Early Childhood Parenting Predicts Late Childhood Brain Functional Connectivity During Emotion Perception and Reward Processing

Seventy-nine 3-year olds and their mothers participated in a laboratory-based task to assess maternal hostility. Mothers also reported their behavioral regulation of their child. Seven years later, functional magnetic resonance imaging data were acquired while viewing emotional faces and completing a reward processing task. Maternal hostility predicted more negative amygdala connectivity during exposure to sad relative to neutral faces with frontal and parietal regions as well as more negative left ventral striatal connectivity during monetary gain relative to loss feedback with the right posterior orbital frontal cortex and right inferior frontal gyrus. In contrast, maternal regulation predicted enhanced cingulo-frontal connectivity during monetary gain relative to loss feedback. Results suggest parenting is associated with alterations in emotion and reward processing circuitry 7–8 years later.     

Best of both worlds or refusal to comply? The rich kids of Tehran on Instagram

ABSTRACT

This article offers a textual analysis and semiotic reading of the Rich Kids of Tehran's (RKOT’s) Instagram page. Contributing to scholarship on Iranian youth media practices, this article interrogates how the RKOT navigate urban and rural space to engage in everyday processes of resistance against global and local systemic oppression. Grounding their visual representations on Instagram in historical and cultural context, the author questions how and when quotidian actions are transformed into political transgressions when posted on social media. This article emphasizes the RKOT's agency in shaping their brand by analyzing representations of gender performance, intertextuality, and national identity on Instagram.     

Using the Information Structure Model to Compare Profile-Based Information Filtering Systems

In the IR field it is clear that the value of a system depends on the cost and benefit profiles of its users. It would seem obvious that different users would prefer different systems. In the TREC-9 filtering track, systems are evaluated by a utility measure specifying a given cost and benefit. However, in the study of decision systems it is known that, in some cases, one system may be unconditionally better than another. In this paper we employ a decision theoretic approach to find conditions under which an Information Filtering (IF) system is unconditionally superior to another for all users regardless of their cost and benefit profiles.It is well known that if two IF systems have equal precision the system with better recall will be preferred by all users. Similarly, with equal recall, better precision is universally preferred. We confirm these known results and discover an unexpected dominance relation in which a system with lower recall will be universally preferred provided its precision is sufficiently higher.     

Accurate assessment of the brake torque on a rope-braked cycle ergometer

Sports Engineering - A Monark cycle ergometer is a device globally used in physiological studies to measure the work and energy levels of exercising humans. In this paper a rope-braked cycle...     

Steps Toward More Effective Implementation of the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing

The goal of the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing is to improve testing practices, but their impact on practice appears spotty. Self-regulation clearly fails in some instances. The establishment of an external agency to oversee testing practices and adherence to the Standards would face substantial hurdles, and the ambiguity of many of the Standards would hobble such an organization if one were created. Many of the Standards are general statements of principle, and past controversies make clear that we in the field often disagree about the reasons for them, their applicability to specific cases, and their practical meaning in specific contexts. This paper argues that the field should follow two approaches to lessen this ambiguity. First, using journals, conferences, and other vehicles, we should foster more frequent and more protracted debate about the practical meaning of key Standards, such as 13.6 and 13.7, which mandate that a decision that will have a "major impact" on a student should not be based on a single score. Second, future revisions of the Standards should use concrete examples of testing practices to clarify the meaning of the Standards, much as the legal system uses case law to clarify the meaning of the general principles embodied in statutes .