Confession of prior knowledge about experimental procedures as a function of evaluation apprehension and commitment

Subjects' evaluation apprehension (anxiety about being judged by the experimenter) and commitment to (involvement in) the experiment were manipulated in an experimental study of subjects' honesty in postexperimental interviews. Previous studies have shown that subjects are typically dishonest in postexperimental interviews by refusing to admit prior knowledge of the experiment imparted to them by a confederate. It was found that both high apprehension and low commitment lead to greater subject honesty. Other features of the experimental design were successful in inducing subjects to be generally more honest than their counterparts in previous confederate tip-off studies.     

‘We Can All Just Get on a Bus and Go’: Rethinking Independent Mobility in the Context of the Universal Provision of Free Bus Travel to Young Londoners

This paper uses qualitative data from interviews with 118 young Londoners (age 12–18) to examine how the universal provision of free bus travel has affected young people’s independent mobility. Drawing on Sen’s capabilities approach, we argue that free bus travel enhanced young Londoners’ capabilities to shape their daily mobility, both directly by increasing financial access and indirectly by facilitating the acquisition of the necessary skills, travelling companions and confidence. These capabilities in turn extended both opportunity freedoms (e.g. facilitating non-‘necessary’ recreational and social trips) and process freedoms (e.g. feeling more independent by decreasing reliance on parents). Moreover, the universal nature of the entitlement rendered buses a socially inclusive way for groups to travel and spend time together, thereby enhancing group-level capabilities. We believe this attention to individual and group capabilities for self-determination provides the basis for a broader and more child-centred view of independent mobility than the typical research focus upon travelling without an adult and acquiring parental permissions.     

Psychosocial Interventions for Maltreated and Violence-Exposed Children

Child sexual, physical, and emotional abuse as well as child neglect and domestic violence, community violence, and Childhood Traumatic Grief may result in significant and long-lasting emotional and behavioral difficulties. This article reviews randomized controlled studies that have assessed child mental health outcomes for maltreated and violence-exposed children. Key points of this review include the following: (1) maltreated and violence-exposed children typically experience more than one of these types of traumas; (2) effective psychosocial treatments are available to address Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), depression, anxiety, and behavioral problems in these children; (3) it is likely that treatments which effectively reduce mental health symptoms in children exposed to one type of child maltreatment or violence exposure will also be effective for other or multiple types; and (4) mental health outcomes are not the only important outcomes to address in future treatment or intervention efforts. These future directions for treatment intervention research are addressed.     

The Development of the Law of Matrimonial Property—A Historical Perspective

This article outlines briefly the development of matrimonial property law from earliest times to the present day. The issue of central concern throughout is the changing status of women and the bearing that this has had on development of the law. A historical, social and economic perspective is adopted in an effort to explain why particular developments occurred when they did. Finally, attention is drawn to the inadequacies of legal solutions to what is perceived as basically an economic issue.     

A note on Rescher's ‘Semantic Foundations for the Logic of Preference’

In ‘Semantic Foundations for the Logic of Preference’ (Rescher, ed.,The Logic of Decision and Action, University Press, Pittsburgh, 1967), Nicholas Rescher claims that, on the semantics developed in that paper, a certain principle - call it ‘Q’ turns out to be ‘unacceptable’. I argue, however, that, given certain assumptions that Rescher invokes in that same paper,Q can in fact be shown to be a ‘preference-tautology’, and henceQ should be classified as ‘acceptable’ on Rescher's theory.     

An Exposure‐Response Threshold for Lung Diseases and Lung Cancer Caused by Crystalline Silica

Whether crystalline silica (CS) exposure increases risk of lung cancer in humans without silicosis, and, if so, whether the exposure‐response relation has a threshold, have been much debated. Epidemiological evidence is ambiguous and conflicting. Experimental data show that high levels of CS cause lung cancer in rats, although not in other species, including mice, guinea pigs, or hamsters; but the relevance of such animal data to humans has been uncertain. This article applies recent insights into the toxicology of lung diseases caused by poorly soluble particles (PSPs), and by CS in particular, to model the exposure‐response relation between CS and risk of lung pathologies such as chronic inflammation, silicosis, fibrosis, and lung cancer. An inflammatory mode of action is described, having substantial empirical support, in which exposure increases alveolar macrophages and neutrophils in the alveolar epithelium, leading to increased reactive oxygen species (ROS) and nitrogen species (RNS), pro‐inflammatory mediators such as TNF‐alpha, and eventual damage to lung tissue and epithelial hyperplasia, resulting in fibrosis and increased lung cancer risk among silicotics. This mode of action involves several positive feedback loops. Exposures that increase the gain factors around such loops can create a disease state with elevated levels of ROS, TNF‐alpha, TGF‐beta, alveolar macrophages, and neutrophils. This mechanism implies a “tipping point” threshold for the exposure‐response relation. Applying this new model to epidemiological data, we conclude that current permissible exposure levels, on the order of 0.1 mg/m³, are probably below the threshold for triggering lung diseases in humans.     

Correlational biases in mean response latency differences

Multifarious psychological constructs are indexed by the mean latency difference (MLD), the within-subject difference between mean response latency on two tasks. Two associations consistently emerge in mean latency data. Firstly, across subjects, mean latencies on distinct tasks are positively correlated. This correlation arises from individual differences in general rates of information processing that are a shared influence on response latency in diverse tasks. Secondly, across tasks, the mean and variance of mean latency are positively correlated. Compared to a simple task, a complex task has both a larger average mean latency and a larger variance of mean latency, across subjects. Taken together, these associations make the interpretation of the MLD problematic by biasing correlations between the MLD and (a) task mean latencies, (b) the average of the mean latencies, (c) external criteria, and (d) other MLDs. A variety of mean latency transformations were evaluated and, while they differed in their effectiveness, they did not satisfactorily rectify MLD biases. An alternative approach, focusing on scale invariant contrasts of within-subject response latency distributions, is introduced in the conclusion.