moral restriction against deception in war is based on another moral principle: military deception is morally unacceptable only when it violates the principle of not harming those who do not intend to harm us.     

A Theory of Providence for Distributive Justice

Distributive justice assumes a morally critical judgment of nature, which typically contradicts providential conceptions. Hence, simple conceptions of divine Providence cannot support distributive justice. This essay analyzes and develops a complex strand of theorizing about Providence within Jewish philosophy that is compatible with distributive justice. According to this conception, the actions of divine Providence express different and mutually exclusive considerations of justice. Therefore, the moral value of outcomes is intransitive between the situations of different people. And while each providential action is justified from an ethical perspective, the total outcome is distinct from God's ultimate desire. Human ethics responds to this disparity by redistribution. This conception of Providence also contributes to the additional issue of intergenerational justice through the concomitant idea of life missions. The classical rendering of missions creates problems, however, for distributive justice. I conclude by formulating a conception of life missions that is compatible with both distributive and intergenerational justice.     

What emotional reactions can tell us about the nature of others: An appraisal perspective on person perception

The present research aimed to assess how people use knowledge about the emotional reactions of others to make inferences about their character. Specifically, we postulate that people can reconstruct or “reverse engineer” the appraisals underlying an emotional reaction and use this appraisal information to draw person perception inferences. As predicted, a person who reacted with anger to blame was perceived as more aggressive, and self-confident, but also as less warm and gentle than a person who reacted with sadness (Study 1). A person who reacted with a smile (Study 1) or remained neutral (Study 2) was perceived as self-confident but also as unemotional. These perceptions were mediated by perceived appraisals.