A new measure for determining children's subjective organization of speech

A new technique for determining children's subjective organization of speech is described. The technique consists of teaching a child a sentence and then repeatedly (1) reading the sentence up to a selected point, (2) sounding a tone, and (3) having the child supply the next word. The time from the tone to the onset of the child's voice is the dependent variable. In the first study 6- and 8-year-old children memorized the following sentence: “John likes to feed the little puppies in the barn.” Their response times suggested that the dominant segmentation pattern consisted of four phrases: a subject phrase, a verb phrase, an object phrase and a modifier phrase. Within each phrase differences between reaction times were on the order of 30 msec. Across phrases they were on the order of 120 msec. The same trend emerged for subsamples of the children with various short-term memory sizes, and for adults. It also appeared for subsamples of the total scores (e.g., first six trials and last six trials). In order to provide further evidence of the technique's validity, different sentences of the same general type were presented to children with short-term memory spans of either 3, 4, or 5. As predicted, it was found that when children's spans corresponded to the number of hypothesized chunks (i.e., 4), they could repeat the sentences verbatim on the first exposure. They could not do so, however, when their spans were lower than that value or when the number of phrases was increased. It was concluded that the new technique is a promising one for assessing young children's patterns of speech segmentation.     

When just-world beliefs promote and when they inhibit forgiveness

The present study provides further evidence that justice and forgiveness are not necessarily competitive responses. Among 157 undergraduates instructed to recall either serious or benign transgressions, just-world beliefs for the self (BJW-self) was associated with forgiveness as inhibition of negative responding but not forgiveness as positive responding. Each of these relations was significantly moderated by transgression severity: the more benign the transgression, the stronger the relationship. Just-world beliefs for others (BJW-others) was negatively associated with inhibition of negative responding and unrelated to positive responding. These relations held over and above well-established predictors of transgression-specific forgiveness (relationship closeness and post-transgression offender effort), and an individual difference variable, justice sensitivity. In practical terms, BJW-self may enable people to better deal with minor stressors. An important theoretical implication is that modelling the relationship between just-world beliefs and forgiveness requires a bidimensional conception of both constructs.     

Selecting explanations from causal chains: Do statistical principles explain preferences for voluntary causes?

We investigate whether people prefer voluntary causes to physical causes in unfolding causal chains and whether statistical (covariation, sufficiency) principles can predict how people select explanations. Experiment 1 shows that while people tend to prefer a proximal (more recent) cause in chains of unfolding physical events, causality is traced through the proximal cause to an underlying distal (less recent) cause when that cause is a human action. Experiment 2 shows that causal preference is more strongly correlated with judgements of sufficiency and conditionalised sufficiency than with covariation or conditionalised covariation. In addition, sufficiency judgements are partial mediators of the effect of type of distal cause (voluntary or physical) on causal preference. The preference for voluntary causes to physical causes corroborates findings from social psychology, cognitive neuroscience and jurisprudence that emphasise the primacy of intentions in causal attribution processes. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Effects of 7.5% CO2 inhalation on allocation of spatial attention to facial cues of emotional expression

Increased vigilance to threat-related stimuli is thought to be a core cognitive feature of anxiety. We sought to investigate the cognitive impact of experimentally induced anxiety, by means of a 7.5% CO₂ challenge, which acts as an unconditioned anxiogenic stimulus, on attentional bias for positive and negative facial cues of emotional expression in the dot-probe task. In two experiments we found robust physiological and subjective effects of the CO₂ inhalation consistent with the claim that the procedure reliably induces anxiety. Data from the dot-probe task demonstrated an attentional bias to emotional facial expressions compared with neutral faces regardless of valence (happy, angry, and fearful). These attentional effects, however, were entirely inconsistent in terms of their relationship with induced anxiety. We conclude that the previously reported poor reliability of this task is the most parsimonious explanation for our conflicting findings and that future research should develop a more reliable paradigm for measuring attentional bias in this field.     

The Multiculturally Responsive Versus the Multiculturally Reactive: A Study of Perceptions of Counselor Trainees

Findings suggest that the completion of or exposure to multicultural counseling coursework or literature does not necessarily indicate an acceptance of or valuing of multicultural counseling literature. Survey results of counselor trainees' observations and perceptions of peers whose perspectives on diversity differ are presented and discussed. Implications for training and supervision are addressed.     

Someone is pulling the strings: hypersensitive agency detection and belief in conspiracy theories

We hypothesised that belief in conspiracy theories would be predicted by the general tendency to attribute agency and intentionality where it is unlikely to exist. We further hypothesised that this tendency would explain the relationship between education level and belief in conspiracy theories, where lower levels of education have been found to be associated with higher conspiracy belief. In Study 1 (N = 202) participants were more likely to agree with a range of conspiracy theories if they also tended to attribute intentionality and agency to inanimate objects. As predicted, this relationship accounted for the link between education level and belief in conspiracy theories. We replicated this finding in Study 2 (N = 330), whilst taking into account beliefs in paranormal phenomena. These results suggest that education may undermine the reasoning processes and assumptions that are reflected in conspiracy belief.     

Benevolent Sexism, Perceived Health Risks, and the Inclination to Restrict Pregnant Women��s Freedoms

The present study investigated the role of sexist ideology in perceptions of health risks during pregnancy and willingness to intervene on pregnant women??s behavior. Initially, 160 female psychology undergraduates in the South East of England completed the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (Glick and Fiske 1996). Two months later, in an apparently unrelated study, they rated the safety of 45 behaviours during pregnancy (e.g., drinking alcohol, exercising, drinking tap water, and oral sex), and indicated their willingness to restrict pregnant women??s choices (e.g., by refusing to serve soft cheese or alcohol). As predicted, benevolent (but not hostile) sexism was related to willingness to restrict pregnant women??s choices. This effect was partially mediated by the perception that various behaviors are unsafe during pregnancy.