It is time for a general comment on children’s spiritual development

Reviewing the general comments by the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the state reports to the CRC reveal a mixed picture. How could a general comment by CRC on the right to spiritual development assist states in their policies and programmes? First, current understandings of spiritual well-being – one’s relationship to oneself, others, nature and the transcendent – encompass all relevant dimensions of meaning-making, enhanced awareness and connectedness. Second, the CRC has elaborated on spiritual development in 16 of its 21 general comments, providing sources from which a comprehensive elaboration can be done. Third, the understanding of the term spiritual is diverse among states. Fourth, a general comment will clarify the term spiritual development and inspire and guide relevant policies and programmes.     

Intellectual property protection,technological innovation and enterprise value—An empirical study on panel data of 80 advanced manufacturing SMEs

Study the role of intellectual property protection in advanced manufacturing SMEs. Is it to protect the growth of advanced manufacturing SMEs, or to inhibit the growth of SMEs in advanced manufacturing? the paper brings the medium variable – technological innovation to explore acting paths of intellectual property protection in enterprises’ value improvement. Through analysis of panel data of 80 SMEs of advanced manufacture collected during the period from 2013 to 2015, Research results show that as for SMEs of advanced manufacture, the inverted-U relationship still exists in the influences brought by intellectual property protection to enterprise values. Meanwhile, U-shaped relations exist between intellectual property protection and technological innovation. Increase of technological innovation investment can promote increase of enterprise values.     

Reflections on how color term acquisition is constrained

Compared with object word learning, young children typically find learning color terms to be a difficult linguistic task. In this reflections article, I consider two questions that are fundamental to investigations into the developmental acquisition of color terms. First, I consider what constrains color term acquisition and how stable these constraints are over culture and age. I review recent studies that have identified conceptual, attentional, and linguistic constraints that seemingly operate on the acquisition of color terms compared with object words and the differential acquisition of color terms within a given language. Second, I consider whether these constraints are specific to the acquisition of color terms or whether they reflect more general constraints that operate on other classes of lexical terms such as different abstract property terms.     

Object individuation using property/kind information in rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta)

Around 1 year of age, infants develop the ability to individuate objects in the absence of spatiotemporal information. Some have proposed that this capacity relies on the emergence of language and, in particular, that comprehending an object's label is required to individuate it as a particular kind. One approach to testing this hypothesis is to conduct experiments on pre-linguistic human infants. A second is to test non-linguistic animals. We followed the second approach, exploring whether semi-free-ranging rhesus macaques can individuate objects using property/kind information. To make the results most directly comparable, we adapted a reaching paradigm used to examine property/kind individuation in infants. Results from three experiments demonstrate that, like 12-month-old infants, adult rhesus macaques can use both spatiotemporal and property/kind information to individuate food objects. In a fourth experiment designed to examine which properties are used to individuate food objects, results revealed that rhesus use color, but not shape. These results, together with experiments involving different procedures, provide support for the conclusion that in the absence of linguistic abilities, some non-human primates spontaneously use property/kind information to individuate objects.     

Different types—Different rights

Drawing on a social construction theory of ownership in biological material this paper discusses which differences in biological material might motivate differences in treatment and ownership rights. The analysis covers both the perspective of the person from whom the material originates and that of the potential recipient. Seven components of bundles of rights, drawing on the analytical tradition of Tony Honoré, and their relationship to various types of biological material are investigated. To exemplify these categories the cases of a heart, a kidney, stem cells and hair are used.     

Early Student-Teacher Relationships of Children With and Without Intellectual Disability: Contributions of Behavioral, Social, and Self-Regulatory Competence

We investigated the student-teacher relationships (STRs) of 6-year-old children with (n = 58) and without (n = 82) intellectual disability (ID). We also examined early (age 3) and concurrent (age 6) child behavioral, self-regulatory, and social characteristics as predictors of age 6 STR quality. Children with ID experienced significantly poorer relationships with their teachers, marked by less closeness and more conflict and dependency, compared to typically developing children. This group difference was not accounted for entirely by IQ differences. Child characteristics and parent-child interactional variables at age 3 and 6 accounted for 53.5% of the variance in age 6 STR quality. The relation between ID status and STR quality was fully mediated by three child variables-global self-regulation at age 3, mother-reported behavior problems at age 6, and teacher-reported behavior problems at age 6- and was partially mediated by mother-reported behavior problems at age 3. Our findings demonstrate the importance of child behavioral and social characteristics in predicting relationships with teachers for children with and without ID.     

Automatic Extraction of Property Norm‐Like Data From Large Text Corpora

Traditional methods for deriving property‐based representations of concepts from text have focused on either extracting only a subset of possible relation types, such as hyponymy/hypernymy (e.g., car is‐a vehicle ) or meronymy/metonymy (e.g., car has wheels ), or unspecified relations (e.g., car — petrol ). We propose a system for the challenging task of automatic, large‐scale acquisition of unconstrained, human‐like property norms from large text corpora, and discuss the theoretical implications of such a system. We employ syntactic, semantic, and encyclopedic information to guide our extraction, yielding concept‐relation‐feature triples (e.g., car be fast , car require petrol , car cause pollution ), which approximate property‐based conceptual representations. Our novel method extracts candidate triples from parsed corpora (Wikipedia and the British National Corpus) using syntactically and grammatically motivated rules, then reweights triples with a linear combination of their frequency and four statistical metrics. We assess our system output in three ways: lexical comparison with norms derived from human‐generated property norm data, direct evaluation by four human judges, and a semantic distance comparison with both WordNet similarity data and human‐judged concept similarity ratings. Our system offers a viable and performant method of plausible triple extraction: Our lexical comparison shows comparable performance to the current state‐of‐the‐art, while subsequent evaluations exhibit the human‐like character of our generated properties.     

A need-supportive teaching approach among students with intellectual disability in physical education

ObjectivesThe present study tested a need-supportive teaching approach to enhance the experience of need satisfaction, autonomous motivation, and well-being, and to decrease need frustration, controlled motivation, amotivation, and ill-being among students with intellectual disability in physical education activities. We further tested the effects of experimental condition in predicting students’ need satisfaction and need frustration, motivational regulations, and well-being and ill-being over the semester.DesignExperimental study.MethodsNinety eight students with mild and borderline intellectual disabilities (M_age = 16.53, SD = 3.22; female = 63.3%) attended in this experimental semester-long study. Teachers (N = 6) of students randomly assigned into either an experimental (need-supportive teaching style) or a control (usual teaching style) condition. Students filled out the targeted questionnaires at the beginning (T1), middle (T2), and the end of the semester (T3).FindingsThe results showed that students of the teachers in the experimental condition reported higher need satisfaction and positive affect, and lesser need frustration, amotivation, and negative affect than students of the teachers in the control condition. The results also showed that experimental condition predicted positively T3 need satisfaction, whereas and negatively predicted T3 need frustration, amotivation, and negative affect.ConclusionFindings highlight the importance of teachers’ need-supportive teaching behaviors to enhance positive outcomes, and decreasing their negative outcomes in students with intellectual disabilities in PE.     

Grammatical gender and inferences about biological properties in german-speaking children

In German, nouns are assigned to one of the three gender classes. For most animal names, however, the assignment is independent of the referent's biological sex. We examined whether German-speaking children understand this independence of grammar from semantics or whether they assume that grammatical gender is mapped onto biological sex when drawing inferences about sex-specific biological properties of animals. Two cross-linguistic studies comparing German-speaking and Japanese-speaking preschoolers were conducted. The results suggest that German-speaking children utilize grammatical gender as a cue for inferences about sex-specific properties of animals. Further, we found that Japanese- and German-speaking children recruit different resources when drawing inferences about sex-specific properties: Whereas Japanese children paralleled their pattern of inference about properties common to all animals, German children relied on the grammatical gender class of the animal. Implications of these findings for studying the relation between language and thought are discussed.     

ÉmigrÉ analysts in Boston, 1930-1940

A brief history of the European analysts who settled in Boston during the first decade of the newly re-organized Boston Psychoanalytic Society/Institute, as part of the great intellectual migration fleeing from Hitler Germany and Austria. The term émigré was chosen as more inclusive, since not all were refugees forced to emigrate. The sequence of each analyst's arrival is traced, and their reasons for choosing Boston are identified, whenever possible.