Binding ties: Closeness and conflict in adult children's caregiving relationships.

The authors used a path model to test the hypothesis that emotional closeness and conflict between adult–child caregivers (N?=?90) and their impaired parents mediated the impact of the parents' functional and cognitive impairment on the caregivers' subjective stress, subjective effectiveness, and depression. Closeness mediated the relationship between cognitive impairment and both stress and effectiveness, whereas conflict mediated cognitive impairment for all 3 outcomes and generally accounted for more variance. There was limited evidence that functional impairment was mediated by the quality of the relationship. Results highlight the importance of both positive and negative ties as intervening mechanisms influencing caregivers' well-being, especially in the presence of cognitive dysfunction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Impairment in category fluency in ischemic vascular dementia.

The underlying mechanisms for impaired output on letter (F, A, and S) and category (e.g., animal) word list generation (WLG) tasks in subcortical ischemic vascular dementia (IVD) were investigated. Normal control (NC) and Alzheimer's disease (AD) participants were also studied. IVD and NC participants performed better on category than letter WLG tasks, whereas the opposite was observed among AD participants. IVD participants produced fewer responses than AD participants on letter WLG tasks, but there was no difference between AD and IVD participants on the "animal" WLG task. AD participants scored lower than IVD and NC participants on animal WLG indexes measuring semantic knowledge. There were few differences between IVD and NC participants. The reduced output on the animal WLG task for IVD participants is consistent with search-retrieval deficits. The reduced output of AD participants may be caused by degraded semantic knowledge. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The complexities of eliciting and assessing children's statements.

The authors agree with the main elements of M. Bruck and S. J. Ceci's (see record 1996-09956-001) amicus curiae brief for the case of State v. Michaels, but they believe that 4 specific aspects of child sexual abuse investigations deserve a more constructive emphasis. Research has tended to concentrate on the suggestibility of children and neglected other topics that may be of great utility to those who investigate suspected cases of child sexual abuse. More attention should have been paid in the brief to the complexities of assessment and the special characteristics of the Wee Care case. Too much emphasis has been placed on children and not nearly enough attention on remedial actions to minimize the problems associated with suggestion. Finally, research shows that it may be possible to develop reliable and valid techniques to assess child sexual abuse allegations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Remediation revisited.

This article replies to comments by J. C. Gonsiorek (see record 84-33291), P. Orr (see record 84-33300), and L. S. Brown (see record 84-33284 ) on M.J. Layman and J.R. McNamara's (see record 84-33293) work on remediation and ethics violations. The authors acknowledge various distinctions they have introduced but continue to argue that sexual violations are outstandingly egregious. They agree that making amends is important but wonder about the practicalities of working this into rehabilitation. Lack of empirical knowledge about what is prescribed for remediation is reemphasized. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Psychology is From Mars, Sexology is From Venus: Can They Meet on Earth?

Mainstream psychologists have not pursued sexology with the enthusiasm aimed at other areas of psychological research. Ambivalence is evident in the ideological marginalization of sexology by mainstream psychology. The authors argue that scientific conflicts between the disciplines in part reflect divergent interpretations of how each discipline approaches the scientific method. By aligning psychology with positivism and sexology with postpositivism, a discussion of cultural, scientific, and normative conflicts between the two disciplines is presented as evidence for these differences in scientific ideology. To address these conflicts, future directions for scientific progress are proposed for sexology and psychology. Specifically, by capitalizing on the strengths of each discipline, collaboration can lead to the validation of sexology as a science and the enhancement of both disciplines. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Framing discrimination: Effects of inclusion versus exclusion mind-sets on stereotypic judgments.

Three studies investigated how inclusion versus exclusion strategies differentially lead to stereotypic decisions. In inclusion strategies, suitable targets are selected from a list of candidates, whereas in exclusion strategies, unsuitable candidates are eliminated. Across 2 separate target domains (Study 1: male and female politicians; Studies 2 and 3: African American and European American basketball players), exclusion strategies, as compared with inclusion strategies, elicited higher levels of both sensitivity stereotyping (i.e., greater difficulty distinguishing among members of stereotyped groups) and criterion stereotyping (i.e., setting different decision thresholds for judging members of different groups; see M. R. Banaji & A. G. Greenwald, 1995). Thus, the strategy used during decision making can influence the final decision via 2 theoretically distinct stereotyping mechanisms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Patterns of Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms in Parents of Childhood Cancer Survivors.

Posttraumatic stress (PTS) symptoms have been reported in mothers and fathers of childhood cancer survivors; however, little is known about patterns of PTS in these families. Cluster analysis was applied to the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Reaction Index scores of 98 couples parenting adolescent childhood cancer survivors to describe patterns of PTS in families, yielding the following 5 clusters: Minimal PTS, Mothers Elevated, Disengaged, Fathers Elevated, and Elevated PTS. The clusters were validated using data from a structured psychiatric interview, an additional self-report measure of PTS, and an index of family functioning. These clinically meaningful patterns reveal that a majority of families had at least one parent with moderate to severe PTS, which supports development of family-based interventions for this population. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Air Regulation in 2017: The Trump Administration Begins

In the world of air regulations, the year 2016 will be remembered not for any major action by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in developing, revising, or defending its rules, but for the result of the November 8 presidential election that took most of the United States, if not the world, by surprise. Donald Trump's election and the transition to a Republican administration will undoubtedly be the primary influence (and major question mark) in the air quality regulation landscape in 2017. As Trump prepares to take office, speculation is rampant about whether the promises he made on the campaign trail will translate into action. Chief among those promises was a vow to eliminate or roll back efforts aimed at regulating climate change, including the repeal of the EPA's Clean Power Plan (CPP) and withdrawal from the Paris climate change accord.     

A comparative study of GPU programming models and architectures using neural networks

Recently, General Purpose Graphical Processing Units (GP-GPUs) have been identified as an intriguing technology to accelerate numerous data-parallel algorithms. Several GPU architectures and programming models are beginning to emerge and establish their niche in the High-Performance Computing (HPC) community. New massively parallel architectures such as the Nvidia??s Fermi and AMD/ATi??s Radeon pack tremendous computing power in their large number of multiprocessors. Their performance is unleashed using one of the two GP-GPU programming models: Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) and Open Computing Language (OpenCL). Both of them offer constructs and features that have direct bearing on the application runtime performance. In this paper, we compare the two GP-GPU architectures and the two programming models using a two-level character recognition network. The two-level network is developed using four different Spiking Neural Network (SNN) models, each with different ratios of computation-to-communication requirements. To compare the architectures, we have chosen the two extremes of the SNN models for implementation of the aforementioned two-level network. An architectural performance comparison of the SNN application running on Nvidia??s Fermi and AMD/ATi??s Radeon is done using the OpenCL programming model exhausting all of the optimization strategies plausible for the two architectures. To compare the programming models, we implement the two-level network on Nvidia??s Tesla C2050 based on the Fermi architecture. We present a hierarchy of implementations, where we successively add optimization techniques associated with the two programming models. We then compare the two programming models at these different levels of implementation and also present the effect of the network size (problem size) on the performance. We report significant application speed-up, as high as 1095× for the most computation intensive SNN neuron model, against a serial implementation on the Intel Core 2 Quad host. A comprehensive study presented in this paper establishes connections between programming models, architectures and applications.