Perspective and prejudice: antecedents and mediating mechanisms

The present work investigated mechanisms by which Whites' prejudice toward Blacks can be reduced (Study 1) and explored how creating a common ingroup identity can reduce prejudice by promoting these processes (Study 2). In Study 1, White participants who viewed a videotape depicting examples of racial discrimination and who imagined the victim's feelings showed greater decreases in prejudice toward Blacks than did those in the objective and no instruction conditions. Among the potential mediating affective and cognitive variables examined, reductions in prejudice were mediated primarily by feelings associated with perceived injustice. In Study 2, an intervention designed to increase perceptions of a common group identity before viewing the videotape, reading that a terrorist threat was directed at all Americans versus directed just at White Americans, also reduced prejudice toward Blacks through increases in feelings of injustice.     

Index of suspicion: feeling not believing

Throughout the U.S., state laws require professionals who work with children to report cases of suspected child abuse to child protection services. Both practically and conceptually, however, significant problems arise from a lack of clarity regarding the threshold that has been set for reporting. Specifically, there is no consensus as to what constitutes reasonable suspicion, and little direction for how mandated reporters should gauge their legal and professional responsibilities when they harbor suspicion. In this paper we outline the context of the problem, discuss the nature and scope of its conceptual underpinnings, and offer recommendations for moving towards a concrete, practical solution.     

Adolescents’ reactions to the world trade center destruction: A study of political trauma in metropolitan New York

This study examined the emotional response of 110 adolescents living in the New York metropolitan area one month and five months after the destruction of the World Trade Center (WTC) by terrorists. The purpose of the study was to assess emerging hypotheses in political psychology that suggest that there are differential emotional responses to a national trauma that recede in predictable directions. The results followed predictions and indicate that adolescents experienced a higher level of emotions related to the Crisis and Bereavement dimension than affect associated with Vulnerability and that the emotional response decreased during the four-month follow-up period. There was no effect on emotional response from the biological sex or political orientation of the respondents, which is inconsistent with other studies in the literature. The absence of a political orientation effect is explained in terms of the lack of a domestic ideological difference in response to the terrorist attack.     

Differential fan effect and attentional focus

As people study more facts about a concept, it takes longer to retrieve a particular fact about that concept. This fan effect (Anderson, 1974) has been attributed to competition among associations to a concept. Alternatively, the mental-model theory (Radvansky & Zacks, 1991) suggests that the fan effect disappears when the related concepts are organized into a single mental model. In the present study, attentional focus was manipulated to affect the mental model to be constructed. One group of participants focused on the person dimension of personlocation pairs, whereas the other group focused on the location dimension. The result showed that the fan effect with the focused dimension was greater than the fan effect with the nonfocused dimension, which is contrary to the mental-model theory. The number of associations with a concept is indeed crucial during retrieval, and the importance of the information seems to be accentuated with attentional focus.     

Senior capstone design and ethics: A bridge to the professional world

A senior level capstone design experience has been developed and offered with a particular emphasis on many of the professional issues raised in Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) Engineering Criterion IV. The course has sought to develop student awareness of the ethical foundation of the engineering profession, the global and societal framework within which engineers practice, and the environmental impact on engineering. The capstone design course also focused upon improving the technical communications skills of the graduating senior class with both extensive instruction in writing and multiple workshops dealing with the art of making an effective oral presentation. The effectiveness of the design course was assessed using Kirkpatrick’s model for evaluating training programs. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the “Ethics and Social Responsibility in Engineering and Technology” meeting, New Orleans, 2003.     

Informed consent and the use of placebo in poland: Ethical and legal aspects

The concept of informed consent was one of the most fruitful ideas that deeply changed the relationships between physicians and their patients from paternalism to respect for the personal autonomy of subjects needing professional medical care. The great progress in medicine, also involving the pharmaceutical industry, has created an increasing need to perform different clinical and experimental trials. The evolution of clinical research in the last decades has influenced strongly the design of these studies. One of the most important changes in this field has been the use of placebo groups in double-blind controlled studies. The controversies have involved not only the use of placebo when standard or proven treatment was available, but also some specific problems concerning the procedure of obtaining informed consent in such trials. This paper briefly presents the evolution of informed consent in Poland as well as different ethical and legal problems concerning informed consent and the use of placebo controls in clinical trials. An earlier version of this paper was presented at an international conference, “Placebo: Its Action and Place in Health Research Today,” held in Warsaw, Poland on 12–13 April, 2003.     

Functional connectivity during working memory maintenance

Neurophysiological experiments with monkeys have demonstrated that working memory (WM) is associated with persistent neural activity in multiple brain regions, such as the prefrontal cortex (PFC), the parietal cortex, and posterior unimodal association areas. WM maintenance is believed to require the coordination of these brain regions, which do not function in isolation but, rather, interact to maintain visual percepts that are no longer present in the environment. However, single-unit physiology studies and traditional univariate analyses of functional brain imaging data cannot evaluate interactions between distant brain regions, and so evidence of regional integration during WM maintenance is largely indirect. In this study, we utilized a recently developed multivariate analysis method that allows us to explore functional connectivity between brain regions during the distinct stages of a delayed face recognition task. To characterize the neural network mediating the on-line maintenance of faces, the fusiform face area (FFA) was defined as a seed and was then used to generate whole-brain correlation maps. A random effects analysis of the correlation data revealed a network of brain regions exhibiting significant correlations with the FFA seed during the WM delay period. This maintenance network included the dorsolateral and ventrolateral PFC, the premotor cortex, the intraparietal sulcus, the caudate nucleus, the thalamus, the hippocampus, and occipitotemporal regions. These findings support the notion that the coordinated functional interaction between nodes of a widely distributed network underlies the active maintenance of a perceptual representation.     

The use of a distractor-assigned response slows later responding in a location negative priming task

Responding to a target's location takes longer when that location has recently contained a distractor event (ignored-repetition [IR] trial) relative to when it has been unoccupied (control trial). This is known as the location negative priming (NP) effect. We aimed to determine whether the elevated reaction time observed for IR trials was due to the reuse of a distractor location (location locus) and/or to the need to execute a (just inhibited) distractor response (response locus). We isolated these loci latency effects by using many-to-one and one-to-many location-response assignments. Our results showed that reusing a distractor location hastened target processing at that position (facilitative location locus), whereas the production of a distractor response was associated with a time cost (interfering response locus). Accordingly, part of the latency elevation seen with IR trials results from the need on these occasions to execute ajust inhibited (distractor) response, and, hence, the location NP effect has a response locus.     

The planning and execution of sequential eye movements: saccades do not show the one target advantage

The present experiment examined the one-target advantage (OTA) with regard to saccadic eye movements. The OTA, previously found with manual pointing responses, refers to the finding that movements are executed faster when the limb is allowed to stop on the target compared to the situation where it has to proceed and hit a second target. Using an adapted limb movement OTA task, saccades of 5 degrees and 15 degrees were made to (a) a single target (one-target), (b) one target and immediately to another target without a change in direction (two-target-extension), and (c) one target and immediately back to the start location (two-target-reversal). Unlike manual movements, the movement times for the initial saccade in the two-target-extension condition were not prolonged compared to either of the other two conditions. Moreover, this pattern of results was found for both the shorter and longer amplitude saccades. The results indicate that the OTA does not occur in the oculomotor system and therefore is not a general motor control phenomenon.     

Responsivity to two odorants, androstenone and amyl acetate, and the affective impact of odors on interpersonal relationships

Substantial variation exists in the importance of olfaction in influencing individuals' preferences, yet the sources of this variation remain elusive. The authors explored responsivity to 2 odorants as 1 potential source. Participants (N = 258) completed the Affective Impact of Odor Scale and were assessed for responsivity to the putative human pheromone androstenone and amyl acetate. Results showed a significant relationship between odorant responsivity and self-reports of the influence of odors. People able to smell androstenone more commonly reported odors as having a negative effect on interpersonal relationships than did people anosmic to androstenone, whereas responsivity to amyl acetate was associated with positive effects of odors on relationships. Responsivity to certain odorants may be an important factor affecting human social interactions.