Objective: The authors sought to describe the 2009-2010 seasonal influenza vaccine coverage of college students. Participants: A total of 4,090 college students from 8 North Carolina universities participated in a confidential, Web-based survey in October-November 2009. Methods: Associations between self-reported 2009-2010 seasonal influenza…

Why do people perseverate, repeating prior behaviours that are no longer appropriate? Many accounts point to isolated deficits in processes such as inhibition or attention. We instead posit a fundamental difference in rule representations: flexible switchers use active representations that rely on later-developing prefrontal cortical areas and are…

In this article, the author identifies six "traps" of institutional research. These traps are: (1) the seductive power of scenarios; (2) that change is the solution to everything; (3) "benchmarking for comfort"; (4) fixation on Research Assessment Exercise (RAE); (5) reputation over quality; and (6) dealing with the counter-intuitive. The author…

The author investigated the contribution of perfectionism to life satisfaction among Turkish adolescents. The analyses revealed that high standards and orderliness/organization were positive predictors of life satisfaction, whereas the discrepancy between one's standards and one's actual performance was a negative predictor of life satisfaction.…

Although violent offenders are widely considered to be difficult to engage in therapeutic change, few methods of assessing treatment readiness currently exist. In this article the validation of a brief self-report measure designed to assess treatment readiness in offenders who have been referred to violent offender treatment programs is described.…

Most research on the dose-effect model of change has combined data across patients who vary in their total dose of treatment and has implicitly assumed that the rate of change during therapy is constant across doses. In contrast, the good-enough level model predicts that rate of change will be related to total dose of therapy. In this study, the…

In three experiments, preschoolers' ability to predict their picture recall was examined. Children studied 10 pictures, predicted how many they would recall, and then attempted to recall them. This study-prediction-recall trial was repeated multiple times with new pictures on each trial. In Experiment 1, children were overconfident on the initial…

People often perseverate, repeating outdated behaviors despite correctly answering questions about rules they should be following. Children who perseverate are slower to respond to such questions than children who successfully switch to new rules, even after controlling for age and processing speed. Thus, switchers may have stronger working memory…

The present studies compare young children's explanations and predictions for the biological phenomenon of contamination. In Study 1, 36 preschoolers and 24 adults heard vignettes concerning contamination, and were asked either to make a prediction or to provide an explanation. Even 3-year-olds readily supplied contamination-based explanations,…

Rapid changes in mobile techniques have always been evolutionary, and the deployment of 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks will be the same. It will be another transition from Third Generation (3G) to Fourth Generation (4G) over a period of several years, as is the case still with the transition from Second Generation (2G) to 3G. As a result,…

This dissertation contains several projects, each addressing different questions with different techniques. In chapter 1, I argue that they are unified thematically by their goal of "scaling up psycholinguistics"; they are all aimed at analyzing large data-sets using tools that reveal patterns to propose and test mechanism-neutral hypotheses about…

This paper argues for a renewed focus on statistical reasoning in the elementary school years, with opportunities for children to engage in data modeling. Data modeling involves investigations of meaningful phenomena, deciding what is worthy of attention, and then progressing to organizing, structuring, visualizing, and representing data. Reported…

Navigating the world of government relations and public policy can be a little like predicting the weather. One can't always be sure what's in store or how it will affect him/her down the road. But there are common patterns and a few basic steps that can help one best prepare for a change in the forecast. Though the forecast is uncertain, early…

In two previous studies on general and violent recidivism (Walters & Heilbrun, 2010; Walters, Knight, Grann, & Dahle, 2008), the summed composite antisocial facet of the Psychopathy Checklist displayed incremental validity relative to the other 3 facets (interpersonal, affective, lifestyle), whereas the other 3 facets generally failed to…

Increased intraindividual variability in response time (RTSD) has been observed reliably in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and has often been used as a measure of inattention. RTSD is assumed to reflect attentional lapses and distractibility, though evidence for the validity of this connection is lacking. We assessed whether RTSD…