Children's self-selection into prevention programs: Evaluation of an innovative recruitment strategy for children of alcoholics

Systematically evaluated the efficacy of a self-selection strategy to recruit elementary-aged children into a school-based prevention program for children of alcoholics. Recruitment involved: a film about parental alcoholism, a follow-up meeting, and an invitation to participate in a prevention program. Of the 844 4th-6th graders exposed to recruitment, 67% showed no interest in the program, 26% attended the follow-up meeting, and 11% obtained parental permission. Analyses focused on group differences according to selection classification on measures of symptomatology and resources available to the child. Significant differences were noted on level of concern about parents' drinking, depression, conduct disorder, and self-worth. Children interested in the program tended to score higher on measures of symptomatology. The potential of a self-selection model for identifying children at risk and areas for future research are discussed.     

Modality effects in the coding reproduction of rhythms

The temporal coding assumption is that time of presentation is coded more accurately for auditory events than for visual events. This assumption has been used to explain the modality effect, in which recall of recent auditory events is superior to recall of recent visual events. We tested the temporal coding assumption by examining the coding and reproduction of quintessentially temporal stimuli-rhythms. The rhythms were produced by sequences of short and long auditory stimuli or short and long visual stimuli; in either case, the task was to reproduce the temporal sequence. The results from four experiments demonstrated reproduction of auditory rhythms superior to that of visual rhythms. We conclude that speech-based explanations of modality effects cannot accommodate these findings, whereas the findings are consistent with explanations based on the temporal coding assumption.     

Spotty Scope and Our Relation to Fictions*

Whatever the attractions of Tolkein's world, irrealists about fictions do not believe literally that Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit. Instead, irrealists believe that, according to The Lord of the Rings {Bilbo is a hobbit}. But when irrealists want to say something like “I am taller than Bilbo”, there is nowhere good for them to insert the operator “according to The Lord of the Rings”. This is an instance of the operator problem. In this paper, I outline and criticise Sainsbury's (2006) spotty scope approach to the operator problem. Sainsbury treats the problem as syntactic, but the problem is ultimately metaphysical.     

Unanswerable questions for everyone: reply to Inan

Millianism is the familiar view that some expressions, such as proper names, contribute only their referent to the semantic content of sentences in which they occur. Inan (Philosophical Studies 2010) has recently argued that the Millian is committed to the following odd conclusion: There may be questions that he is able to grasp but that he cannot answer, either affirmatively, negatively, or with a simple ??I don??t know??. The Millian is indeed committed to this conclusion. But we intend to show that Inan??s argument generalizes, so that everyone who accepts certain largely uncontroversial principles is committed to the odd conclusion that there may be questions that are graspable but not answerable.