Infants' Ability to Distinguish Between Intentional and Accidental Actions and Its Relation to Internal State Language

The experiment reported here investigated infants' concept of intention, as well as the relation among intention understanding, general productive vocabulary, and internal state language production during the 2nd year. Results from an imitation task indicated that 18‐month‐olds are better able to differentiate between intentional and accidental actions than 14‐month‐olds. Although there was no relation between infants' performance on the intention task and their general productive vocabulary, internal state language production at 30 months was predicted by infants' ability to differentiate between intentional and accidental actions about a year earlier. These findings shed light on the developmental progression of infants' concept of intention, as well as on the continuity between infants' understanding of intentional action and their ability to use internal state words.     

Braving Human Suffering: Death Education and its Relationship to Empathy and Mindfulness

Social workers are likely to encounter clients dealing with traumatic grief and death in their practice. Though death education has gained in popularity and acceptance, few social work students receive coursework in this area and many are unprepared to deal with their clients' and their own emotions regarding death and grief. Though death-related content may evoke provider avoidance, mindfulness and empathy may help regulate provider emotions and responses. This United States-based study evaluates the effectiveness of experiential death education on mindfulness and empathy. Measures in three separate cohorts were given at the beginning and end of the course. Results show statistically significant increases on the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire and the Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy, indicating that such a course may be effective in increasing both mindfulness and empathy in social work students and those in related fields.     

Influencing alcohol control policies and practices at community festivals

The goal of this study was to assess the feasibility and effectiveness of two interventions aimed at reducing alcohol-related risks at community festivals--a training program for festival planners and a community organizing campaign. We randomly selected four festivals for each intervention and had 24 comparison festivals. Our assessment included process evaluation to track and evaluate types of alcohol policies resulting from each of the interventions, pre and post telephone surveys of key festival planners and law enforcement agencies, and pre and post pseudo-underage and pseudo-intoxicated purchase attempts. Analyses showed that both interventions were feasible and were successful in influencing adoption of written policies and improving alcohol-related practices. However, neither intervention appeared to decrease propensity for illegal alcohol sales at these events, likely due, in part, to the short time frame of the interventions. Future research should assess effects of the interventions on alcohol-related problems and effects of enforcement interventions.     

Traumatic Bereavement and Mindfulness: A Preliminary Study of Mental Health Outcomes Using the ATTEND Model

This article presents a quasi-experimental study of a mindfulness-based intervention for traumatically bereaved individuals using a single group with pre-test and post-test design. The intervention consists of the ATTEND model, which is comprised of the following elements practiced by the clinician: attunement, trust, therapeutic touch, egalitarianism, nuance, and death education. The study is based on the charts of 42 clients seeking grief counseling at a mental health agency viewed retrospectively. Participants’ intake scores on the Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R), which measures trauma symptoms, and 25-item Hopkins Symptom Checklist (HSCL-25), which measures depressive and anxious symptoms, were compared to their scores after an average of 14.64 hours of counseling. Paired samples t tests showed a statistically significant decline in trauma symptoms on the IES-R, and in anxious and depressive symptoms on the HSCL-25. These results provide preliminary support for the use of this mindfulness-based approach for difficulties associated with traumatic bereavement, though more extensive research is needed to determine the effectiveness of this approach.     

Multiplicity: discussion points from the Statisticians in the Pharmaceutical Industry multiplicity expert group

In May 2012, the Committee of Health and Medicinal Products issued a concept paper on the need to review the points to consider document on multiplicity issues in clinical trials. In preparation for the release of the updated guidance document, Statisticians in the Pharmaceutical Industry held a one‐day expert group meeting in January 2013. Topics debated included multiplicity and the drug development process, the usefulness and limitations of newly developed strategies to deal with multiplicity, multiplicity issues arising from interim decisions and multiregional development, and the need for simultaneous confidence intervals (CIs) corresponding to multiple test procedures. A clear message from the meeting was that multiplicity adjustments need to be considered when the intention is to make a formal statement about efficacy or safety based on hypothesis tests. Statisticians have a key role when designing studies to assess what adjustment really means in the context of the research being conducted. More thought during the planning phase needs to be given to multiplicity adjustments for secondary endpoints given these are increasing in importance in differentiating products in the market place. No consensus was reached on the role of simultaneous CIs in the context of superiority trials. It was argued that unadjusted intervals should be employed as the primary purpose of the intervals is estimation, while the purpose of hypothesis testing is to formally establish an effect. The opposing view was that CIs should correspond to the test decision whenever possible. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Multimodal hub location and hub network design

Through observations from real life hub networks, we introduce the multimodal hub location and hub network design problem. We approach the hub location problem from a network design perspective. In addition to the location and allocation decisions, we also study the decision on how the hub networks with different possible transportation modes must be designed. In this multimodal hub location and hub network design problem, we jointly consider transportation costs and travel times, which are studied separately in most hub location problems presented in the literature. We allow different transportation modes between hubs and different types of service time promises between origin–destination pairs while designing the hub network in the multimodal problem. We first propose a linear mixed integer programming model for this problem and then derive variants of the problem that might arise in certain applications. The models are enhanced via a set of effective valid inequalities and an efficient heuristic is developed. Computational analyses are presented on the various instances from the Turkish network and CAB data set.     

Handheld computers. A feasible alternative to paper forms for field data collection

Recent advances in handheld computer hardware and software may provide alternatives to paper-based data collection methods. The authors compared data collected with paper forms to data collected with handheld computer-based forms in a field observation study of alcohol purchase attempts at 47 community festivals in a large metropolitan area. Agreement between data collected with paper forms and data collected with handheld computers was greater than 95%. Computer-based forms handled branching patterns better and yielded data that were immediately available for analyses. Paper forms handled written comments better. Handheld computers are a feasible alternative to paper forms for field data collection.     

Critical research and entrepreneurship: A cross-disciplinary conceptual typology

Critical perspectives of entrepreneurship have gained increasing traction over the last two decades. The transformative potential of critical research resides in challenging some of entrepreneurship research's epistemological, ontological and theoretical assumptions, with a view to offering a range of alternatives. Critical research in entrepreneurship has remained fragmented, however, due to its heterogeneous theoretical lineages and compartmentalized and niche interests. Addressing this situation, our objective is to intensify the space of critique in entrepreneurship research by offering a theoretically informed typology that delineates different manifestations of ‘criticalness’. Our overarching contribution is to advance a typology distinguishing four ideal types of critical entrepreneurship research based on evaluative emphases (referred to as ‘valence’) and the meta-theoretical assumptions informing its critical operation (called ‘paradigmatic orientation’). By demonstrating the variegated political, ethical and ideological interests and preoccupations that critical studies serve within different management sub-disciplines, the typology provides a conceptual vocabulary for making sense of and synthesizing critical perspectives across scholarly boundaries. Also, it helps to reposition understandings of critique as gestures of negativity by stimulating a greater appreciation of the generative potential of critique and the theoretical and philosophical possibilities that this can bring to our scholarly community.