Pathways to violence propensity: Results from a two-wave study of young males in urban South Africa

The aim of this study was to model pathways to violence propensity and violent behaviour among boys and young men in a high-violence community in South Africa. To that end, 284 young males (11 to 23 years old) from Khayelitsha, Cape Town self-reported risk for engagement in interpersonal violence and criminality; including within family, peer, and school domains, over a 12 month period. In Structural Equation Modelling, a pathway emerged through which an unstable home environment, influenced by deprivation and violence, affects the quality of parenting. In turn, early deviant associations and attitudes toward violence and gangs are cultivated and may have a deleterious effect on schooling, resulting in greater future substance abuse, greater violence propensity, and offending. These findings support the life course perspective approach, emphasising turning points and human agency in the aetiology of violence.     

CAREGIVER SENSITIVITY AND CONSISTENCY AND CHILDREN'S PRIOR FAMILY EXPERIENCE AS CONTEXTS FOR EARLY DEVELOPMENT WITHIN INSTITUTIONS

The current study addressed whether two institution‐wide interventions in St. Petersburg, Russian Federation, that increased caregiver sensitivity (Training Only: TO) or both caregiver sensitivity and consistency (Training plus Structural Changes: T+SC) promoted better socioemotional and cognitive development than did a No Intervention (NoI) institution during the first year of life for children who were placed soon after birth. It also assessed whether having spent less than 9 versus 9 to 36 months with a family prior to institutionalization was related to children's subsequent socioemotional and cognitive development within these three institutions. The Battelle Developmental Inventory (J. Newborg, J.R. Stock, L. Wnek, J. Guidubaldi, & J. Svinicki, 1988) was used to assess the socioemotional and cognitive functioning of children in NoI (n = 95), TO (n = 104), and T+SC (n = 86) at two to three time points during their first 6 to 12 months of residency. Results suggest that improving caregiver sensitivity can improve the cognitive development of infants in the first year of institutionalization whereas improving caregiver consistency in addition to sensitivity is more beneficial for socioemotional development than is sensitivity alone. Similarly, for children in T+SC, longer time with a family prior to institutionalization (consistent caregiver, unknown sensitivity) was associated with better socioemotional, but not cognitive, baseline scores and more rapid cognitive than socioemotional development during institutionalization. These results suggest caregiver sensitivity is more highly related to cognitive development whereas caregiver consistency is more related to socioemotional development in the first years of life.     

SEM Based CARMA Time Series Modeling for Arbitrary N

This article explains in detail the state space specification and estimation of first and higher-order autoregressive moving-average models in continuous time (CARMA) in an extended structural equation modeling (SEM) context for N = 1 as well as N > 1. To illustrate the approach, simulations will be presented in which a single panel model (T = 41 time points) is estimated for a sample of N = 1,000 individuals as well as for samples of N = 100 and N = 50 individuals, followed by estimating 100 separate models for each of the one-hundred N = 1 cases in the N = 100 sample. Furthermore, we will demonstrate how to test the difference between the full panel model and each N = 1 model by means of a subject-group-reproducibility test. Finally, the proposed analyses will be applied in an empirical example, in which the relationships between mood at work and mood at home are studied in a sample of N = 55 women. All analyses are carried out by ctsem, an R-package for continuous time modeling, interfacing to OpenMx.     

老年人认知功能的变化轨迹：基于潜变量增长模型的分析

摘 要 本研究采用中国老年健康影响因素跟踪调查（CLHLS）的4次数据（2002,2005,2008,2011）,对老年人认知功能的变化趋势以及影响因素进行了探讨。结果显示：（1）老年人认知功能在4次测查中呈非线性的下降趋势。（2）日常生活活动能力较低的个体其认知功能也较低;老年人读书年限越高,其认知功能水平越高;女性的认知功能水平低于男性;不饮酒的老年人认知功能低于饮酒的老年人。（3）读书年限与饮酒会正向预测模型的斜率。     

A Large‐Scale Analysis of Variance in Written Language

The collection of very large text sources has revolutionized the study of natural language, leading to the development of several models of language learning and distributional semantics that extract sophisticated semantic representations of words based on the statistical redundancies contained within natural language (e.g., Griffiths, Steyvers, & Tenenbaum, 2007 ; Jones & Mewhort, 2007 ; Landauer & Dumais, 1997 ; Mikolov, Sutskever, Chen, Corrado, & Dean, 2013 ). The models treat knowledge as an interaction of processing mechanisms and the structure of language experience. But language experience is often treated agnostically. We report a distributional semantic analysis that shows written language in fiction books varies appreciably between books from the different genres, books from the same genre, and even books written by the same author. Given that current theories assume that word knowledge reflects an interaction between processing mechanisms and the language environment, the analysis shows the need for the field to engage in a more deliberate consideration and curation of the corpora used in computational studies of natural language processing.     

No Evidence That Sleep Deprivation Effects and the Vigilance Decrement Are Functionally Equivalent: Comment on Veksler and Gunzelmann (2017)

Veksler and Gunzelmann (2017) make an extraordinary claim, which is that sleep deprivation effects and the vigilance decrement are functionally equivalent. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, which is missing from Veksler and Gunzelmann's study. Their behavioral data offer only weak theoretical constraint, and to the extent their modeling exercise supports any position, it is that these two performance impairments involve functionally distinct underlying mechanisms.     

Narrowing the Creativity Gap: The Moderating Effects of Perceived Support for Creativity

This article examines the role of 3 types of perceived support for creativity in moderating the relation between creative self-efficacy and self-perceived creativity. The findings suggest significant interaction effects for perceived work-group support and supervisor support, but not for perceived organizational support. This study is among the first to (a) examine the importance of perceived support for creativity in unlocking creative potential and increasing creativity in organizations and (b) use interaction terms in structural equation modeling (SEM) to investigate moderator effects in an applied research setting. These results imply that organizational interventions focused on training supervisors and work-group members to support creativity in the workplace may be more effective than broader and less focused interventions at the organizational level.     

The Cognitive Architecture of Perceived Animacy: Intention,Attention, and Memory

Human vision supports social perception by efficiently detecting agents and extracting rich information about their actions, goals, and intentions. Here, we explore the cognitive architecture of perceived animacy by constructing Bayesian models that integrate domain‐specific hypotheses of social agency with domain‐general cognitive constraints on sensory, memory, and attentional processing. Our model posits that perceived animacy combines a bottom–up, feature‐based, parallel search for goal‐directed movements with a top–down selection process for intent inference. The interaction of these architecturally distinct processes makes perceived animacy fast, flexible, and yet cognitively efficient. In the context of chasing, in which a predator (the “wolf”) pursues a prey (the “sheep”), our model addresses the computational challenge of identifying target agents among varying numbers of distractor objects, despite a quadratic increase in the number of possible interactions as more objects appear in a scene. By comparing modeling results with human psychophysics in several studies, we show that the effectiveness and efficiency of human perceived animacy can be explained by a Bayesian ideal observer model with realistic cognitive constraints. These results provide an understanding of perceived animacy at the algorithmic level—how it is achieved by cognitive mechanisms such as attention and working memory, and how it can be integrated with higher‐level reasoning about social agency.     

A Method of Correcting Estimation Failure in Latent Differential Equations with Comparisons to Kalman Filtering

Abstract

Studies have used the latent differential equation (LDE) model to estimate the parameters of damped oscillation in various phenomena, but it has been shown that correct, non-zero parameter estimates are only obtained when the latent series exhibits little or no process noise. Consequently, LDEs are limited to modeling deterministic processes with measurement error rather than those with random behavior in the true latent state. The reasons for these limitations are considered, and a piecewise deterministic approximation (PDA) algorithm is proposed to treat process noise outliers as functional discontinuities and obtain correct estimates of the damping parameter. Comprehensive, random-effects simulations were used to compare results with those obtained using a state-space model (SSM) based on the Kalman filter. The LDE with the PDA algorithm (LDEPDA) successfully recovered the simulated damping parameter under a variety of conditions when process noise was present in the latent state. The LDEPDA had greater precision and accuracy than the SSM when estimating parameters from data with sparse jump discontinuities, but worse performance for diffusion processes overall. All three methods were applied to a sample of postural sway data. The basic LDE estimated zero damping, while the LDEPDA and SSM estimated moderate to high damping. The SSM estimated the smallest standard errors for both frequency and damping parameter estimates.