Rethinking Adult Learner Persistence: Implications for Counselors

The authors examined adult learner persistence in higher education by exploring student perspectives regarding the obstacles that blocked their attendance and the motivators that contributed to their tenacity in pursuing their academic goals over a period of time. Results suggest implications for counselors who work with adult learners in colleges and universities.     

Posture and the emergence of manual skills

In this paper, we examine how infants’ natural manual and postural activities — what they prefer and do week by week — are related to developmental transitions in reaching skill and its neuromuscular control. Using a dense, longitudinal design, we tracked the manual and postural activities of four infants in a natural, free‐play setting across the first year of life, and related these activities to two transitions in reaching as measured in a structured laboratory setting: the transition to reaching and the transition to stable reaching. Our data indicated that specific advances in the free‐play setting preceded both transitions. Head and upper torso control, the ability to extend the arm and hand to a distant target, and the ability to touch and grasp objects placed nearby were all precursors to the onset of reaching, whereas sitting independently was associated with the transition to stable reaching. We also found important individual variability in when these ‘components’ were in place, indicating that it is the ensemble of components that is essential, not the order in which they develop or the timing of their contribution. These findings suggest that subsequent experimental manipulations should be planned with respect to infants’ individual constellations of skills, rather than looking at only a single precursor to change.     

The procreative asymmetry and the impossibility of elusive permission

Philosophical Studies - This paper develops a form of moral actualism that can explain the procreative asymmetry. Along the way, it defends and explains the attractive asymmetry: the claim...     

Parenting Surviving Children After the Death of a Child from Cancer: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis

Journal of Child and Family Studies - The death of a child is a tragic, devastating event with enormous emotional and relational impact on the family unit. Parental changes are significant,...     

What time travelers cannot not do (but are responsible for anyway)

The Principle of Alternative Possibilities is the intuitive idea that someone is morally responsible for an action only if she could have done otherwise. Harry Frankfurt has famously presented putative counterexamples to this intuitive principle. In this paper, I formulate a simple version of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities that invokes a course-grained notion of actions. After warming up with a Frankfurt-Style Counterexample to this principle, I introduce a new kind of counterexample based on the possibility of time travel. At the end of the paper, I formulate a more sophisticated version of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities that invokes a certain fine grained notion of actions. I then explain how this new kind of counterexample can be augmented to show that even the more sophisticated principle is false.     

Evidence for a response preparation bottleneck during dual-task performance: Effect of a startling acoustic stimulus on the psychological refractory period

The present study was designed to investigate the mechanism associated with dual-task interference in a psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm. We used a simple reaction time paradigm consisting of a vocal response (R1) and key-lift task (R2) with a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between 100 ms and 1500 ms. On selected trials we implemented a startling acoustic stimulus concurrent with the second stimulus to determine if we could involuntarily trigger the second response. Our results indicated that the PRP delay in the second response was present for both control and startle trials at short SOAs, suggesting the second response was not prepared in advance. These results support a response preparation bottleneck and can be explained via a neural activation model of preparation. In addition, we found that the reflexive startle activation was reduced in the dual-task condition for all SOAs, a result we attribute to prepulse inhibition associated with dual-task processing.     

Differentiation and Intimate Partner Violence

ABSTRACT

This study explored the impact of differentiation of self on Intimate Partner Violence (IPV). We sought to determine if an individual's level of differentiation of self in a relationship adds to the variance accounted for in IPV perpetration by known risk factors, i.e., relational satisfaction, marital conflict, romantic jealousy, depression, and anxiety. Results indicated that differentiation of self in a relationship is a predictor for perpetration of physical intimate partner violence even after controlling for other known risk factors.