Professional health care providers in today's increasingly global world are more and more required to interact with families whose race, culture, national origin, living circumstances, and family composition are different from their own. This happens almost daily in any public urban clinic in the U.S., where health care providers service…

This dissertation proposes a dynamical computational model of the timecourse of phonological parameter setting. In the model, phonological representations embrace phonetic detail, with phonetic parameters represented as activation fields that evolve over time and determine the specific parameter settings of a planned utterance. Existing models of…

Due to the popularity of Web 2.0 and Social Media in the last decade, the percolation of user generated content (UGC) has rapidly increased. In the financial realm, this results in the emergence of virtual investing communities (VIC) to the investing public. There is an on-going debate among scholars and practitioners on whether such UGC contain…

Hispanics have a disproportionate burden of poorer cancer outcomes. "Promotores" (community health workers) have been shown to be effective in delivering interventions to this population. However, little is known about what aspects of the "promotores" influence the delivery of a cancer education intervention as well what…

Research has consistently shown that traditional admission measures--SAT® scores and high school grade point average (HSGPA)--are valid predictors of early college performance such as first-year grades; however, their usefulness to predict later college outcomes has been questioned, especially for the SAT. This study builds on previous research…

This brief examines high school counselor staffing counts relative to four-year college enrollment rates. Recent evidence from a national survey of counselors provides support for claims by counselors and school administrators that current counselor staffing levels are suboptimal. An additional high school counselor is predicted to induce a 10…

Women are underrepresented in the most senior level administrative positions in intercollegiate athletics. This qualitative study is an analysis of the professional lives of nine women who hold Senior Associate AD positions in Division I intercollegiate athletics. They were interviewed about their career experiences and their intentions to pursue…

The current study examined the direction of the association between children's attachment security and empathic responding. At 42 and 48 months of age, 69 children's empathic concern was observed, and mothers reported the children's attachment. Results indicated that attachment at 42 months predicted empathic concern at 48 months even after…

Although scholars from various fields now argue that emotion is a critical resource for individuals as they learn and make sense of information, the topic is only just emerging as a sustained area of emphasis for instructional communication scholars. Using a sample of 752 students from three universities, we tested a predictive model exploring how…

Personality is the strongest and most consistent cross-sectional predictor of high subjective well-being. Less predictive economic factors, such as higher income or improved job status, are often the focus of applied subjective well-being research due to a perception that they can change whereas personality cannot. As such there has been limited…

This study analyzes the contribution of peer attachment in predicting active coping and self-esteem in a sample of 109 institutionalized adolescents. It also explores the mediating role of social skills in the association between peer attachment, coping, and self-esteem. Structural equation modeling identified a model able to predict a positive…

Conventional pundits, pollsters, and forecasters are focused on whether the economy will improve sufficiently in 2012 for President Barack Obama to gain reelection. The Keys to the White House, a prediction system that the author developed in collaboration with Vladimir Keilis-Borok, founder of the International Institute of Earthquake Prediction…

Many readers may recall that this author wrote an open letter to President Obama in 2010 where he took issue with the emphasis on math and science education resulting in the marginalization of social studies and citizenship. In this column, he has selected and written about websites that focus on the election process. The author hopes this will…

With a push for evidence-based practice in psychology (EBPP), dissemination to community mental health care providers has been occurring. Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) is one type of EBPP that is currently being trained across the United States and internationally; however, there is little research reporting on these efforts and no…

As shown by the neuropsychological educational approach to the cognitive remediation model, first-person-shooter video game play eliminates gender-related deficits in spatial rotation. Spatial rotation increases academic success and decreases social and economic disparities. Per the general aggression model, first-person-shooter video game play…