Don’t Shoot the Messnger: Memory for Misspellings in Context

Misspellings in sentences are usually easy to understand by readers due to top-down influences. Although top-down processing allows for fluent reading of misspelled items, the nature of their representations in memory is not known. If representations of misspellings are distinct from representations of correctly spelled words, their influence should be seen in later recognition decisions. In this set of experiments, participants read words and misspellings embedded in sentences and were later given a recognition test. The sentences contained semantically biased or neutral contexts. In Experiment 1, misspellings were created by removing a single letter (e.g., drveway). In Experiment 2, the recognition items probes were presented in uppercase letters (e.g., DRVEWAY) to reduce the visual similarity between study and test items. In Experiment 3, the misspellings were created by substituting visually similar letters (e.g., driweway). In contrast to the previous experiments, in Experiment 4, participants were explicitly told about the memory test to see how response strategies affect performance. Overall, the results indicate that people retain surface feature information about misspellings which seem to inform their memory judgments, and that the processing of this information cannot be strategically controlled.     

What We Don’t Know May Hurt Us: An Examination of Systematic Bias in Offender Risk Assessments

Many issues are known to plague the validity of risk assessment, but empirical scholarship in criminal justice has not yet directly investigated how they influence prediction accuracy. This study explores how frequently risk assessment staff classifies information to be insufficient and the extent to which systematic error impacts the validity of risk prediction. Using Oregon’s Juvenile Crime Prevention Risk Assessment Instrument, we identified critical missing risk information and infused the dataset with varying levels of error. Classification outcomes and overall prediction accuracy reacted unfavorably, suggesting that the common practice of knowingly and unknowingly underestimating risk may be highly pernicious.     

When Male Norms Don��t Fit: Do Traditional Attitudes of Female Colleagues Challenge Men in Non-traditional Occupations?

Our study examined whether traditional attitudes of female colleagues toward the male role negatively impact the psychological health of German men in non-traditional occupations and whether these relationships are mediated by social stressors at work. Traditional attitudes are presented as a threefold concept: Attitudes of female colleagues toward male anti-femininity, status, and toughness were measured. One hundred and thirteen men and 174 of their female colleagues from eastern parts of Germany and working in the healthcare and educational sectors completed hard-copy questionnaires. We used bootstrapped regression models to test for direct effects, controlling for autonomy, working hours, professional tenure, and sector of work. Bootstrapping strategies were also used for the analysis of indirect effects, even considering controls. The attitudes of female colleagues toward male anti-femininity were directly related to heightened depressive moods and lowered job satisfaction. For the attitudes of female colleagues toward male status, or male toughness we found no such direct relationships. Only indirect effects of female colleagues?? attitudes toward male status, or male toughness on men??s job satisfaction through social stressors were found. The study provides theoretical reasoning and empirical evidence for the importance of female colleagues?? attitudes and interpersonal conflicts at work for German men in non-traditional occupations.     

“You Shouldn’t Look at Us Strangely”: An Exploratory Study on Personal Perspectives on Quality of Life of Adolescents with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders in Residential Youth Care

Applied Research in Quality of Life - Adolescents with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders (EBD) have complex needs and experience challenges in various developmental areas and life domains. The...     

Mothers,Fathers, and Parental Systems: A Conceptual Model of Parental Engagement in Programmes for Child Mental Health—Connect,Attend, Participate,Enact (CAPE)

Parenting programmes are one of the best researched and most effective interventions for reducing child mental health problems. The success of such programmes, however, is largely dependent on their reach and parental engagement. Rates of parental enrolment and attendance are highly variable, and in many cases very low; this is especially true of father involvement in parenting programmes. This paper proposes a conceptual model of parental engagement in parenting programmes—the CAPE model (Connect, Attend, Participate, Enact) that builds on recent models by elaborating on the interdependent stages of engagement, and its interparental or systemic context. That is, we argue that a comprehensive model of parental engagement will best entail a process from connection to enactment of learned strategies in the child’s environment, and involve consideration of individual parents (both mothers and fathers) as well as the dynamics of the parenting team. The model provides a framework for considering parent engagement as well as associated facilitators and mechanisms of parenting change such as parenting skills, self-efficacy, attributions, and the implementation context. Empirical investigation of the CAPE model could be used to further our understanding of parental engagement, its importance for programme outcomes, and mechanisms of change. This will guide future intervention refinement and developments as well as change in clinical practice.     

Diversity in Individual↔Context Relations as the Basis for Positive Development Across the Life Span: A Developmental Systems Perspective for Theory,Research, and Application (The 2004 Society for the Study of Human Development Presidential Address)

Contemporary, cutting-edge scholarship in human developmental science is framed by developmental systems theories emphasizing that the basic process in development involves mutually influential relations between the individually distinct person and his or her diverse, multilevel context; stressing that relative plasticity in development derives from such individual?context relations; and providing optimism about the possibility that applications of developmental science may promote positive development. These ideas underscore the substantive importance of human diversity, seen both as the potential for systematic intraindividual change across life (plasticity) and as interindividual differences in intraindividual change, and stand in contrast to views about diversity as either unimportant, error, or reflecting deficits in development. I discuss these differing conceptions of human diversity and of their distinct implications for the methodological and ethical conduct of science and of applications to programs and policies aimed at promoting positive development.