A prospective study of life events,social support,and psychological symptomatology during the transition from high school to college

Life events, perceived social support, and psychological symptoms were studied prospectively among older adolescents during the transition from high school to college. These variables were reciprocally related to one another in patterns which changed over a period of 6 months. The findings are supportive of a transactional model of stress that emphasizes reciprocal, rather than linear, paths of influence. Further, the study highlights the importance of studying stress and social support during life transitions that may constitute periods of greater vulnerability to life events.     

Animal experiment studies of the effect of the hazardous substance carbon tetrachloride on peripheral nerves

The deleterious effects of Carbon Tetrachloride, widely used industrially, on the peripheral nervous system was investigated by experimentation on rabbits. Long-term infusion simulated various conditions of exposure to obtain pharmacological and electroneurographic data. Tetrachlorethen is shown to induce reversible dysfunctions of the peripheral nervous system depending on the degree of concentration. The mode of molecular action remains open. Our results are compared with references in existing literature.     

Vibrotactile threshold shift during magnitude-estimation scaling on the hand: effects on magnitude-estimation responses and scaling behavior

The purpose of the present study was to determine whether threshold shifts occurred during magnitude-estimation scaling of suprathreshold stimuli presented to the thenar eminence of the right hand. Possible relationships of the vibrotactile threshold shifts to suprathreshold stimulus intensity, magnitude-estimation responses, and over-all scaling behavior were explored. A single group of 14 subjects whose ages ranged from 18 to 22 yr. participated. Each subject performed two magnitude-estimation tasks. In one of the tasks threshold of sensitivity was determined after every suprathreshold numerical response of the subject. If a threshold shift was recorded, threshold was allowed to return to pretest baseline level before continuation to the next suprathreshold stimulus presentation. Analysis showed that threshold shift did occur during vibrotactile magnitude-estimation scaling on the hand and that it was related to suprathreshold stimulus intensity. Results also showed that the subjects' numerical magnitude-estimation responses and over-all scaling behavior in the form of power function exponents were not statistically different for the two scaling tasks.     

Sex differences in school-aged children with pervasive attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

This study investigated 54 children (37 boys and 17 girls) with cross-situational attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to determine whether there are sex differences in the expression of either the primary or secondary symptomatology of ADHD. Results indicated that the male and female ADHD groups were strikingly similar on all measures of primary (impulsivity, inattention, and overactivity) and secondary (learning problems, externalizing symptoms, internalizing symptoms, peer relationship difficulties, and self-perceptions) symptomatology included in this study. The lack of significant sex differences conflicts with prior reports in the literature, and these conflicting results are discussed in terms of differences in inclusion criteria. Implications for understanding the long-term outcome of ADHD in girls are also discussed.     

Self-, ingroup, and outgroup achievement attributions of German and Turkish pupils

The present study investigated intergroup bias in achievement attributions in a sample of 62 German and 55 Turkish pupils (aged 15 years) in the Federal Republic of Germany. The design was 2 x 2 x 2 x 3 (Ethnic Group x Outgroup Prejudice x Outcome x Stimulus) with repeated measures on the last two factors. Subjects attributed examination performance to ability, effort, luck, and task difficulty. Intergroup bias was limited to German pupils, who attributed failure of an ingroup member or self more to bad luck than they did that of an outgroup member. Turkish pupils acted more in terms of self than ingroup, attributing the success of another Turkish child more to good luck than they did that of self or an outgroup member. They also failed to distinguish clearly between success and failure in their task attributions. Results are discussed in terms of the inventive nature of explanations for ability-linked performance and the motivational consequences of causal attributions.     

Emotions and cognitions in consumer health behaviors: insights from chronically ill patients into the effects of hope and control perceptions

The lack of compliance to medical advice is a widely recognized healthcare concern with important implications to consumer well‐being. Through an in‐depth examination of the narratives provided by chronically ill patients, this study contributes to transformative consumer research by offering a better understanding of patients' compliance or lack of compliance with medical advice. The narratives are examined with a focus on two potential antecedents: hope and perceptions of control over health outcomes. Findings suggest that although control perceptions play a crucial role in compliance, chronically ill patients often feel that they have no control over their health outcomes. The narratives reveal that the positive emotion of hope is a motivator for positive health behaviors. Additionally, the lived experiences accounts suggest a possible relationship between hope and control perceptions: patients' belief in their ability to manage their chronic illness facilitates hope but might not be essential to it. The importance of healthcare providers' role in cultivating hope and customizing their interactions with patients is discussed. The implications also indicate that health initiatives aimed at increasing treatment compliance should consider alternatives to messages calling for patients to take control of their health. Instead, future research on health behavior should look beyond social cognition models of health behavior and focus on the role of positive emotions such as hope. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Hugo Kauder's unexpressed philosophical concept: Schelling's transcendence,Nietzsche's visions and Buber's Israel

Hugo Kauder, born in 1888 near Prague, composer, instrumentalist, theoretician and music-philosopher, came to Vienna in 1905, left Austria after the Novemberpogrom 1938 and reached New York via the Netherlands and England in 1940. In 1938 Tel Aviv was also one of his intended havens (parts of Kauder's estate are kept at the National Library of Israel, Jerusalem). Engaged in the crisis discourse in Vienna's postwar period of the early 1920s, Kauder drafted his philosophical ideas under the influence of Friedrich Schelling and Friedrich Nietzsche, also speculating on music-teleology, mysticism and cosmology. Corresponding with the German philosopher Rudolf Pannwitz, with the authors Karl Wolfskehl and Erich von Kahler, Kauder expressed his Jewishness – much more as a mindset than an active Jewish identity. Coming from a system of transcendental and natural philosophy combined with Christian ideas, Kauder moved to a more complex syncretism also reflecting on Jewish topics. Kauder did not organize his ideas into a concept, they are, rather, the theoretical framework of his educational books and are widespread in his essays and letters.     

Efficient <Emphasis Type="Italic">n</Emphasis>-gram analysis in R with <Literal>cmscu</Literal>

We present a new R package, cmscu, which implements a Count-Min-Sketch with conservative updating (Cormode and Muthukrishnan Journal of Algorithms, 55(1), 58–75, 2005), and its application to n-gram analyses (Goyal et al. 2012). By writing the core implementation in C++ and exposing it to R via Rcpp, we are able to provide a memory-efficient, high-throughput, and easy-to-use library. As a proof of concept, we implemented the computationally challenging (Heafield et al. 2013) modified Kneser–Ney n-gram smoothing algorithm using cmscu as the querying engine. We then explore information density measures (Jaeger Cognitive Psychology, 61(1), 23–62, 2010) from n-gram frequencies (for n=2,3) derived from a corpus of over 2.2 million reviews provided by a Yelp, Inc. dataset. We demonstrate that these text data are at a scale beyond the reach of other more common, more general-purpose libraries available through CRAN. Using the cmscu library and the smoothing implementation, we find a positive relationship between review information density and reader review ratings. We end by highlighting the important use of new efficient tools to explore behavioral phenomena in large, relatively noisy data sets.     

Don't ask,don't tell: a systematic review of the extent to which participant characteristics are reported in social anxiety treatment studies

Background and Objectives: This study examined the extent to which social anxiety treatment studies report the demographic characteristics of their participants. One hundred and 56 treatment studies published in English between 2001 and 2012 articles were collected. Methods: Each study was evaluated on whether or not it reported information on gender, age, race, relationship status, education, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, and disability and also the extent to which the racial composition of the sample was described. Results: The majority of studies reported information on age (96.2%) and gender (94.2%), but the percentage of studies that reported anything else is much lower: race (50.0%), education (42.3%), relationship status (37.8%), socioeconomic status (5.1%), disability (2.6%), and sexual orientation (1.3%). One third (34.0%) of studies reported the race of all participants in their samples, while the remaining reported no information or information for only a subset of participants (e.g. “mostly white”). Conclusions: Participants of social anxiety disorder treatment studies generally are not described beyond their age and gender. Standards for reporting participant characteristics of treatment studies (similar to standards for reporting the methodology of treatment studies) could improve clinical researchers’ and clinicians’ ability to evaluate the external validity of this body of work.