The Age of Uncertainty: Parent Perspectives on the Transitions of Young People with Mental Health Difficulties to Adulthood

For young people aged 16–24, the transition from adolescence to young adulthood involves predictable and unpredictable changes and they may encounter challenges in their roles, relationships, and responsibilities. Young people with mental health difficulties face additional challenges as they and their families navigate this transition. As a result, families commonly experience anxiety, uncertainty, frustration, and turbulent relationships. After learning to become advocates to secure appropriate services for their children, in late adolescence and young adulthood, parents are likely to find themselves excluded from their children’s treatment planning and services. This article reports findings from a recent qualitative study of the experiences and perceptions of 42 family members supporting their children with mental health difficulties during the transition years. Family members described their goals for their children, their frustrations trying to access appropriate services for their children, and their strategies to provide the support their children needed. Recommendations are for service providers to connect transition age youth with practical assistance and supportive mentoring relationships. Family members requested service providers to consider them as resources and potential collaborators in supporting young people with mental health difficulties to live successful lives in the community.     

Horse (Equus caballus) whinnies: a source of social information

Many animal species that rely mainly on calls to communicate produce individual acoustic structures, but we wondered whether individuals of species better known as visual communicants, with small vocal repertoires, would also exhibit individual distinctiveness in calls. Moreover, theoretical advances concerning the evolution of social intelligence are usually based on primate species data, but relatively little is known about the social cognitive capacities of non-primate mammals. However, some non-primate species demonstrate auditory recognition of social categories and possess mental representation of their social network. Horses (Equus caballus) form stable social networks and although they display a large range of visual signals, they also use long-distance whinny calls to maintain contact. Here, we investigated the potential existence of individual acoustic signatures in whinny calls and the ability of horses to discriminate by ear individuals varying in their degree of familiarity. Our analysis of the acoustic structure of whinnies of 30 adult domestic horses (ten stallions, ten geldings, ten mares) revealed that some of the frequency and temporal parameters carried reliable information about the caller’s sex, body size and identity. However, no correlations with age were found. Playback experiments evaluated the behavioural significance of this variability. Twelve horses heard either control white noise or whinnies emitted by group members, familiar neighbours or unfamiliar horses. While control sounds did not induce any particular response, horses discriminated the social category of the callers and reacted with a sound-specific behaviour (vigilance and attraction varied with familiarity). Our results support the existence of social knowledge in horses and suggest a process of vocal coding/decoding of information.     

Self-estimates of intelligence: culture and gender difference in self and other estimates of both general (g) and multiple intelligences

This review paper examines two related areas of research: studies dating back over 50 years on lay theories of the nature and measurement of intelligence, and more recent research on sex and culture differences on self-estimated intelligence. The latter focus is on the nearly 20 published papers on estimated intelligence. Studies have shown consistent sex differences with males rating themselves higher than females. There are also consistent generational effects with adult participants believing around a half standard deviation difference in intelligence with their grandparents being least intelligent and children most. Self-estimated and psychometric intelligence only correlates weakly. Studies looking at self and other estimates of multiple intelligence indicated that participants seemed to believe that intelligence was male normative in that it was specifically those types of intelligence (mathematical and spatial) that most differentiated between the sexes that were themselves more predictive of general overall intelligence. Implications of these findings for intelligence testing are considered.     

RAISING DARWIN'S CONSCIOUSNESS: FEMALES AND EVOLUTIONARY THEORY

Abstract Early studies of primate social behavior were distorted by observational, methodological, and ideological biases that caused researchers to overlook active roles played by females in the social lives of monkeys. Primatology provides a particularly well documented case illustrating why research programs in the social and natural sciences need multiple studies that enlist researchers from diverse backgrounds     

Working on Gender as a Gender-Nonconformist

No abstract available for this article.     

Up by upwest: Is slope like north?

Terrain slope can be used to encode the location of a goal. However, this directional information may be encoded using a conceptual north (i.e., invariantly with respect to the environment), or in an observer-relative fashion (i.e., varying depending on the direction one faces when learning the goal). This study examines which representation is used, whether the sensory modality in which slope is encoded (visual, kinaesthetic, or both) influences representations, and whether use of slope varies for men and women. In a square room, with a sloped floor explicitly pointed out as the only useful cue, participants encoded the corner in which a goal was hidden. Without direct sensory access to slope cues, participants used a dial to point to the goal. For each trial, the goal was hidden uphill or downhill, and the participants were informed whether they faced uphill or downhill when pointing. In support of observer-relative representations, participants pointed more accurately and quickly when facing concordantly with the hiding position. There was no effect of sensory modality, providing support for functional equivalence. Sex did not interact with the findings on modality or reference frame, but spatial measures correlated with success on the slope task differently for each sex.     

Sex categorization of conspecific pictures in Japanese monkeys (Macaca fuscata)

We investigated whether monkeys discriminate the sex of individuals from their pictures. Whole-body pictures of adult and nonadult monkeys were used as stimuli. Two male Japanese monkeys were trained for a two-choice sex categorization task in which each of two choice pictures were assigned to male and female, respectively. Following the training, the monkeys were presented with novel monkey pictures, and whether they had acquired the categorization task was tested. The results suggested that while monkeys discriminate between the pictures of adult males and females, discrimination of nonadult pictures was difficult. Partial presentations of the pictures showed that conspicuous and sexually characteristic parts (i.e., underbellies including male scrotums or breasts including female nipples) played an important role in the sex categorization.     

Sex differences in a human analogue of the Radial Arm Maze: the "17-Box Maze Test"

This study investigated sex differences in spatial memory using a human analogue of the Radial Arm Maze: a revision on the Nine Box Maze originally developed by called the 17-Box Maze Test herein. The task encourages allocentric spatial processing, dissociates object from spatial memory, and incorporates a within-participants design to provide measures of location and object, working and reference memory. Healthy adult males and females (26 per group) were administered the 17-Box Maze Test, as well as mental rotation and a verbal IQ test. Females made significantly fewer errors on this task than males. However, post hoc analysis revealed that the significant sex difference was specific to object, rather than location, memory measures. These were medium to large effect sizes. The findings raise the issue of task- and component-specific sexual dimorphism in cognitive mapping.     

Distinguishing Between Causes and Enabling Conditions—Through Mental Models or Linguistic Cues?

The mental model theory of naive causal understanding and reasoning (Goldvarg & Johnson-Laird, 2001, Cognitive Science, 25, 565–610) claims that people distinguish between causes and enabling conditions on the basis of sets of models that represent possible causal situations. In the tasks used to test this hypothesis, however, the proposed set of models was confounded with linguistic cues that frame which event to assume as given (the enabling condition) and which to consider as responsible for the effect under this assumption (the cause). By disentangling these two factors, we were able to show that when identifying causes and enabling conditions in these tasks, people rely strongly on the linguistic cues but not on the proposed set of models and that this set of models does not even reflect people's typical interpretation of the tasks. We propose an alternative explanation that integrates syntactic and causal considerations.