The role of familiarity in dietary development

The rise in inadequate and unhealthily diets in children has led investigations to examine the development of food preferences. This review outlines the ways in which children choose between foods made available to them and the subsequent shaping of their own habitual diet. Children are liable to form preferences to certain hedonic foods, and to exhibit neophobic reactions to the unfamiliar. Unfamiliar foods can elicit anxiety and suspicion. Trust and liking of a once novel food can be gained through exposure, increasing familiarity towards that food. This review examines: visual familiarity (awareness of foods within their environment); taste familiarity (knowledge and experience of the taste of foods); contextual familiarity (knowledge of how foods should be presented); and categorical familiarity (which family foods belong to). The influence of familiarity is also explained with regards to both positive and negative associative learning. These associations are influenced by the specific presentation and the social environment of a novel food. The potential benefits of understanding the nature of children’s learning and preference development for the promotion of healthy nutrition to both parent and child are discussed.     

Begging the Question: A Case Study

The essay starts by presenting two accounts of begging the question, John Biro's epistemic account and David Sanford's doxastic account. After briefly comparing these accounts, the essay will study an argument suspected of begging the question and subsequently apply the epistemic and doxastic accounts to this test case. It is found that the accounts of Biro and Sanford do not analyse the test case adequately, therefore a new account is developed using the idea of a knowledge-base.     

Children and youth in neighborhood contexts

Neighborhoods are increasingly studied as a context where children and youth develop; however, the extent of neighborhoods' impact remains debatable because it is difficult to disentangle this impact from that of the family context, in part because families have some choice as to where they live. Evidence from randomized experiments, studies using advanced statistical models, and longitudinal studies that control for family characteristics indicates that neighborhoods do matter. In nonexperimental studies, small to moderate associations were found, suggesting that children and adolescents living in high-income neighborhoods had higher cognitive ability and school achievement than those living in middle-income neighborhoods, and children and adolescents living in low-income neighborhoods had more mental and physical health problems than those living in middle-income neighborhoods. The home environment has been shown to be partly responsible for the link between neighborhood and children's development. For adolescents, neighborhood effects are partially accounted for by community social control. Experimental studies in which families were randomly assigned to move to low-poverty neighborhoods from housing projects found larger neighborhood effects than nonexperi-mental research, particularly for boys' outcomes. Additional issues reviewed are relevant neighborhood characteristics, theoretical models explaining the pathways underlying neighborhood effects, methods for research assessing neighborhood processes, and policy implications.     

The Cornell Institute for Research on Children: A vision of integrated developmental science

The Cornell Institute for Research on Children (CIRC) is an intellectual infrastructure funded by the National Science Foundation under the aegis of the Children's Research Initiative, which was spearheaded by Rodney R. Cocking. Cocking's vision of integrated developmental science is an integral part of CIRC's philosophy. CIRC aims to integrate knowledge and paradigms from a variety of fields (e.g., developmental psychology, economics, neuroscience, and pediatrics), which take different perspectives on similar issues (e.g., the effects of toxins on cognitive development), making it explicitly interdisciplinary. The object of CIRC studies is to apply research findings to social policy. To accomplish this, CIRC provides resources to enable teams of scholars from diverse fields to collaborate on policy-relevant questions. CIRC's approach begins by asking policy-makers to define questions for researchers to address, then shepherds the process by which scholars from various relevant disciplines are commissioned to work as a team to answer such questions. To demonstrate the strengths of this approach we describe the six components that comprise CIRC and provide an actual example of a project that CIRC has commissioned as well as a hypothetical example of a project that CIRC could undertake. This article is a progress report, written in an effort to disseminate information about CIRC's agenda.     

Book Reviews

Books Reviewed:
Daniel Chirot and Martin E. P. Seligman (eds.), Ethnopolitical Warfare: Causes, Consequences, and Possible Solutions
David Patrick Houghton, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Iran Hostage Crisis
Yoram Peri (ed.), The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin
Peter Suedfeld (ed.), Light from the Ashes: Social Science Careers of Young Holocaust Refugees and Survivors     

离异家庭儿童发展性研究综述

随着世界各国离婚率的提高,离异家庭对儿童发展的影响已经成为众多学者研究关注的焦点.文章着重介绍和分析了离异家庭儿童发展性研究的进展、离异家庭儿童心理和行为问题的产生机制以及离异家庭儿童发展的影响因素和作用机制.最后对公共政策的制定提出建议.     

论公共决策的优先性价值

公共决策关涉价值,且负荷优先性价值。在思想史的维度上,众多学者认同公平是公共决策的优先性价值。在学理层面上,公共决策的公共性和政府的服务性决定公平是公共决策的优先性价值。处于市场经济条件下的政府必须以公共决策的优先性价值为基础正确把握公平与效率的辩证关系。     

Engaging African Americans in Therapy: Integrating a Public Policy and Family Therapy Perspective

The field of marriage and family therapy faces a growing imperative to reach historically underserved populations. African Americans are a prime example of a minority group in the United States that continues to be underserved by the current mental health system. We integrate Andersen’s (1995, Journal of Health and Social behavior, 36, 1–10) public policy model of health service use with Fox et al. (1995, Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, 6, 434–468) revision of the rural de facto mental health services model (Regier and Goldberg, 1978, Archives of General Psychiatry, 35, 685–693) to develop a more inclusive and culturally sensitive framework that captures salient factors influencing African Americans’ entry into and engagement in therapy. Recommendations for overcoming barriers and suggestions for future research are presented.     

行为社会政策：“助推”公共福利的实践与探索

行为社会政策是基于人的行为特点而设计, 使用“助推”作为政策工具来执行的社会政策。它是行为科学在社会政策范畴的应用, 其原理在于洞察人们做选择时的行为偏好, 以隐性且非明显经济刺激的方式谋求公众利益。从政策制定者的角度出发, 基于自愿性和信息性的统一, 可将行为社会政策中的助推策略分为增加策略、减少策略和转换策略; 三大策略被用于再住院率、儿童健康、社区养老、入学资助、就业问题、器官移植和精准扶贫等民生领域, 帮助人们做出更好的选择, 提高公共福利。作为一种新兴的方法和技术, 助推并非万能, 需要政策制定者对症下药、精确识别、权衡使用, 规避“行为官僚”, 才能真正实现国家治理现代化和社会利益最大化。