Ethical Decision Making in Autonomous Vehicles: The AV Ethics Project

Science and Engineering Ethics - The ethics of autonomous vehicles (AV) has received a great amount of attention in recent years, specifically in regard to their decisional policies in accident...     

Misconduct and Misbehavior Related to Authorship Disagreements in Collaborative Science

Science and Engineering Ethics - Scientific authorship serves to identify and acknowledge individuals who “contribute significantly” to published research. However, specific authorship...     

Ethnic-racial identity,relatedness, and school belonging for adolescent New Zealanders: does student gender make a difference?

Social Psychology of Education - Attitudes toward ethnic and racial identity have been linked to both wellbeing and maladaptive outcomes that affect belonging at school. Further, relatedness (or...     

Family Therapy, You Make Me Feel Like Dancing

In this article we use our experience with ballroom dancing to revisit three central systemic/relational ideas—summativity, pragmatics/aesthetics, and communication—in order to reaffirm our theoretical grounding in family therapy and to connect that grounding to community-mindedness in therapy. Community-mindedness consists of deliberate attention to the socially constructed grand narratives that dominate clients and therapists in the process of therapy. A detailed example is provided. Thanks to Leo Sayer     

A Return to “The Clinic” for Community Psychology: Lessons from a Clinical Ethnography in Urban American Indian Behavioral Health

Community psychology (CP) abandoned the clinic and disengaged from movements for community mental health (CMH) to escape clinical convention and pursue growing aspirations as an independent field of context‐oriented, community‐engaged, and values‐driven research and action. In doing so, however, CP positioned itself on the sidelines of influential contemporary movements that promote potentially harmful, reductionist biomedical narratives in mental health. We advocate for a return to the clinic—the seat of institutional power in mental health—using critical clinic‐based inquiry to open sites for clinical‐community dialogue that can instigate transformative change locally and nationally. To inform such works within the collaborative and emancipatory traditions of CP, we detail a recently completed clinical ethnography and offer “lessons learned” regarding challenges likely to re‐emerge in similar efforts. Conducted with an urban American Indian community behavioral health clinic, this ethnography examined how culture and culture concepts (e.g., cultural competence) shaped clinical practice with socio‐political implications for American Indian peoples and the pursuit of transformative change in CMH. Lessons learned identify exceptional clinicians versed in ecological thinking and contextualist discourses of human suffering as ideal partners for this work; encourage intense contextualization and constraining critique to areas of mutual interest; and support relational approaches to clinic collaborations.     

Longitudinal evidence linking processing speed to the development of reasoning

Age‐related change in processing speed has been linked directly to increases in reasoning as well as indirectly via increases in the capacity of working memory (WM). Most of the evidence linking change in speed to reasoning has come from cross‐sectional research; in this article we present the findings from a 2½‐year longitudinal study of 277 6‐ to‐13‐year‐olds. On three occasions, speed of information processing was assessed with Visual Matching and Cross Out; WM was assessed with reading, listening, backward digit, alphabet, and operation span tasks; and nonverbal reasoning was assessed with Raven's progressive matrices. The results provided consistent evidence of direct links from processing speed to reasoning but inconsistent evidence for indirect links from speed to WM to reasoning. These findings suggest that variations in processing speed may constrain the development of reasoning, directly and perhaps indirectly. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/nc0VlFdi468     

Longitudinal predictors of changes in the morningness–eveningness personality among Norwegian nurses

The aim of this cohort study was to investigate factors that might cause a shift in morningness–eveningness personality. A large sample of Norwegian nurses (n = 1144) participated in a longitudinal survey study about life- and work factors, symptoms of anxiety and depression, and habits such as smoking, caffeine- and alcohol consumption. A hierarchical regression analysis was employed to determine if these variables had predictive value concerning changes in morningness assessed with the Diurnal Type Scale (DTS) over a 24-month interval. The results showed that percentage of full time equivalent, having children (or having children move in), and female gender all predicted higher scores on the morningness scale over time. Also, factors such as number of night shifts during the past two years, whether the subject had started smoking and higher alcohol consumption by the subject all predicted lower scores on the morningness scale over time.     

Somatic Complaints in Girls: A Longitudinal Perspective

This report presents results from a study of the dimensionality and longitudinal stability of some common self-reported somatic complaints in teenage girls. Data were supplied by the Swedish longitudinal research program “Individual Development and Adaptation”. At four age levels (age 10, 13, 15, and 16 years) a representative sample of approximately 500 girls filled out questionnaires on various adjustment problems, including some typical somatic complaints. A separate dimension of somatic complaints was identified at each age level through factor analysis of the questionnaire data. Correlational stability of somatic complaints was not high until middle adolescence. At this age fairly stable patterns of somatic complaints were also found at the individual level; different somatic complaints were not found to be interchangeable. The results support the interpretation of girls' somatic complaints as a single, meaningful dimension in late childhood and adolescence. This dimension may be hypothesized to constitute a psychological process, somatization, manifesting itself in fairly stable patterns at the individual level in middle adolescence.     

Hemispheric lateralization in aging: Interest of the verbal-manual concurrency paradigm

ABSTRACT

Introduction: The aim of this study was to evaluate whether the classic asymmetry seen in hemispheric functioning is modified in older adults by using a verbal-manual concurrency task. Method: Thirty-five right-handed participants divided into two groups according to age (15 older participants, mean age: 68 ± 8 years, without cognitive decline and 20 younger participants, mean age: 23 ± 2 years) had to perform a 30-second uni-manual tapping task, in both a single task (tapping alone) and dual task (tapping and performing a letter fluency task together) condition. Results: In younger participants, the letter fluency task disrupted the right hand more than the left hand whereas, in older participants, the letter fluency task disrupted both hands equally. Conclusion: These results should be considered preliminary data using a behavioral dual task condition, which might be useful for studying lateralized hemispheric functioning and the processes of divided attention during aging.     

Parent Programs for Reducing Adolescent’s Antisocial Behavior and Substance Use: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Two theoretically based parent training programs, delivered in real-world settings by the social services, were examined in this randomized controlled trial for effectiveness in reducing adolescents’ antisocial behavior and substance use. Two hundred and thirty-seven (237) adolescents in ages between 12 and 18 and their parents were assigned to one of two programs or to a wait-list control condition. The programs were the nine weekly group sessions program Comet 12–18 (Swedish Parent Management Training Program) and the six weekly ParentSteps (Swedish shortened version by Strengthening Families Program 10–14). Outcome measures were antisocial behavior, substance use, and delinquency, and psychosocial dysfunction. Data based on adolescents’ and parents’ ratings of the adolescents’ problem behavior at baseline and 6 months later were analyzed with repeated measures ANVOA, Logistic regression, and Kruskal–Wallis H test. The results showed that parents’ ratings of adolescents’ antisocial behaviors decreased significantly over time, but no time by group effect emerged. No program effects were found in the adolescents’ self-reported antisocial behavior, delinquency, or psychosocial functioning. A threefold risk of illicit drug use was found in both intervention groups. The results suggest that neither Comet nor ParentSteps had beneficial effects on adolescent’s antisocial or delinquent behavior, or on alcohol use. The only significant group difference found was a threefold risk of drug use in the intervention adolescents at follow-up, but for several reasons this finding should be interpreted with caution. Trial registration number: ISRCTN76141538.