Predictors of children's entertainment television viewing: Why are they tuning in?

Three hundred and twenty six 3- and 5-year-olds (N = 160 3-year-olds) participated in a longitudinal study of the sociological and ecological predictors of children's general audience and child entertainment viewing. Viewing was assessed through five weekly diaries for each child, completed by families over a two-year period. Concurrent analyses of program availability, family demographics/attributes, and child characteristics indicated that children who were frequent viewers of entertainment programs had parents who had limited education, access to cable, and incorporated television into their activities. Although parental regulation and encouragement played a role in children's viewing experiences, particularly at 5 and 7 years of age, the strongest long-term predictors on children's entertainment viewing were parents' education, family size, and the age and sex of the child. Parents need to become more aware of their role in shaping their children's viewing habits. Responsibility for improving children's television viewing experiences, however, should not rely solely with parents but must be shared by educators, broadcasters, and legislators.     

Why are they being so nice to us? Social identity threat and the suspicion of Whites’ motives

Abstract

Stigmatizing racism has made Whites’ kindness attributional ambiguous to people of color (POC). When this ambiguity is experienced in domains where stereotypes are active, POC may experience praise from Whites as a form of social identity threat. The current article reviews how POC are predicted to respond to Whites’ positivity as a function of their beliefs about Whites’ motives. To the extent that POC are suspicious of Whites’ motives and chronically discount positivity from Whites, praise and positive overtures from Whites were predicted to be threatening. Evidence suggests that POC suspicious of Whites motives are the most sensitive to positive responses from Whites, reacting with both greater threat and social accuracy compared to non-suspicious POC. The current work reviews the empirical evidence on suspicion and highlights avenues for future research that explores suspicion’s origins and capacity to shape the academic and professional identities of POC.     

Masked phonological priming effects in English: are they real? Do they matter?

For over 15 years, masked phonological priming effects have been offered as evidence that phonology plays a leading role in visual word recognition. The existence of these effects-along with their theoretical implications-has, however, been disputed. The authors present three sources of evidence relevant to an assessment of the existence and implications of these effects. First, they present an exhaustive meta-analytic literature review, in which they evaluate the strength of the evidence for masked phonological priming effects on English visual word processing. Second, they present two original experiments that demonstrate a small but significant masked priming effect on English visual lexical decision, which persists in conditions that may discourage phonological recoding. Finally, they assess the theory of visual word recognition offered by the DRC model (Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001) in the context of their empirical data. Through numerous simulations with this model, they argue that masked phonological priming effects might best be captured by a weak phonological (i.e., dual-access) theory in which lexical decisions are made on the basis of phonological information.     

Human facial discrimination in horses: can they tell us apart?

The human–horse relationship has a long evolutionary history. Horses continue to play a pivotal role in the lives of humans and it is common for humans to think their horses recognize them by face. If a horse can distinguish his/her human companion from other humans, then evolution has supplied the horse with a very adaptive cognitive ability. The current study used operant conditioning trials to examine whether horses could discriminate photographed human faces and transfer this facial recognition ability a novel setting. The results indicated the horses (a) learned to discriminate photographs of the unrelated individuals, fraternal twins, and identical twins and (b) demonstrated transfer of facial recognition by spending more time with their S+ woman in the field test.     

Regularity effects in word naming: What are they?

In a word-naming experiment, word-body consistency was crossed with grapheme-to-phoneme regularity to test predictions of current models of word recognition. In the latency and error data, a clear effect of consistency was observed, with the influence of regularity somewhat weaker. In addition, simulation data from three contemporary models of word recognition were obtained for the stimuli used in the experiment in order to compare the models' latencies with those of humans. The simulations showed that the human latency data are most consistent with the parallel-distributed-processing model of Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg, and Patterson (1996), less so with the dual-process model (Zorzi, Houghton, & Butterworth, 1998), and least so with the dual-route-cascaded model (Coltheart & Rastle, 1994).     

Shoot or don't shoot? Why police officers are more inclined to shoot when they are anxious

We investigated the effect of anxiety on police officers' shooting decisions. Thirty-six police officers participated and executed a low- and high-anxiety video-based test that required them to shoot or not shoot at rapidly appearing suspects that either had a gun and "shot," or had no gun and "surrendered." Anxiety was manipulated by turning on (high anxiety) or turning off (low anxiety) a so-called "shootback canon" that could fire small plastic bullets at the participants. When performing under anxiety, police officers showed a response bias toward shooting, implying that they accidentally shot more often at suspects that surrendered. Furthermore, shot accuracy was lower under anxiety and officers responded faster when suspects had a gun. Finally, because gaze behavior appeared to be unaffected by anxiety, it is concluded that when they were anxious, officers were more inclined to respond on the basis of threat-related inferences and expectations rather than objective, task-relevant visual information.     

Physical education teachers in Australia: Why do they stay?

Studies related to reasons why teachers stay are far less frequent than those reporting reasons to leave. This study assessed the factors that satisfied PE teachers and the motivators to stay in PE teaching. Physical educator stayers (N?=?139) responded to a ‘PE Teachers’ Career Intentions Questionnaire’, ‘Basic Satisfaction Needs at Work Scale’ and an open-ended question to ascertain retention motivators. Basic needs satisfaction for competence, autonomy and relatedness support, along with satisfaction for ‘professional interaction’, ‘participation in decision-making’, ‘organisation of teaching’, and ‘respect’ predicted retention. PE teachers gain work-related motivation from their expertise, the opportunity to implement ideas collaboratively, but also the sense of efficacy to control their pedagogy and student outcomes of focus. Supportive policy and actions; not just the absence of career-thwarting stimuli, appear vital for teacher self-efficacy, leading to career fulfillment. Quality mentoring programs may serve to enhance PE teacher satisfaction and are worthy of further investigation.     

Why are faces hard to recognize in photographic negative?

Faces may be difficult to recognize in photographic negative simply because they contain a large range of grays, while printed words and geometric shapes, which contain no grays, are easy to recognize in negative. This explanation was partly tested in an experiment where Ss had to recognize positive and negative pictures of well-known people, both using normal monochrome photographs and using lith photographs in which all areas of gray were removed. Lith photographs were harder to recognize than normal photographs, but the difference between positive and negative was the same for lith pictures as for normal ones. This does not rule out an explanation in terms of grays, but it does put a major constraint on it.     

Why is a truth-predicate like a pronoun?

I begin with an exposition of the two main variants of the Prosentential Theory of Truth (PT), those of Dorothy Grover et al. and Robert Brandom. Three main types of criticisms are then put forward: (1) material criticisms to the effect that (PT) does not adequately explain the linguistic data, (2) an objection to the effect that no variant of (PT) gives a properly unified account of the various occurrences of “true” in English, and, most importantly, (3) a charge that the comparison with proforms is explanatorily idle. The last objection is that, given a complete semantic account of pronouns, proadjectives, antecedents, etc., together with a complete (PT), the essential semantic character of “true” could be deduced, but then, the idleness of the comparison with pronouns would be apparent. It turns out that objections (2) and (3) are related in the following way: the prosentential terminology is held to conceal the lack of unity in (PT), by describing the different data in the same terms (“proform”, “antecedent”, etc.). But this, I argue, is only a way of truly describing, rather than explaining, the data, these being certain relations of equivalence and consequence between sentences. I consider a language for which (PT) would be not only true, but also explanatory, but note that this language is very different from English. I end by showing that Robert Brandom’s case that “is true” is not a predicate fails, and that his motivation for saying so is based on fallacious reasoning (namely, Boghossian’s argument against deflationism).     

Why are Benevolent Sexists Happier?

Research indicates that the endorsement of sexist ideology is linked to higher subjective wellbeing for both men and women. We examine gender differences in the rationalisations which drive this effect in an egalitarian nation (New Zealand). Results from a nationally representative sample (N?=?6,100) indicated that the endorsement of Benevolent Sexism (BS) predicted life satisfaction through different mechanisms for men and women. For men, BS was directly associated with life satisfaction. For women, the palliative effect of BS was indirect and occurred because BS-ideology positioning women as deserving of men??s adoration and protection was linked to general perceptions of gender relations as fair and equitable, which in turn predicted greater levels of life satisfaction.     

Why are idioms recognized fast?

It is an established fact that idiomatic expressions are fast to process. However, the explanation of the phenomenon is controversial. Using a semantic judgment paradigm, where people decide whether a string is meaningful or not, the present experiment tested the predictions deriving from the three main theories of idiom recognition—the lexical representation hypothesis, the idiom decomposition hypothesis, and the configuration hypothesis. Participants were faster at judging decomposable idioms, nondecomposable idioms, and clichés than at judging their matched controls. The effect was comparable for all conventional expressions. The results were interpreted as suggesting that, as posited by the configuration hypothesis, the fact that they are known expressions, rather than idiomaticity, explains their fast recognition.     

Should children decide whether they are enrolled in nonbeneficial research?

The U.S. federal regulations require investigators conducting nonbeneficial research to obtain the assent of children who are capable of providing it. Unfortunately, there has been no analysis of which children are capable of assent or even what abilities ground the capacity to give assent. Why should investigators be required to obtain the positive agreement of some children, but not others, before enrolling them in research that does not offer a compensating potential for direct benefit? We argue that the scope of children's research decision making should be based on the principles of respect for autonomy and nonmaleficence. These principles imply that the threshold for assent should be fixed at 14 years of age, and a dissent requirement should be adopted for all children in the context of nonbeneficial research.     

Why do they exercise less? Barriers to exercise in high-anxiety-sensitive women

Anxiety sensitivity (AS; fear of arousal sensations) is a risk factor for mental and physical health problems, including physical inactivity. Because of the many mental and physical health benefits of exercise, it is important to better understand why high-AS individuals may be less likely to exercise. The present study's aim was to understand the role of barriers to exercise in explaining lower levels of physical exercise in high-AS individuals. Participants were undergraduate women who were selected as high (n = 82) or low (n = 72) AS. High-AS women participated in less physical exercise and perceived themselves as less fit than low-AS women. Mediation analyses revealed that barriers to exercise accounted for the inverse relationships between AS group and physical exercise/fitness levels. Findings suggest that efforts to increase physical exercise in at-risk populations, such as high-AS individuals, should not focus exclusively on benefits to exercise but should also target reasons why these individuals are exercising less.     

Value seeking and prediction-decision inconsistency: Why don’t people take what they predict they’ll like the most?

In this research, it is proposed that, when making a choice between consumption goods, people do not just think about which option will deliver the highest consumption utility but also think about which choice is most consistent with rationales—beliefs about how they should make decisions. The present article examines a specific rationale, value seeking. The value-seeking rationale refers to the belief that one should choose the option in a choice set that has the highest monetary value. Studies 1 and 2 show that value seeking could lead to a prediction-decision inconsistency, predicting a high consumption utility from one option but choosing another option. Study 3 shows that the prediction-decision inconsistency could be created even by “illusory” (as opposed to truly monetary) values and that the inconsistency could be turned on or off through empirical manipulation.     

Children’s cross-ethnic friendships: Why are they less stable than same-ethnic friendships?

Previous findings suggest that children’s cross-ethnic friendships are less stable than same-ethnic friendships. However, it is not clear why this is. This study examined stability of same- and cross-ethnic friendships among 10-year-old children over the course of five months. Analyses focused on both individual-level data (comparing 82 German and 37 Turkish children) and social network data (comparing 125 German and 172 non-German children). We predicted that children high in empathy and who perceived peer norms about cross-ethnic friendships to be positive would have more stable cross-ethnic friendships. Results showed that cross-ethnic friendships were indeed less stable than same-ethnic friendships. Empathy marginally predicted stability of cross-ethnic friendships while peer norms only predicted German but not Turkish children’s cross-ethnic friendship stability. Further, children high in empathy were less likely to be deselected by their cross-ethnic friends and similarity in empathy between cross-ethnic friends increased the longevity of their friendship.