Young children's explorations of average through informal inferential reasoning

This study situates children's early notions of average within an inquiry classroom to investigate the rich inferential reasoning that young children drew on to make sense of the questions: Is there a typical height for a student in year 3? If so, what is it? Based on their deliberations over several lessons, students' ideas about average and typicality evolved as meaning reasonable, contrary to atypical, most common (value or interval), middle, normative, and representative of the population. The case study reported here documents a new direction for the development of children's conceptions of average in a classroom designed to elicit their informal inferential reasoning about data

The milieu of accountability of early companies in the Qing Dynasty: evidence from the Shànghai-based print media.

This study looks at evidence from the Shànghǎi (Shanghai)-based print media of the accountability of early Chinese companies from the middle period of the Qīng (Qing) Dynasty when the Opium War broke out in 1840 until the imperial monarchy's overthrow in the revolution of 1911. The Qīng Dynasty is known for its technical accounting stagnation. Yet, an examination of the Shànghǎi-based print media shows the existence of a strong sense of public reporting by early companies of the Qīng Dynasty. The findings of this study indicate that the print media displayed a rich milieu of accountability of these early companies by incorporating components of Western and Chinese benchmarks of accountability expressed in commercial metrics and key financial ratios

The uncertainty of psychological and psychiatric diagnoses

Psychiatric and psychological diagnoses are imperfect. Unlike somatic medicine, most psychological and psychiatric phenomena have no gold standard to establish their presence beyond reasonable doubt. Consequently, prevalence estimates are based on the average agreement of imperfect evaluators. Kuchenhoff, Augustin, and Kunz (2012) provided a statistical method for estimating confidence intervals of the prevalence based on the well-known kappa coefficient of interrater agreement. We expand this method and derive confidence intervals for the probability of a diagnosis being true (i.e., the positive predictive value). We illustrate the method and its results with empirical data for a particular type of paraphilia (pedophilia) in sexual offenders. The findings indicate that up to 1 in 3 diagnoses of pedophilia may be wrong. Given the similar rates of prevalence and interrater agreement reported for diagnoses in general psychiatry (such as schizophrenia or affective disorders), the results likely apply to other diagnostic domains as well. (PsycINFO Database Recor

Psychopathic men: Deficits in general mental ability, not emotion perception

Psychopathy is characteristically associated with deficits in emotion perception; however, findings surrounding this deficit are actually quite mixed. This is most likely due to limitations of study methodology, including the use of tasks with unknown or poor psychometric properties, underpowered samples, and a lack of control for third variables. We present a study that addressed these limitations. A sample of men (n = 339) ranging across the psychopathy continuum, recruited in and out of the German prison system, completed three psychometrically validated tasks that assessed the ability to perceive facially expressed emotions. Using latent variable modeling, we show that deficits in emotion perception ability associated with psychopathy are fully attributable to deficits in general mental ability. Modeling relations at the manifest level, separately for inmates and noninmates, support these conclusions. We conclude that emotion general and emotion-specific deficits associated with psychopathy have been exaggerated and instead indicate deficits in general mental ability. (PsycINFO Database Recor