This report examines cross-cultural differences in response style regarding the use of rating scales Subjects were high school students 944 from Sendai (Japan), 1,357 from Taipei (Taiwan), 687 from Edmonton and Calgary (Canada), and 2,174 from the Minneapolis metropolitan area and Fairfax County, Virginia Responses to fifty-seven 7-point Likert-type scales were analyzed The Japanese and Chinese students were more likely than the two North American groups to use the midpoint on the scales, the U S subjects were more likely than the other three groups to use the extreme values Within each cultural group, endorsement of individualism was positively related to the use of extreme values and negatively related to the use of the midpoint These small, albeit statistically significant, differences in response styles generally did not alter cross-cultural comparisons of item means

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This study examined perceived parent-adolescent relationships and depressed mood among 173 early adolescents and 297 college students, all of European or Asian American background. Ethnic differences in depressed mood, not evident in the early adolescent sample, emerged in the college sample, with Asian Americans reporting more symptoms. Ethnic differences in depressed mood were reduced to nonsignificance when quality of parent-adolescent relationships was statistically controlled. The magnitude of associations between measures of parent-adolescent relationships and depressed mood was strikingly similar for European and Asian Americans at the same phase of adolescence. As anticipated, perceived parent-adolescent relationships accounted for more of the variance in depressed mood in early adolescence than in late adolescence: 44% to 51% for the junior high samples and about 10% for the college samples.Depressed mood has been described as the key affective disturbance of normal adolescence (Weiner, 1980). Indeed, some evidence suggests that depressed mood is more common in this pivotal life period than in either childhood or adulthood (Radloff, 1991;Steinberg, 1993), and developmental research has contributed important insights into those factors associated with dysphoria during the adolescent years. Three important and sometimes intersecting lines of research have examined the effects of pubertal changes, other stressful life events, and family relationships on adolescents' experience of depressed mood.Researchers have shown, for example, that certain hormonal changes are linked with increases in depressed mood (e.g., Susman, Dorn, & Chrousos, 1991). Early pubertal onset-an event of biological, psychological, and social significance-has been implicated in girls' depressed mood, and pubertal onset accompanied by other stressors, such as school changes, has been related to higher levels of depressive symptomatology in both sexes (e.g., Petersen, Sarigiani, & Kennedy, 1991). Independent of pubertal events, adolescents who experience a greater number of stressful life events report more depressed mood-a relationship that is moderated by individual differences in reactivity to stressors (e.g., Compas, 1987;Ge, Lorenz, Conger, Elder, & Simons, 1994). These and other researchers also have uncov-

Repeated study improves memory, but the underlying neural mechanisms of this improvement are not well understood. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging and representational similarity analysis of brain activity, we found that, compared with forgotten items, subsequently remembered faces and words showed greater similarity in neural activation across multiple study in many brain regions, including (but not limited to) the regions whose mean activities were correlated with subsequent memory. This result addresses a longstanding debate in the study of memory by showing that successful episodic memory encoding occurs when the same neural representations are more precisely reactivated across study episodes, rather than when patterns of activation are more variable across time.Repeated study of the same materials can significantly strengthen memory representations and make them more resistant to forgetting (1), but not all repetitions are equal. One fundamental issue is how multiple study episodes add up to improve later memory. A widely accepted theory, often referred to as the encoding variability hypothesis (2-5), proposes that each study episode is encoded differently as a result of contextual drift with time, and that greater encoding variability leads to better memory. Alternatively, it has been claimed that each subsequent study episode serves as a retrieval cue to reactivate and strengthen the memory representation of the information stored during earlier study episodes (6). Evidence for this reactivation view comes from the finding in an AB-AC paradigm in which the presence of A during AC study reinstated AB and therefore also improved memory for B (7), an effect related to activity in the posterior medial temporal lobe (8). However, previous work has not yet established a link between the nature of neural representations during encoding and later memory.

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Anecdotal evidence suggests an increase in entitled attitudes and behaviors of youth in school and college settings. Using a newly developed scale to assess ''academic entitlement'' (AE), a construct that includes expectations of high grades for modest effort and demanding attitudes towards teachers, this research is the first to investigate the phenomenon systematically. In two separate samples of ethnically diverse college students comprised largely of East and Southeast Asian American, followed by Caucasians, Latinos, and other groups (total N = 839, age range 18-25 years), we examined the personality, parenting, and motivational correlates of AE. AE was most strongly related to exploitive attitudes towards others and moderately related to an overall sense of entitlement and to narcissism. Students who reported more academically entitled attitudes perceived their parents as exerting achievement pressure marked by social comparison with other youth and materially rewarding good grades, scored higher than their peers in achievement anxiety and extrinsic motivation, and engaged in more academic dishonesty. AE was not significantly associated with GPA.

Particles beyond the Standard Model (SM) can generically have lifetimes that are long compared to SM particles at the weak scale. When produced at experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, these long-lived particles (LLPs) can decay far from the interaction vertex of the primary proton–proton collision. Such LLP signatures are distinct from those of promptly decaying particles that are targeted by the majority of searches for new physics at the LHC, often requiring customized techniques to identify, for example, significantly displaced decay vertices, tracks with atypical properties, and short track segments. Given their non-standard nature, a comprehensive overview of LLP signatures at the LHC is beneficial to ensure that possible avenues of the discovery of new physics are not overlooked. Here we report on the joint work of a community of theorists and experimentalists with the ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb experiments—as well as those working on dedicated experiments such as MoEDAL, milliQan, MATHUSLA, CODEX-b, and FASER—to survey the current state of LLP searches at the LHC, and to chart a path for the development of LLP searches into the future, both in the upcoming Run 3 and at the high-luminosity LHC. The work is organized around the current and future potential capabilities of LHC experiments to generally discover new LLPs, and takes a signature-based approach to surveying classes of models that give rise to LLPs rather than emphasizing any particular theory motivation. We develop a set of simplified models; assess the coverage of current searches; document known, often unexpected backgrounds; explore the capabilities of proposed detector upgrades; provide recommendations for the presentation of search results; and look towards the newest frontiers, namely high-multiplicity ‘dark showers’, highlighting opportunities for expanding the LHC reach for these signals.

We propose a class of parametric smooth functions that approximate the fundamental plus function, (x) + =maxf0; xg, by twice integrating a probability density function. This leads to classes of smooth parametric nonlinear equation approximations of nonlinear and mixed complementarity problems (NCPs and MCPs). For any solvable NCP or MCP, existence of an arbitrarily accurate solution to the smooth nonlinear equation as well as the NCP or MCP, is established for su ciently large value of a smoothing parameter . Newton-based algorithms are proposed for the smooth problem. For strongly monotone NCPs, global convergence and local quadratic convergence are established. For solvable monotone NCPs, each accumulation point of the proposed algorithms solves the smooth problem. Exact solutions of our smooth nonlinear equation for various values of the parameter , generate an interior path, which is di erent from the central path for interior point method. Computational results for 52 test problems compare favorably with those for another Newton-based method.