Out of the ashes: Sikh American institution building and the promise of equality for Sikh women

This paper examines Sikh American institution building in the post-9/11 period, and the impact of these institutions on Sikh women’s status and empowerment within the community. I examine the social and historical context of Sikh American politics and activism. I present the views of Sikh Americans who are directly involved with institution building and I describe their perspectives on women’s empowerment within the new institutions and in the broader Sikh American community. My discussion is based on ethnographic research, including open-ended interviews, participant-observation at conferences and community events, and analyses of public discourses about faith, ethics, politics, gender, and women on Sikh American websites and blogs.     

Improving access to psychological treatments: lessons from developing countries

Even though psychological treatments have been advocated as treatments for a range of mental disorders by the WHO for scaling up through primary care globally, the vast majority of potential beneficiaries are unable to access these treatments. Two major barriers impede the path between evidence based treatments and improved access: the lack of skilled human resources and the acceptability of treatments across cultures. This essay synthesizes the experiences of programs which developed and evaluated psychological treatments for depression in three resource poor developing countries. These programs addressed the human resource barrier by training lay or community health workers to deliver the treatments and addressed the acceptability barrier by systematically adapting the treatment to contextual factors. All programs demonstrated significant benefits in recovery rates when compared with usual care demonstrating the effectiveness of the approach. The implications for these experiences to improving access to psychological treatments in the global context are discussed.     

Accuracy, confidence, and calibration: how young children and adults assess credibility

Do children and adults use the same cues to judge whether someone is a reliable source of information? In 4 experiments, we investigated whether children (ages 5 and 6) and adults used information regarding accuracy, confidence, and calibration (i.e., how well an informant's confidence predicts the likelihood of being correct) to judge informants' credibility. We found that both children and adults used information about confidence and accuracy to judge credibility; however, only adults used information about informants' calibration. Adults discredited informants who exhibited poor calibration, but children did not. Requiring adult participants to complete a secondary task while evaluating informants' credibility impaired their ability to make use of calibration information. Thus, children and adults may differ in how they infer credibility because of the cognitive demands of using calibration.     

Past speech therapy experiences of individuals exploring a new stuttering treatment

Perceptions of benefits of speech therapy, success of therapy across clinical settings, reasons for returning to therapy, client-clinician relationships, and clinicians' competency were assessed in 57 participants (47 men, 10 women; M age = 34 yr.) trying a new therapy. A majority of respondents had cumulatively five or more years in therapy and at least two stuttering therapies. Respondents rated university or hospital settings as more successful than services in public schools. 70% of the respondents noted difficulty communicating basic needs; they blamed themselves for inability to maintain posttherapeutic gains while perceiving their clinicians to be competent and attentive--although 47% of the respondents had minimal to no contact with their therapist after therapy.     

Epistemic akrasia and the fallibility of critical reasoning

There is widespread disagreement about whether epistemic akrasia is possible. This paper argues that the possibility of epistemic akrasia follows from a traditional rationalist conception of epistemic critical reasoning, together with considerations about the fallibility of our capacities for reasoning. In addition to defending the view that epistemic akrasia is possible, we aim to shed light on why it is possible. By focusing on critical epistemic reasoning, we show how traditional rationalist assumptions about our core cognitive capacities help to explain the possibility of epistemic akrasia.     

Believing what you’re told: Young children’s trust in unexpected testimony about the physical world

How do children resolve conflicts between a self-generated belief and what they are told? Four studies investigated the circumstances under which toddlers would trust testimony that conflicted with their expectations about the physical world. Thirty-month-olds believed testimony that conflicted with a naive bias (Study 1), and they also repeatedly trusted testimony that conflicted with an event they had just seen (Study 2)—even when they had an incentive to ignore the testimony (Study 3). Children responded more skeptically if they could see that the testimony was wrong as it was being delivered (Study 3), or if they had the opportunity to accumulate evidence confirming their initial belief before hearing someone contradict it (Study 4). Together, these studies demonstrate that toddlers have a robust bias to trust even surprising testimony, but this trust can be influenced by how much confidence they have in their initial belief.     

A hidden cost of happiness in children

Happiness is generally considered an emotion with only beneficial effects, particularly in childhood. However, there are some situations where the style of information processing triggered by happiness could be a liability. In particular, happiness seems to motivate a top-down processing style, which could impair performance when attention to detail is required. Indeed, in Experiment 1, 10- to 11-year-old children (N = 30) induced to feel a happy mood were slower to locate a simple shape embedded in a complex figure than those induced to feel a sad mood. In Experiment 2, 6- to 7-year-old children (N = 61) induced to feel a happy mood found fewer embedded shapes than those induced to feel a sad or neutral mood. Happiness may have unintended and possibly undesirable cognitive consequences, even in childhood.     

Who knows best? Preschoolers sometimes prefer child informants over adult informants

Do preschoolers think adults know more about everything than children? Or do they recognize that there are some things that children might know more about than adults? Three‐, four‐, and five‐year olds (N=65) were asked to decide whether an adult or child informant would better be able to answer a variety of questions about the nutritional value of foods and about toys. Children at all ages chose to direct the food questions to the adult and the toy questions to the child. Thus, there are some kinds of information for which preschoolers expect that a child would be a better informant than an adult. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Preschoolers favor the creator's label when reasoning about an artifact's function

The creator of an artifact, by virtue of having made the object, has privileged knowledge about its intended function. Do children recognize that the label an artifact's creator uses can convey this privileged information? 3- and 4-year-olds were presented with an object that looked like a member of one familiar artifact category, but which the speaker referred to with the label of a different familiar category (e.g. a key-like object was called a "spoon"). Children who heard the speaker refer to the object as something she made were more likely to assign its function on the basis of the anomalous label she used than those who heard it referred to as something the speaker found. Thus, even very young children expect a unique connection between the label the creator of an artifact uses and the function she intends it to have.