Cognitive Sciences Research: More Than Thinking About Drug Abuse

On May 23, 1997, the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the American Psychological Society co-sponsored a conference titled "Cognitive Sciences Research: More Than Thinking About Drug Abuse." The conference highlighted important lines of research, both within and outside of drug abuse, that may elucidate the relationships between substance abuse and cognitive processes. This Special Section of Psychological Science presents a compilation of articles from that conference by scientists who are working in the forefront of this exciting new research area. The research questions posed by these articles take the following forms: What are the cognitive and developmental effects (i.e., the consequences) of substance abuse? What are the antecedents or precursors of drug use that render persons vulnerable to taking drugs? How do the effects of drugs, in turn, become antecedents for changes in perception, behavior, and cognition that further enhance vulnerability to drugs?     

Predictors of Managerial Performance: More Than Cognitive Ability

This study investigated the discriminant validity of cognitive ability, managerial potential, fear of negative evaluation, interaction anxiousness, and audience anxiousness as predictors of managerial performance. As hypothesized cognitive ability significantly predicted only thinking and knowledge criteria. However, managerial potential was significantly correlated with all the criteria. As predicted, fear of negative evaluation predicted thinking and knowledge criteria, interaction anxiousness, and audience anxiousness. In turn, as predicted, interaction anxiousness significantly predicted interpersonal behavior and audience anxiousness significantly predicted communication behavior. Managerial potential and fear of negative evaluation were the only two predictors that were significantly correlated with overall performance.     

The New Job Outlook: Preparing for the Years Ahead

In this article, the author deals with the employment and career opportunities that will prevail from the present to the year 2000, with emphasis on the projected labor shortage.     

Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing: More Than a Symbolic Exercise

The 1985 edition of the American Psychological Association's Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing has greatly expanded its coverage of the testing of special populations including handicapped students. The enforcement of the Standards depends upon professionals themselves. Yet, recent surveys of practitioners' knowledge of basic testing and measurement concepts raise serious questions about the extent to which they are prepared to administer and interpret not only standard versions of tests but also modified ones. Extensive in-service training to upgrade skills is recommended.     

More Than Attendance: The Importance of After-School Program Quality

A central theme of the articles featured in this issue is the need to improve the quality of after-school programs. In this commentary, we discuss why student engagement, program characteristics and implementation, staff training, and citywide policy are key considerations in the effort to define and achieve high quality programs for youth.     

Beauty is More Than Skin Deep: Components of Attractiveness

This study examined the complex interrelationships among various static and dynamic components of physical attractiveness and their contributions to overall ratings of attractiveness and to the favorability of initial impressions. Two separate groups of undergraduate students completed a self-report measure of social and communication skills and were videotaped and photographed during initial encounters in a laboratory setting. The videotape segment or photographs were then shown to independent groups of judges who made multiple ratings of subjects' physical attractiveness, initial likability, and attractiveness as a dating partner. A series of structural equation models were fitted to the data. The model that provided the best fit to the data indicated that facial beauty and dynamic components of attractiveness were the most important contributors to overall evaluations of attractiveness, and that overall attractiveness in turn affected the positivity of initial impressions and desirability as a potential dating partner.     

Arendt and Augustine: More Than One Kind of Love

Although Hannah Arendt is not usually read as a philosopher of religion, her political philosophy is noticeably filled with references to religious figures and thinkers, including Jesus of Nazareth, Augustine and Duns Scotus. Also notable is the implicit centrality in her thought of amor mundi, or love of the world. The difficulty is that although she spoke to her students about it, she rarely wrote about amor mundi. In this article, I seek to provide a plausible explanation of the meaning of amor mundi in Arendt’s thought, drawing in particular upon the influence of Augustine on Arendt’s unique development of the ethical and political principle of love for the world. Specifically, through a close reading of Arendt’s doctoral dissertation, Love and Saint Augustine, I identify the relationship between Augustine’s conception of cupiditas and Arendt’s conception of amor mundi.     

More Than A Feeling: The Communicative Function of Regret

Rüdiger Bittner argues that regret is not useful and so it is always unreasonable to feel and express it. In this paper, I argue that regret is often reasonable because regret has a communicative function: it communicates where we stand with respect to things we have done and outcomes that we have caused. So, I not only argue that Bittner’s argument is unsuccessful, I also shed light on the nature and purpose of regret.     

Colloquy: Do Interacting Groups Perform Better Than Aggregates of Individuals?

Recent examples of research about group processes melding individual‐cognitive and social communicative factors have resulted in the application of concepts relevant to individual cognition to groups as a whole. Although based on a helpful metaphor, the practice risks resurrecting discredited “group mind” concepts. One particular concept, “transactive memory system,” implies that a group can “know” all of the knowledge of its individual members. Several studies showing that groups remember more information than do its individual members appear on their face to support this notion. However, a reanalysis of the results of these studies using Lorge‐Solomon (1955) Model B reveals that the groups were not successful at pooling their members' knowledge. This conclusion implies that group interaction does not lead to efficient group information exchange.     

More Than Afterthoughts and Details: Maintenance and Booster Effects as Critical Elements of Intervention Research

The set of studies in this special section bring into relief the importance of due attention to maintenance effects and use of boosters as critical components of intervention planning and evaluation, requiring theoretical and analytic forethought and direction. While some trends can be identified across these included reports and the other few studies of boosters in child psychopathology intervention, the main implication of work to date is to highlight the need to consider maintenance and booster effects analyses as more than afterthoughts of technical interest primarily. In addition, this collection of studies includes treatment and prevention efforts focused on a shared topic, which is rare in child psychopathology topical collections. This juxtaposition helps illuminate some of the many considerations that could influence how maintenance effects and booster contributions might be tested. It is hoped that further work will occur that builds on these exemplary efforts.     

Multifaceted Personality Predictors of Workplace Safety Performance: More Than Conscientiousness

This article concerns individual differences in workplace safety behavior. We identify six performance dimensions related to overall safety performance, which in turn, leads to occupational accidents and injuries. We define these dimensions and develop personality-based safety scales to predict them by combining facets of Five-Factor Model scales. Next, we validate these safety scales by aggregating results from independent criterion-related studies and show that a composite safety scale is more predictive of overall safety performance than individual Five-Factor Model scales. Also, results show that safety scales predict accidents and injuries, but this relationship is mediated by safety performance. We consider implications of using individual differences to study links between personality, safety performance, and accidents and injuries in selection, training, and organizational safety culture.     

More Than Just IQ: School Achievement Is Predicted by Self-Perceived Abilities—But for Genetic Rather Than Environmental Reasons

ABSTRACT— Evidence suggests that children's self-perceptions of their abilities predict their school achievement even after one accounts for their tested cognitive ability (IQ). However, the roles of nature and nurture in the association between school achievement and self-perceived abilities (SPAs), independent of IQ, is unknown. Here we reveal that there are substantial genetic influences on SPAs and that there is genetic covariance between SPAs and achievement independent of IQ. Although it has been assumed that the origins of SPAs are environmental, this first genetic analysis of SPAs yielded a heritability of 51% in a sample of 3,785 pairs of twins, whereas shared environment accounted for only 2% of the variance in SPAs. Moreover, multivariate genetic analyses indicated that SPAs predict school achievement independently of IQ for genetic rather than environmental reasons. It should therefore be possible to identify "SPA genes" that predict school achievement independently of "IQ genes."     

新中国六十年民族伦理学研究纵论

民族伦理学日益成为民族学和伦理学研究中的一个重要分支领域。对新中国成立后民族伦理学研究的发展历程、民族伦理学研究成果、民族伦理学研究的现状与特点等进行概述,既是对我国民族伦理学研究状况60年来的回顾和总结,又对这一领域的进一步深入研究提出了合理化建议。当前,加强对民族伦理学的研究,相信对我国作为一个统一的多民族国家,特别是对我国少数民族和民族地区的精神文明建设必将起到积极的推动作用。     

Counteracting Media's Thin-Body Ideal for Adolescent Girls: Informing Is More Effective Than Warning

The present study investigated whether information or warnings about depictions of the thin-body ideal in mass media are effective in counteracting media-induced negative body perceptions of adolescent girls. Based on counter-advertising and reactance theories, our hypotheses were tested in a 3 (weight labels: information vs. warning vs. no label) × 2 (media models' body shape: thin vs. normal weight) × 2 (self-esteem: lower vs. higher) design (N = 178). Body dissatisfaction, objectified body consciousness, and body comparison with media models served as dependent variables. Pretested media models were systematically combined with various textual weight labels and presented on the front page of a magazine targeted toward girls. The results indicated that a simple information label that provided the weight status of thin media models induced less negative body perceptions in adolescent girls when compared with the use of warning labels or images only. Especially, girls with lower self-esteem then exhibited lower levels of body dissatisfaction and objectified body consciousness. When compared with exposure to images only, the warning labels had little effect on body perceptions by adolescent girls. Thus, informing is more effective than warning in counteracting the undesired effects of the thin-body ideal promoted by the media.     

More Spousal Support for Men Than for Women: A Comparison of Sources and Types of Support

Types and sources of received support among 902 Costa Rican employees were examined; gender and age differences as well as associations with mental health were considered. Four types of support (advice giving, assistance, reassurance, and empathic listening) were measured as received from four sources, namely friends, family, spouses, and groups/organizations. Support types were not very distinct, therefore we aggregated sum scores across these variables. In contrast, sources were discriminant and had to be analyzed separately. An interaction between gender and age pointed to a larger discrepancy of received spousal support in middle-aged men and women than in younger ones. The older the women were, the less support they received from their spouses. In addition to this interaction, further gender differences emerged at the correlation level, where the association between spousal support and depression was significant for men only.