A fundamental assumption of the causal graphical model framework is the Markov assumption, which posits that learners can discriminate between two events that are dependent because of a direct causal relation between them and two events that are independent conditional on the value of another event(s). Sobel and Kirkham (2006) demonstrated that 8-month-old infants registered conditional indepen...

BACKGROUND Organizations in the health care sector are undergoing extensive structural reforms. To face these challenges, management initiatives that foster employees' commitment to and support for organizational change are needed in hospitals. PURPOSES In literature, a charismatic leadership style has proved to be especially helpful in times of crisis and change as well as an essential antec...

What makes one person more intellectually able than another? Can the entire distribution of human intelligence be accounted for by just one general factor? Is intelligence supported by a single neural system? Here, we provide a perspective on human intelligence that takes into account how general abilities or "factors" reflect the functional organization of the brain. By comparing factor models...

Social comparison, in which people evaluate their opinions and abilities by comparing them with the opinions and abilities of others, is a central feature of human social life. Previous work has highlighted the importance of social comparison in reward processing. However, the time-course of the social comparison effect in outcome evaluation remains largely unknown. The purpose of this study wa...

To further knowledge concerning the nature and nurture of intelligence, we scrutinized how heritability coefficients vary across specific cognitive abilities both theoretically and empirically. Data from 23 twin studies (combined N = 7,852) showed that (a) in adult samples, culture-loaded subtests tend to demonstrate greater heritability coefficients than do culture-reduced subtests; and (b) in...

Universal Design is an approach to design that includes all abilities from the outset. Whether this approach can achieve social inclusion and equality is analysed in this research paper. An insight into disabilities is provided and delivers a fundamental understanding of how to cater for their needs. In the hope to create a meaningful discourse from this vast array of needs visual impairment is...

Using data from an Italian University we relate student evaluations of teaching quality to physical attractiveness of instructors, controlling for a number of teachers' and courses' characteristics. We first show that the beauty of teachers strongly affects teaching evaluations. To investigate whether the impact is due to productivity or discrimination, that is, if the better evaluations obtain...

Recent studies have demonstrated infants' pragmatic abilities for resolving the referential ambiguity of non-verbal communicative gestures, and for inferring the intended meaning of a communicator's utterances. These abilities are difficult to reconcile with the view that it is not until around 4 years that children can reason about the internal mental states of others. In the current study, we...

In this work we present a new method for genetic analysis of twin data which is based on generalized estimating equations and allows for analysis of various response types (e.g., continuous, binary, counts) combined with estimation of residual correlations. The new approach allows for control of covariates of any kind (e.g., continuous, counts) by modeling the dependence of mean and variance on...