The cognitive profile of Chinese children with mathematics difficulties

This study examined how four domain-specific skills (arithmetic procedural skills, number fact retrieval, place value concept, and number sense) and two domain-general processing skills (working memory and processing speed) may account for Chinese children’s mathematics learning difficulties. Children with mathematics difficulties (MD) of two age groups (7-8 and 9-11 years) were compared with age-matched typically achieving children. For both age groups, children with MD performed significantly worse than their age-matched controls on all of the domain-specific and domain-general measures. Further analyses revealed that the MD children with literacy difficulties (MD/RD group) performed the worst on all of the measures, whereas the MD-only group was significantly outperformed by the controls on the four domain-specific measures and verbal working memory. Stepwise discriminant analyses showed that both number fact retrieval and place value concept were significant factors differentiating the MD and non-MD children. To conclude, deficits in domain-specific skills, especially those of number fact retrieval and place value understanding, characterize the profile of Chinese children with MD.     

Inclusivism and the spiritual journey of Marie de Souza Canavarro (1849–1933)

Every age has its share of religious seekers, but during some periods of spiritual crisis greater numbers of seekers seem to appear. Marie de Souza Canavarro, an American advocate and interpreter of Asian traditions, was a paradigmatic seeker in an age of religious wandering. Along the way, she embraced Catholicism, Theosophy, Buddhism, Bahá'í, and Hinduism. In this article I offer an interpretation of her life and work, drawing on her novels, poems, letters, lectures, articles, and autobiography. I argue that amidst the diversity of views she affirmed, there was some continuity. Canavarro longed for rest from her ceaseless wandering, and she hoped that religious and gender inclusivism might bring it. She, like others of her age, yearned for a tradition that elevated women and reconciled religions.     

Brief encounters and available places to land

In this paper the author addresses the process of ending in brief therapy. While recognizing the importance of attending to the symbolic meaning of the ending itself and the need to interpret this as it manifests in the transference, he points out the limitations of such an approach. He highlights the significance of the environment of interpersonal relationships and family systems and the wider communities in which the client lives. He suggests that the therapist needs to assess the extent to which these can provide an environment that facilitates the client's development and working through as the therapy ends. The therapist needs to establish whether the patient will have an available place to land, and one that provides sufficient security and safety for the client's onward journeying and exploration without the therapist. The author's conceptualization of 'landing at the end of brief therapy' links together Malan's triangles of insight with Sullivan's concept of the ordinary solution and selective inattention and Gustafson's concept of dilemmas to add depth to the therapeutic effectiveness with which the practitioner can approach brief therapy in general, and the ending in particular. The article concludes with a case example that illustrates these themes.     

Islamic identity re‐covered: Muslim women after September 11th

For women, hijab is a prominent and oftentimes controversial physical marker of their social identity as Muslims. This study explores the perceptions of Muslim women living in Houston regarding the hijab and how these perceptions were partially shaped by media portrayals of Muslim women overseas after the September 11th tragedy. The effects of these perceptions on women's decisions to wear the hijab after September 11th were also examined. Using a convenience sample of 67 women, semi‐structured interviews were conducted. Results suggest that American Muslim women were more likely to talk about hijab in terms of identity than immigrant Muslim women, and to believe that by wearing hijab they could help portray a more positive image of Muslims in the United States.     

Psychological sequelae of remote exposure to the September 11th terrorist attacks in Canadians with and without panic

The purpose of the present investigation was to examine the psychological impact of remote exposure to the events and aftermath of the terrorist attacks in the USA on September 11th, 2001, and to assess what differences, if any, exist between individuals classified with probable panic disorder and those without. Telephone interviews were conducted with 122 residents of the capital city of the Canadian prairie province of Saskatchewan in spring 2002 in order to gather information regarding current mood, fears and avoidance behaviours as well as current post‐traumatic stress disorder symptoms specific to September 11th. Consistent with previous findings and despite the remote nature of exposure, results indicated that the psychological well‐being and behaviour of participants with probable panic disorder was more adversely affected by the events and aftermath of September 11th than those without panic disorder. These results suggest that remote viewing of traumatic events can have a significant and lingering impact on psychological well‐being and behaviour and that these effects are more pronounced in those with panic disorder. Implications of the findings and future research directions are discussed.     

Medical semiotics in the 18th century: A theory of practice?

Medical semiotics in the 18th century was more than a premodern form of diagnosis. Its structure allowed for the combination of empirically proven rules of instruction with the theoretical knowledge of the new sciences, employing the relation between the sign and the signified.     

Psychological Illness in Presidents: A Medical Advisory Commission and Disability Determinations

Although the 25th Amendment is intended to provide for instances of presidential disability, critics claim that it is impractical since it requires vice presidents and cabinet members to move overtly against the president—which they are unlikely to do. Also, they warn that medical information about the president is likely to be concealed. To overcome these problems, they recommend that a Medical Advisory Commission be established at the outset of every presidential administration to examine the president annually and then provide formal medical input so that the vice president and cabinet would be "compelled" to act in the presence of medically determined "inability," whether physiological or psychological. This paper argues, however, that such a proposal is badly flawed and quite unworkable, particularly in the case of psychological illness where accurate diagnosis typically depends on long-term, continuous doctor-patient interaction rather than through sporadic and superficial interchange. It concludes that less draconian measures in implementing the Amendment are far more sensible, such as those proposed by the Working Group on Presidential Disability which are discussed here.     

A model of episodic memory: Mental time travel along encoded trajectories using grid cells

The definition of episodic memory includes the concept of mental time travel: the ability to re-experience a previously experienced trajectory through continuous dimensions of space and time, and to recall specific events or stimuli along this trajectory. Lesions of the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex impair human episodic memory function and impair rat performance in tasks that could be solved by retrieval of trajectories. Recent physiological data suggests a novel model for encoding and retrieval of trajectories, and for associating specific stimuli with specific positions along the trajectory. During encoding in the model, external input drives the activity of head direction cells. Entorhinal grid cells integrate the head direction input to update an internal representation of location, and drive hippocampal place cells. Trajectories are encoded by Hebbian modification of excitatory synaptic connections between hippocampal place cells and head direction cells driven by external action. Associations are also formed between hippocampal cells and sensory stimuli. During retrieval, a sensory input cue activates hippocampal cells that drive head direction activity via previously modified synapses. Persistent spiking of head direction cells maintains the direction and speed of the action, updating the activity of entorhinal grid cells that thereby further update place cell activity. Additional cells, termed arc length cells, provide coding of trajectory segments based on the one-dimensional arc length from the context of prior actions or states, overcoming ambiguity where the overlap of trajectory segments causes multiple head directions to be associated with one place. These mechanisms allow retrieval of complex, self-crossing trajectories as continuous curves through space and time.     

Gender associations in the twentieth-century English-language literature

Gender associations may be partly learned from print media, including literature. Using Google Books Ngram corpus, we explored the depiction of male and female characters in the twentieth-century English-language fiction. By analyzing adjective-noun bigrams, we examined adjectives used in association with “man”, “woman”, “boy”, and “girl”. Men were described in more positive terms than women. Girls were depicted more positively than boys at the beginning of the twentieth century, but the tendency reversed in the middle of the century. Boys were described in more masculine terms than girls; however, men were described in similarly masculine adjectives as women. Despite limitations of interpretability of the results, the study presents a possible approach of exploring past characterization of the two genders.