Associations Between Social Anxiety and Nonverbal Processing Skill in Preadolescent Boys and Girls

This study was designed to investigate the potential association between social anxiety and children's ability to decode nonverbal emotional cues. Participants were 62 children between 8 and 10 years of age, who completed self-report measures of social anxiety, depressive symptomatology, and nonspecific anxious symptomatology, as well as nonverbal decoding tasks assessing accuracy at identifying emotion in facial expressions and vocal tones. Data were analyzed with multiple regression analyses controlling for generalized cognitive ability, and nonspecific anxious and depressive symptomatology. Results provided partial support for the hypothesis that social anxiety would relate to nonverbal decoding accuracy. Difficulty identifying emotions conveyed in children's and adults' voices was associated with general social avoidance and distress. At higher levels of social anxiety, children more frequently mislabeled fearful voices as sad. Possible explanations for the obtained results are explored.     

A Cognitive Career Course: From Theory to Practice

A university career development course based on cognitive information‐processing theory was assessed. Students who took the course showed a significant decrease in their negative career thoughts when the Career Thoughts Inventory (J. P. Sampson, G. W. Peterson, J. G. Lenz, R. C. Reardon, & D. E. Saunders, 1996a) was used as a pretest and posttest measure. The greatest decrease in negative thinking was found in students with the highest level of negative thinking at the beginning of the course. The specific components of negative career thinking—decision‐making confusion and commitment anxiety—contributed significantly to the main effect. There were no significant interactions with ethnicity or sex.     

被扭曲的木石前盟：－评《红楼梦》后四十回

《红楼梦》后四十回的描写,是违背曹雪芹原意的,木石前盟作为《红楼梦》的情节主线,同样是被续作者歪曲了的首先是抽去了木石前盟的思想基础——对传统观念的叛逆,其次是修正了木石前盟的爱情条件——相互尊重和人格平等的知己之爱;其三是改变了爱情主人公矢志不渝的个性特点。从而抹杀了木石前盟所体现的超越时代的积极精神。     

Ethnic pride, biculturalism, and drug use norms of urban American Indian adolescents

This study examines how strength of ethnic identity, multiethnic identity, and other indicators of biculturalism relate to the drug use norms of urban American Indian middle school students. The article distinguishes categories of norms that may affect drug use. Regression analysis of self-reports by 434 American Indian seventh graders attending middle schools in a large southwestern U.S. city indicated that students who had a more intense sense of ethnic pride adhered more strongly to certain antidrug norms than those who did not. Whereas American Indian students with better grades in school held consistently stronger antidrug norms, there were few differences by gender, socioeconomic status, or age. These results have implications in social work practice for better understanding and strengthening the protective aspects of American Indian culture in drug prevention efforts.     

On Bayesian consistency

We consider a sequence of posterior distributions based on a data-dependent prior (which we shall refer to as a pseudoposterior distribution) and establish simple conditions under which the sequence is Hellinger consistent. It is shown how investigations into these pseudo posteriors assist with the understanding of some true posterior distributions, including Pólya trees, the infinite dimensional exponential family and mixture models.     

伦理理论与反理论之争——玛莎·努斯鲍姆伦理理论化思想述评

伦理理论与反理论不仅是德性伦理学与规范伦理学之间的争论,而且同样存在于德性伦理学内部。玛莎·努斯鲍姆是当代著名德性伦理学家。她的德性伦理理论化的主张具有代表性。研究玛莎.努斯鲍姆的伦理理论化的思想,有助于我们站在伦理学的前沿,把握当代西方德性伦理学的最新发展方向。      

Nonparametric estimation of the mean function of a stochastic process with missing observations

In an attempt to identify similarities between methods for estimating a mean function with different types of response or observation processes, we explore a general theoretical framework for nonparametric estimation of the mean function of a response process subject to incomplete observations. Special cases of the response process include quantitative responses and discrete state processes such as survival processes, counting processes and alternating binary processes. The incomplete data are assumed to arise from a general response-independent observation process, which includes right- censoring, interval censoring, periodic observation, and mixtures of these as special cases. We explore two criteria for defining nonparametric estimators, one based on the sample mean of available data and the other inspired by the construction of Kaplan-Meier (or product-limit) estimator [J. Am. Statist. Assoc. 53 (1958) 457] for right-censored survival data. We show that under regularity conditions the estimated mean functions resulting from both criteria are consistent and converge weakly to Gaussian processes, and provide consistent estimators of their covariance functions. We then evaluate these general criteria for specific responses and observation processes, and show how they lead to familiar estimators for some response and observation processes and new estimators for others. We illustrate the latter with data from an recently completed AIDS clinical trial.     

Robust Mechanism Design

The mechanism design literature assumes too much common knowledge of the environment among the players and planner. We relax this assumption by studying mechanism design on richer type spaces. We ask when ex post implementation is equivalent to interim (or Bayesian) implementation for all possible type spaces. The equivalence holds in the case of separable environments; examples of separable environments arise (1) when the planner is implementing a social choice function (not correspondence) and (2) in a quasilinear environment with no restrictions on transfers. The equivalence fails in general, including in some quasilinear environments with budget balance. In private value environments, ex post implementation is equivalent to dominant strategies implementation. The private value versions of our results offer new insights into the relationship between dominant strategy implementation and Bayesian implementation.     

Relationships Among Career and Life Stress,Negative Career Thoughts,and Career Decision State: A Cognitive Information Processing Perspective

According to cognitive information processing theory, career thoughts mediate the relationship between career and life stress and the ensuing career decision state. Using a sample of 232 college students and structural equation modeling, this study found that an increase in career and life stress was associated with an increase in negative career thinking and that an increase in such thoughts was associated with a lower level of decidedness and satisfaction with career choice. However, when the variation associated with negative career thoughts was partitioned in the mediated causal model, career and life stress became associated with less career indecision and dissatisfaction with career choice. The results suggest that counselors attend to negative career thoughts when individuals encounter career and life stress.