Primary-school stutterers: Have attitudes changed?

How concerned are primary-school-aged stuttering children about their communication problem? What are the clinical implications of this concern?Fifteen years ago, Silverman (1970) suggested that primary-school-aged children who stuttered were not concerned about their disfluencies. A clinical implication of that report was that the interpreted lack of concern might negatively affect the children's motivation and desire for change in therapy. Scant research exists to support or refute this implication. While research is available on reactions to stuttering, pretherapeutic attitudes—especially those of children—have not been systematically reported. Guitar (1976) measured the pre-treatment attitudes of 38 adult stutterers and reported that, “those stutterers with more negative attitudes measured just prior to treatment, were most likely to have high levels of stuttering a year later, even though all subjects left therapy entirely fluent.” In related areas, research by Kolb, Winter, and Berlen (1968), McFall (1970), and McFall and Hammen (1971) has indicated that clients who are more motivated do better in behavior modification programs.Whether or not these findings may be generalized to children, in the midst of a developmental process, is purely speculative.     

Substance P facilitation of memory: effects in an appetitively motivated learning task

Food deprived, heterogeneous strain (HS/IBG) mice were trained on two different discrimination tasks for food reinforcement. In one experiment animals were trained to make spatial discriminations in a T maze. Immediately after training they were given subcutaneous injections of either substance P (1 ng/g) or vehicle. Twenty-four hours later the animals were given reversal training in the same maze. The results showed that substance P-treated animals took significantly longer to acquire the reversal habit than did control mice. In a second experiment, animals were trained to make visual discriminations in a T maze. Immediately after reaching acquisition criterion animals were injected with either substance P (1 ng/g) or vehicle. Different groups of mice were retrained on the same task either 1, 2, 3, or 7 days after original learning. Savings scores were calculated and, at every interval, substance P-treated mice retained the task better than control animals. One interpretation of these data is that substance P-treated mice remembered the original task significantly better than vehicle-injected control animals.     

Comment on internal feedback as a theory of judgment: a reply to Levin

Levin's suggestion that internal feedback strategies be employed in judgmental and learning tasks is discussed. The predictions of an internal feedback notion are seen as inconsistent with Veit's ratio and difference task data. Scale-free frameworks and scale-convergence criteria used in previous research are described as useful techniques for separating integration from judgmental processes in information-integration as well as learning-task situations.     

Exploring the enactment effect from an information processing view: What can we learn from serial position analyses?

The focus of the present article was to analyze processes that determine the enactment and age effect in a multi-trial free recall paradigm by looking at the serial position effects. In an experimental study (see Schatz et al 2010), the performance-enhancing effect of enactive encoding and repeated learning was tested with older and younger participants. As expected, there was a steady improvement of memory performance as a function of repeated learning regardless of age. In addition, enactive encoding led to a better memory performance than verbal encoding in both age groups. Furthermore, younger adults outperformed the elderly regardless of type of encoding. Analyses in the present article show that encoding by enacting seems to profit especially from remembering the last items of a presented list. Regarding age differences, younger outperformed older participants in nearly all item positions. The performance enhancement after task repetition is due to a higher amount of recalled items in the middle positions in a subject performed task (SPT) and a verbal task (VT) as well as the last positions of a learned list in VT.     

Desecration,Moral Boundaries,and the Movement of Law: The Case of Westboro Baptist Church

Using participant observation, in-depth interviews, and legislative histories, we examine Westboro Baptist Church, a religious group infamous for homophobic rhetoric and funeral protests. Employing cultural and interactionist perspectives that focus on the semiotics of death, the sacred, and desecration, we outline how Westboro’s activities purposively violate deeply held signifiers of moral order through language, while simultaneously respecting extant laws of behavior. This strategy, in conjunction with the political profitability of opposing the group, explains why the group’s activism triggered extensive legal disputes and modifications at multiple levels of governance. Westboro’s actions and use of symbols—and those of others against the group—lay bare multiple threads in the sacred cultural fabric of American society.     

Personal and family factors as predictors of pupils' mathematics achievement

This study examined personal and family factors in prediction of mathematics achievement by Kuwaiti fourth graders (395 boys, 501 girls; M age=10.0 yr., SD=8.0 mo.). Personal variables included sex, total achievement, perception of parental involvement, pupil's attitude towards school, and mathematics achievement. Family variables included parental education and parental involvement, views of school, and income. The data had good fit with the suggested model. Analysis showed variables which had significant direct association with mathematics achievement were total achievement and sex. Parental education, pupil's sex, and attitude towards school had significant indirect associations with mathematical achievement. Associations were direct for boys and indirect for girls on mathematics achievement, so sex had minimal total effects on mathematics achievement.     

Well-being in major depression and social phobia with and without comorbidity

Background/Objective: Lower levels in well-being have been observed in individuals with Major Depression (MDD) and Social Phobia (SP), but well-planned direct comparisons with control individuals, not suffering from a mental disorder, are lacking. Furthermore, MDD is highly comorbid with anxiety disorders, and SP with depressive disorders. This study is among the first to examine differences in well-being in individuals with a clinical diagnosis of MDD or SP compared to individuals with no such diagnosis and to test differences in well-being within the combined diagnostic categories respective with and without anxiety-depressive comorbidity. Method: Participants were 119 individuals with a diagnosis of MDD, 47 SP and 118 controls. Results: Results revealed that overall well-being as well as emotional, psychological, and social well-being were lower in the MDD and SP group compared to the control group. Individuals with comorbidity reported lower well-being than individuals without comorbidity. Conclusions: These findings have clinical implications as presence of comorbidity may require a different therapeutic approach than with no comorbidity.     

Taking Religious Pluralism Seriously. Arguing for an Institutional Turn. Introduction

Discussions of the relations between religions, society, politics, and the state in recent political philosophy are characterized, firstly, by a strong US American bias focusing on limitations of religious arguments in public debate. Even if the restriction or radical exclusion of religious reasons from public debate has recently been extensively criticized, secularist interpretations of liberal-democratic constitutions still prevail. Here it is argued that both strong secularism and weak or second order secularism are counterproductive for many reasons. Secondly, separationist interpretations of state-church relations are predominant, even if the severe wall of separation is criticized more often nowadays. Here it is argued that there are more and more interesting options than either separationism or accommodationism, that we should not exclusively focus at the constitutional relations between state and churches but address the full reciprocal relationship between society, culture, politics, nation, state and (organized) religions, and that we need more historical and comparative perspectives for the required institutionalist turn in political theory in order to overcome the obstacles inherent in predominant American political philosophy. The articles included in this volume are first, modest steps in this new direction.