Perceptions of Deservedness of Social Aid as a Function of Prenatal Diagnostic Testing1

This study examined whether judgments of deservedness of social aid subsequent to the birth of a disabled child vary as a function of prenatal diagnostic testing (PDT) use as predicted by the attribution‐affect‐action model (Weiner, 1980). A sample of family physicians/obstetricians (n= 341) and a university employee sample (n= 281) made attribution ratings in 3 scenarios in which an at‐risk pregnant woman gave birth to a disabled child. The findings indicate that women who chose not to use PDT or who chose to continue the pregnancy following a diagnosis were judged more responsible, more to blame, and less deserving of both sympathy and social aid subsequent to giving birth to a disabled child than were women to whom testing was not made available.     

Improving the Credibility of Child Sexual Assault Victims in Court: The Impact of a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner

The present study investigated the influence of a sexual assault nurse examiner's (SANE's) testimony on mock juror perceptions of a child or adolescent victim of child sexual assault. Community members (N = 252, 156 females) read a fictional criminal trial summary of a child sexual assault case in which the victim was 6 or 15 years old and the prosecution presented medical testimony from a SANE or a traditional registered nurse (RN), or did not present medical testimony. Mock jurors were more likely to render guilty verdicts when a SANE testified compared with the other two testimony conditions. In addition, pro-victim judgments (e.g., sympathy toward the victim) and negative defendant judgments (e.g., anger toward the defendant) mediated this relation. Finally, cognitive network representations of the case demonstrated that the RN and no-medical-testimony groups were similar and the SANE group was distinct from the other two conditions. We discuss these results in terms of the implications of SANE testimony in child sexual assault court cases. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

专业背景、主观印象和情绪对量刑决策的影响

为了考察司法决策者对案件当事人的主观印象如何影响刑罚决策及情绪在其中的作用,本研究要求法律与非法律专业被试对案情相同但对案件当事人的主观印象不同的刑事案件进行刑罚强度决策,并要求被试对犯罪行为所引发的情绪强度进行评定。研究结果发现,被试对施害人的消极印象比积极印象条件下产生更强的愤怒和厌恶情绪,更少的同情情绪,同时,给予的刑罚更重;被试对受害人的积极印象比消极印象条件下,低年级组被试对施害人给予的刑罚更重,但在高年级组被试中不存在显著差异,两组被试在情绪强度上也没有显著差异。法律专业比非法律专业被试对犯罪行为所产生的情绪强度更低。被试的专业背景对量刑决策没有显著影响。中介效应检验发现,在施害人的主观印象对刑罚决策的影响过程中,愤怒和同情表现出部分中介效应,厌恶情绪表现出完全中介效应。     

Action perception and outcome valence: effects on children's inferences of intentionality and moral and liking judgments.

The influences of different action-outcome scenarios on children's evaluative judgments and inferences of outcome intentionality were assessed. One hundred forty-five kindergartners, 2nd graders, and 4th graders heard 4 stories about child actors who engaged in 1 action or 3 equifinal actions and caused a positive or negative outcome. The stories made no mention of the actors' anticipated outcome so that we could assess the children's inferences of whether the actors wanted and had tried to cause the outcome. Children also rated their liking for the actors and the actors' morality. Children's moral and liking judgments were not significantly differentiated by action condition. However, actors who caused positive outcomes received favorable liking and moral judgments, and actors who caused negative outcomes received neutral liking and moral judgments. Children's intentionality inferences varied by the actors' actions and were moderated by outcome valence. The authors discuss children's apparent use of the valence rule when inferring intentionality and their reluctance to judge harshly actors who cause negative outcomes when not privy to the actors' intentions.     

Action Perception and Outcome Valence: Effects on Children's Inferences of Intentionality and Moral and Liking Judgments

The influences of different action-outcome scenarios on children's evaluative judgments and inferences of outcome intentionality were assessed. One hundred forty-five kindergartners, 2nd graders, and 4th graders heard 4 stories about child actors who engaged in 1 action or 3 equifinal actions and caused a positive or negative outcome. The stories made no mention of the actors' anticipated outcome so that we could assess the children's inferences of whether the actors wanted and had tried to cause the outcome. Children also rated their liking for the actors and the actors' morality. Children's moral and liking judgments were not significantly differentiated by action condition. However, actors who caused positive outcomes received favorable liking and moral judgments, and actors who caused negative outcomes received neutral liking and moral judgments. Children's intentionality inferences varied by the actors' actions and were moderated by outcome valence. The authors discuss children's apparent use of the valence rule when inferring intentionality and their reluctance to judge harshly actors who cause negative outcomes when not privy to the actors' intentions.     

Daniel has fallen into a muddy puddle – Schadenfreude or sympathy?

The present study investigated the experience of schadenfreude among children. Participants were 4‐ to 8‐year‐old children (n = 100) who were told stories of another child experiencing a misfortune while pursuing a morally positive versus morally negative goal. Schadenfreude, sympathy, and helping behaviour towards the suffering child were assessed. Results showed that beginning at the age of 4, emotional and behavioural reactions towards a misfortune of another child were predicted by the moral valence of the other child's goal. Furthermore, morally negative goals decreased helping behaviour and morally positive goals increased helping behaviour. Multilevel mediation analysis revealed that the relation between goal valence and helping behaviour was mediated by both schadenfreude and sympathy. However, those effects were especially pronounced in older children.     

Influence of the spacing of trait information on impressions of likability

Five experiments were conducted in which subjects were shown lists of trait adjectives that supposedly described particular individuals. Each list included both positive and negative traits, with all such traits occurring twice. The second occurrence of a trait followed the first either immediately (massed presentation) or after four other traits intervened (distributed presentation). For a given list, all positive traits received massed presentation and all negative traits were distributed, or vice versa. After list presentation, subjects judged how likable the person described would be. In Experiments 1–3 only, there was also a free recall test for the traits. The free recall test revealed both a spacing effect (distributed items being recalled better than massed) and a bias toward recalling negative traits better than positive. Likability judgments paralleled the recall pattern, with the judgments being more positive when positive traits were distributed (and negative massed), than in the opposite arrangement. Correlations calculated between recall and impressions were mostly nonsignificant, however, suggesting that judgments were not based on the recall of specific traits and that inferences formed at encoding were of primary importance.     

Continuous monitoring of human contingency judgment across trials

Recent evidence suggests that people are sensitive to the degree of contingency between their actions and ensuing outcomes, but little is known about the way in which such contingency judgments develop as more and more information about the contingency is provided. Three experiments examined this issue in the context of a video game. In Experiment 1, it was found that contingency judgments follow growth functions: When the contingency was positive, judgments increased toward a positive asymptote, and when the contingency was negative, judgments decreased toward a negative asymptote. When the contingency was zero, judgments themselves remained close to zero but were biased by the overall frequency with which the outcome occurred. In Experiment 2, it was shown that the growth function was not the result of the anchoring of early judgments at the zero point. The bias in judgments when the contingency is zero was investigated in Experiment 3. The results are discussed in terms of rule-based analyses and contemporary theories of conditioning.     

An exploratory study assessing relations of demographic characteristics with police recruits' attitudes toward abuse of children and abusive parents

The purpose of this exploratory study was to assess the relationships of demographic characteristics with attitudes toward abusive parents and abused children in a convenience sample of 183 police recruits. Police academy training staff invited recruits to complete a questionnaire which contained three vignettes and a 36-item questionnaire that depicted child neglect, sexual abuse, physical abuse, and demographic information. Analysis of responses showed that African Americans and Latinos reported more negative attitudes of anger, disgust, sadness, and discomfort toward an abusive parent than the Euro-American group. Women reported more negative attitudes toward an abused child and also more positive attitudes of sympathy and caring toward an abused child. Results partially support previous research suggesting demographic characteristics influence report of attitudes toward abusive parents and abused children. These findings about the influence of demographic characteristics on positive and negative emotional reactions toward abusive parents and abused children add to the literature.     

The Unintended Negative Consequences of Sympathy for the Stigmatized1

Research on attitudes toward the stigmatized indicates that negative feelings and stereotypes toward the stigmatized are often mixed with positive feelings of sympathy and concern. Three studies investigate the hypothesis that positive outcomes for the stigmatized that are motivated by sympathy may have unintended negative consequences for self-esteem, affect, and motivation. Subjects were asked to imagine themselves in the position of a stigmatized person who received a job either because he or she was qualified, or out of sympathy for a stigmatizing condition. Results indicated that subjects reported lower state self-esteem, more negative affect, and lowered work motivation when the job was offered out of sympathy rather than on the basis of qualifications. Study 2 showed that the negative effects of sympathy occur whether the basis for the sympathy is prejudice and discrimination or mobility problems faced by the stigmatized individual. The third experiment showed that sympathy has negative effects when the sympathy is based either on individual or group-based problems imposed by the stigmatizing condition. The findings are discussed in terms of the attributional ambiguity surrounding positive outcomes faced by the stigmatized and applied to the effects of affirmative-action programs.     

Judging response-outcome relations: The role of response-outcome contingency,outcome probability,and method of information presentation

A series of four experiments investigated college students’ judgments of interevent contingency. Subjects were asked to judge the effect of a discrete response Itapping a wire) on the occurrence of a brief outcome (a radio’s buzzing). Pairings of the possible event-state combinations (response-outcome, response-no outcome, no response-outcome, no response-no outcome) were presented in a summary-table (Experiments 2 and 4), in an unbroken-time-line (Experimente 1, 2, and 4), or in a broken-time-line format (Experiment 3). Subjects judged the extent to which the response caused the outcome or prevented it from occurring. Across all methods of information presentation, judgments were a positive function of response-outcome contingency and outcome probability. In the unbroken-time-line condition, judgments of negative response-outcome contingencies were less extreme than judgments of equivalent positive contingencies. This asymmetry was smaller in the broken-time-line condition and in those conditions in which subjects were encouraged to segment an unbroken time line into discrete response outcome units. Finally, judgments of positive and negative relationships were generally symmetrical in the summary-table condition. Relative to the two time-line portrayals, summary table judgments were also less influenced by the overall probability of outcome occurrence. These judgment differences among format conditions suggest that, depending on the method of information presentation, subjects differently partition event sequences into discrete event pairings.     

Judgment of contingency: cognitive biases in depressed and nondepressed subjects

In this research I investigated whether the use of relevant affective outcomes influences depressed and nondepressed subjects' judgment of contingency. Similar to previous studies (Alloy & Abramson, 1979, Experiments 1 and 2), Experiments 1 and 2 confirmed that when the outcome is affectively neutral (i.e., the onset of a light) depressed subjects make accurate judgments of contingency, whereas nondepressed subjects show (in noncontingent situations) a significant illusion of control. In Experiments 3 and 4 (a contingency situation and a noncontingency situation, respectively) different types of sentences (negative self-referent, negative other-referent, positive self-referent, positive other-referent) were used as outcomes. Although depressed subjects were more reluctant to show biased judgments than were the nondepressed subjects, in noncontingency situations depressed subjects made overestimated judgments of contingency when the outcomes were negative self-referent sentences. Results are discussed with regard to current cognitive theories of depression, particularly the learned helplessness model.     

Genetic Testing of Children for Predisposition to Mood Disorders: Anticipating the Clinical Issues

Large-scale sequencing information may provide a basis for genetic tests for predisposition to common disorders. In this study, participants in the Coriell Personalized Medicine Collaborative (N?=?53) with a personal and/or family history of Major Depressive Disorder or Bipolar Disorder were interviewed based on the Health Belief Model around hypothetical intention to test one’s children for probability of developing a mood disorder. Most participants (87 %) were interested in a hypothetical test for children that had high (“90 %”) positive predictive value, while 51 % of participants remained interested in a modestly predictive test (“20 %”). Interest was driven by beliefs about effects of test results on parenting behaviors and on discrimination. Most participants favored testing before adolescence (64 %), and were reluctant to share results with asymptomatic children before adulthood. Participants anticipated both positive and negative effects of testing on parental treatment and on children’s self-esteem. Further investigation will determine whether these findings will generalize to other complex disorders for which early intervention is possible but not clearly demonstrated to improve outcomes. More information is also needed about the effects of childhood genetic testing and sharing of results on parent–child relationships, and about the role of the child in the decision-making process.     

Acquisition functions in contingency judgment

Two experiments investigated the way in which judgments of the extent to which an action caused an outcome changed as more experience of the actionoutcome contingency was presented. In the first experiment judgments increased across trials when there was a positive contingency and decreased when there was a negative contingency. In noncontingent situations judgments were biased by the overall probability of the outcome. In the second experiment the changes across trials under positive and negative contingencies persisted even when the subjects were given the opportunity to dissociate their causality judgments from their degree of confidence in those judgments. The results are at variance with the dP and dD theories which attempt to account for causality judgments in terms of statistical rules based on the probabilities or frequencies of the relevant events. If such theories were modified, however, to take account of the regression of the subjects' estimates onto the actual probabilities or frequencies, then the data could be accommodated. On the other hand, a simple associative view is also able to account for the data.     

Asymptotic judgment of cause in a relative validity paradigm

We report three experiments in which we tested asymptotic and dynamic predictions of the Rescorla-Wagner (R-W) model and the asymptotic predictions of Cheng's probabilistic contrast model (PCM) concerning judgments of causality when there are two possible causal candidates. We used a paradigm in which the presence of a causal candidate that is highly correlated with an effect influences judgments of a second, moderately correlated or uncorrelated cause. In Experiment 1, which involved a moderate outcome density, judgments of a moderately positive cause were attenuated when it was paired with either a perfect positive or perfect negative cause. This attenuation was robust over a large set of trials but was greater when the strong predictor was positive. In Experiment 2, in which there was a low overall density of outcomes, judgments of a moderately correlated positive cause were elevated when this cause was paired with a perfect negative causal candidate. This elevation was also quite robust over a large set of trials. In Experiment 3, estimates of the strength of a causal candidate that was uncorrelated with the outcome were reduced when it was paired with a perfect cause. The predictions of three theoretical models of causal judgments are considered. Both the R-W model and Cheng's PCM accounted for some but not all aspects of the data. Pearce's model of stimulus generalization accounts for a greater proportion of the data.     

Interactions between early parenting and a polymorphism of the child's dopamine transporter gene in predicting future child conduct disorder symptoms

Mounting evidence suggests that genetic risks for mental disorders often interact with the social environment, but most studies still ignore environmental moderation of genetic influences. The authors tested interactions between maternal parenting and the variable number tandem repeat (VNTR) polymorphism in the 3' untranslated region of the dopamine transporter gene in the child to increase understanding of gene-environment interactions involving early parenting. Participants were part of a 9-year longitudinal study of 4- to 6-year-old children who met criteria for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and demographically matched controls. Maternal parenting was observed during standard mother-child interactions in Wave 1. The child's conduct disorder (CD) symptoms 5-8 years later were measured using separate structured diagnostic interviews of the mother and youth. Controlling for ADHD symptoms and child disruptive behavior during the mother-child interaction, there was a significant inverse relation between levels of both positive and negative parenting at 4-6 years and the number of later CD symptoms, but primarily among children with 2 copies of the 9-repeat allele of the VNTR. The significant interaction with negative parenting was replicated in parent and youth reports of CD symptoms separately.     

Personality and socialization correlates of vicarious emotional responding

The relations of personality and family characteristics to adults' negative vicarious emotional responses to sympathy and distress films were examined. Ss reported more sympathy and less personal distress and exhibited less skin conductance as well as heart rate deceleration when viewing a sympathy-evoking film. Dispositional emotional intensity and fantasy empathy were associated with greater self-reported emotional responding and higher skin conductance. Dispositional perspective taking and personal distress were positively and negatively correlated, respectively, with reported vicarious responding to the sympathy film when Ss were administered instructions to imagine the emotions of those in the films. Family cohesiveness was associated with reported sympathy and sadness in reaction to the sympathy film, whereas the expression of negative subordinate and positive emotional states in the home of origin was associated with women's reported responsivity.     

Attitudes and Beliefs of African-Americans Toward Genetics,Genetic Testing,and Sickle Cell Disease Education and Awareness

Research among African-Americans indicates this population perceives sickle cell (SCD) to be a serious disease and sickle cell trait (SCT) screening an important intervention. However, studies have consistently demonstrated a lower than desired uptake of SCD education, inadequate knowledge regarding personal and family trait status, and a low perceived susceptibility of giving birth to a child with the disease. We examined general attitudes and beliefs regarding genetics and genetic testing including prenatal testing and newborn screening; we used this information as the foundation to more specifically assess attitudes and beliefs regarding SCD and perceived barriers to SCD education and awareness. Thirty-five African-American adult men and women participated in one of four focus groups. Thematic analysis identified that both prenatal testing and newborn screening are acceptable forms of genetic testing. Based largely on their personal experiences, participants possessed an understanding of the natural progression of SCD but had a limited understanding of the inheritance and probable risk of giving birth to a child with the disease. Barriers to education and greater awareness of SCD were classified as personal, familial, and societal. Community based interventions focused on sharing the stories of individuals with first-hand experiences with SCD should be considered.     

Is self disclosure by a physically handicapped proband reciprocated by the interaction partner? An experimental study of the effect of physical handicap on interaction behavior with non-handicapped interaction partners

An experimental study tested whether an able-bodied person's positive disposition toward a disabled interaction partner was effective in the amount of reciprocation given to the disabled partner's self-disclosure. Sixty female subjects were confronted with either a disabled or nondisabled conversation partner who showed either a high or a low amount of self-disclosure. We anticipated that a "sympathy" effect of disablement in the amount of the subjects' self-disclosure would result from the nondisabled partner's overcompensation. This arises from an effort to compensate the negative, stereotyped attitudes to the disabled in actual behavior toward a single, disabled person by more strongly reciprocating the self-disclosure of a disabled interaction partner compared to a nondisabled one. Results showed that, contrary to expectations, self-disclosure was equally reciprocated with both a disabled and a nondisabled partner. However, a "sympathy" effect was found in the impression judgments on the disabled partner who had shown a high amount of self-disclosure in the previous conversation. The lack of a "sympathy" effect in the amount of self-disclosure was possibly the result of (1) the reciprocation of self-disclosure not being exclusively determined by intentional control processes; and/or (2) the evaluative significance of the amount of self-disclosure not being clear to the subjects in the interaction studied. It is concluded that the efforts of the nondisabled to show an unprejudiced attitude toward a disabled interaction partner are mostly effective in other aspects of behavior than the amount of self-disclosure.     

The Utility of Genetic Counseling Prior to Offering First Trimester Screening Options

In order to evaluate the utility of genetic counseling at the time of first trimester screening in patients with no previously identified genetic concerns, we reviewed family history data for 700 women seen for genetic counseling in Utah during 2005-2006. The mean maternal age was 35 years (Range: 16–47 years). The majority of patients seen were non-Jewish Caucasians (90.8%, 634/700). A three-generation pedigree was obtained from each woman by one of two certified genetic counselors and subsequently classified as “negative” (no birth defects/genetic disorders); “positive” (birth defect or genetic condition with a minimal/low risk of recurrence; additional evaluation/genetic testing during pregnancy not indicated); or “significant” (birth defect or genetic condition with an increased risk of recurrence; additional evaluation/genetic testing during the pregnancy indicated). About 72% (501/700) of the histories were negative, 19% (134/700) were positive, and about 9% (65/700) were significant. Among patients with significant family histories, 66% (n = 43) were women less than 35 years of age. We conclude that assessing a patient’s family history at the time of first trimester serum screening is a valuable resource for pregnancy management.