An effective approach to violence prevention: traditional martial arts in middle school

This study replicated and extended the design and outcome measures of several small studies. In these studies, juveniles at high risk for violence and delinquency showed decreased violence and positive changes in psychological risk factors after being required to take a school-linked course in traditional martial arts. In the present study, 60 boys in a large urban middle school were required to take a traditional martial arts course in their school. They were paired on problematic behavior profiles and assigned to a treatment group or to a wait-list control group. Thirty classes, three per week (45 minutes each), were taught by a master of Koga Ha Kosho Shorei Ryu Kempo and his assistant (neither was a public school teacher). Results are reported here for 14 variables from the following measures: four teacher rating scales from the Sutter-Eyberg Student Behavior Inventory, five self-report scales of the Piers-Harris Self-Concept Scale, four computerized measures of attentional self-control from the Intermediate Visual and Auditory Continuous Performance Test, and a count of permanent expulsions from school. The treatment students improved over baseline on 12 variables, while the controls improved on 5 by small amounts and deteriorated from baseline on 8, including teacher-rated violence. There were significant differences between the groups on self-reported happiness and schoolwork and on one measure of attention. After controls took the course, their scores resembled the postcourse scores of the treatment group. Importantly, the control group's increase in teacher-rated violence was reversed. Both groups were then pooled to compare baseline and postcourse teacher ratings. Their scores improved significantly in the areas of resistance to rules, impulsiveness, and inappropriate social behavior. There was also improvement in regard to violence, but the change in scores was not statistically significant. Follow-up on teachers' ratings showed that improvement remained, and in some cases increased, four months after completion of the course. Interestingly, all 6 permanent expulsions were among the control group students who had not yet taken, or had only begun taking, the martial arts course.     

Homo Orans: Von Balthasar's Christocentric Philosophical Anthropology

Hans Urs von Balthasar's philosophical anthropology is the premise not only of his religious epistemology, but also of his whole theological enterprise. The importance of his anthropology to the rest of his theology is often overlooked, because its fundamentals are set out in an early work to which little critical attention has been given: Das Betrachtende Gebet – a work which emphasizes the "necessity of prayer". According to von Balthasar, in praying, one encounters God, and it is through this encounter that one can attain authentic personal identity and genuine fulfilment. In short, what this early work indicates is a conception of humanity as homo orans .     

Human holiness as religious shape apologia

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

Is a picture worth a thousand words? Evidence from concept definitions by patients with semantic dementia

Nine patients with semantic dementia (the temporal lobe variant of frontotemporal dementia) were asked to define concrete concepts either from presentation of a picture of the object or from its spoken name. As expected, the patients with the most severe semantic impairment produced the least detailed definitions, and the quality of the definitions overall was significantly related to concept familiarity. Further analyses of the definitions were designed to assess two key theoretical aspects of semantic organization. (i) Do objects and their corresponding names activate conceptual information in two neuroanatomically separable (modality-specific) semantic systems? If so, then-apart from any expected commonality in performance attributable to factors such as concept familiarity-one would not predict striking item-specific similarities in a patient's picture- and word-elicited definitions. (ii) Do sensory/perceptual features and more associative/functional attributes of conceptual knowledge form two neuroanatomically separable subsystems? If so, then one would predict significant dissociations in the prominence of these two types of information in the patients' definitions. The results lead us to favor a model of the semantic system that is divided by attribute type but not by modality.     

A delivery system for olfactory stimuli

This paper describes the design of a new method for controlling and administering olfactory stimuli—namely, thehood system. The hood system involves a stream of vaporized odor (at known concentrations) mixed with odorless air and pumped (at a constant flow rate) into an oxygen therapy hood. It is designed to be used with odorants in solution, such as essential oils, as the olfactory stimulus. The use of oxygen therapy hoods allows for the precise control of a constant concentration of odorized air over time, while allowing subjects to breathe normally. The hood system provides a natural administration of olfactory stimuli and the exact determination of the stimulus concentration. The use of this system will allow experimental conditions to be completely defined and results and replication studies to be accurately interpreted. The hood system is portable, cost effective, and constructed from readily available components. It is proposed that the hood system could be adopted to suit a wide range of olfactory research, particularly that in which the effects of chronic exposure to olfactory stimuli on cognition are examined.     

The Importance of Knowing your History: Perceiving Past Women as less Agentic than Contemporary Women Predicts Impaired Quantitative Performance

Research on dynamic stereotypes of women has shown that women perceive large differences between contemporary women and women who lived in the past in terms of agentic (or masculine) traits. This temporal discrepancy in agentic attributes of women may suggest that agency is not a stable trait of women and may result in impaired performance in domains associated with agency, such as quantitative reasoning. We propose that women who think that agency has always characterized their gender group would perform better in quantitative tasks. Indeed, we found that as the difference between agency attributed to present and past women decreased, U.S. college women’s (n?=?80) accuracy in a quantitative test increased (Study 1). Further, reading a text about women’s achievements in the history of science reduced the discrepancy between agency attributed to past and present women and had an indirect positive effect on quantitative performance by 150 U.S. college women (Study 2). Findings suggest that women’s participation and performance in science could be improved by raising awareness of women’s historical achievements in male-dominated areas.     

Infant pointing serves an interrogative function

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the motivations behind, and the function of, infant pointing behaviour. Many studies have converged on the view that early pointing reflects a motivation to share attention and interest with others. Under one view, it is the sharing of attention itself that is the ultimate function of pointing, and is an early manifestation of a uniquely human social cognition that is geared towards cooperation and collaboration. In the current study, we tested an alternative hypothesis in which the goal of pointing is not attention sharing itself, but the information-laden response that infants tend to receive as a result of sharing attention. If infants indeed point in order to obtain information, their pointing should be modulated by the perceived ability of the other to provide this information. In Experiment 1, 16-month-olds who interacted with a demonstrably knowledgeable experimenter pointed significantly more to novel objects than infants who interacted with an ignorant experimenter. In Experiment 2, we confirmed that this finding was due to the perceived competence of the experimenter rather than to the different ways in which the experimenter responded to infants' points. Our results suggest that one function of pointing in infancy is to obtain information from others, and that infants selectively elicit desired information from those whom they perceive could competently provide it.     

Nine-months-old infants do not need to know what the agent prefers in order to reason about its goals: on the role of preference and persistence in infants' goal-attribution

Human infants readily interpret others' actions as goal-directed and their understanding of previous goals shapes their expectations about an agent's future goal-directed behavior in a changed situation. According to a recent proposal (Luo & Baillargeon, 2005), infants' goal-attributions are not sufficient to support such expectations if the situational change involves broadening the set of choice-options available to the agent, and the agent's preferences among this broadened set are not known. The present study falsifies this claim by showing that 9-month-olds expect the agent to continue acting towards the previous goal even if additional choice-options become available for which there is no preference-related evidence. We conclude that infants do not need to know about the agent's preferences in order to form expectations about its goal-directed actions. Implications for the role of action persistency and action selectivity are discussed.     

A systematic review of training programs for parents of children with autism spectrum disorders: Single subject contributions

Aim: The purpose of this systematic review was to examine research utilizing single subject research designs (SSRD) to explore the effectiveness of interventions designed to increase parents' ability to support communication and social development in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Method: Included studies were systematically assessed for methodological quality (Logan et al., 2008; Smith et al., 2007) and intervention effects. Data examining participant characteristics, study methodology, outcomes, and analysis were systematically extracted. Results: Eleven SSRD parent-training intervention studies examining 44 participants with ASD were included. Overall, the studies were of moderate quality and reported increases in parent skills and child language and communication outcomes. Interpretation: The results supported by improvement rate difference (IRD) analysis indicated several interventions demonstrated positive effects for both parent and child outcomes. However, limited generalization and follow-up data suggested only one intervention demonstrated parents' accurate and ongoing intervention implementation beyond training.