Beyond Consistency: Contextual Dependency of Language Style in Monolog and Conversation

Language is highly dynamic: It unfolds over time, and we can use it to achieve a wide variety of communicative goals, from telling a story to trying to persuade another person. One aspect of language that has gained increasing popularity among researchers in the last several decades is the individual language style (LS) represented by an individual’s use of function words (e.g., pronouns, articles). Previous approaches to LS mostly focus on LS of one individual in isolation, paying less attention to the fact that language emerges from interaction with others. The aim of this paper is twofold: First, we integrate LS into a dynamical theoretical framework and present an innovative methodological approach. Second, this paper aims to address how interactive conversation—as an aspect of the communicative setting—changes an individual’s LS. We use recurrence quantification analysis to look at structure in patterns of LS in monologs and conversations of 118 participants. Our results showed that LS significantly differs from monolog to conversation, and post hoc analyses further revealed that the change in LS is greater for conflict than for friendly conversations. The difference between monologs and conversations is reflected more strongly in the dynamics (i.e., structure and complexity) of LS than the proportion of function words used. Theoretical implications and directions for future studies are discussed.     

The Incidence and Outcomes of Sexual Harassment Among Hispanic and Non–Hispanic White Women: A Comparison Across Levels Of Cultural Affiliation

An extensive body of literature has documented the widespread and damaging nature of sexual harassment among Anglo women, but little attention has focused on the experiences of women of color. The current paper begins to address this gap by comparing sexual harassment incidence rates and psychological and work–related outcomes of Hispanic and non–Hispanic White women across varying levels of cultural affiliation. Chi–square tests of association suggest that risk of harassment increases with affiliation to the mainstream U.S. culture, and hierarchical regression analyses suggest that cultural affiliation moderates the relation between sexual harassment and occupational functioning. These provocative findings are discussed in the context of social and economic vulnerability, socio–sexual norms, and cultural background.     

Egocentric and Exocentric Spatial Judgements of Visual Displacement

The role of changes in ego- and exocentric spatial relationships on perceptual judgements about visual displacement was investigated in this study. Subjects were asked to indicate whether a dot in a test stimulus was displaced compared to a dot in a reference stimulus. Subjects were given explicit instructions to report displacement relative to themselves (egocentric) or relative to a circle surrounding the dot (exocentric). Four types of test stimuli were used in which object-circle (exocentric) and object-observer (egocentric) relations were systematically varied. It was found that for test stimuli that reveal conflicting ego- and exocentric spatial information, subjects performed poorly in both instruction conditions. This suggests that ego- and exocentric representations cannot be used independently and are probably interconnected.     

Causal Information-Seeking Strategies Change Across Childhood and Adolescence

Intervening on causal systems can illuminate their underlying structures. Past work has shown that, relative to adults, young children often make intervention decisions that appear to confirm a single hypothesis rather than those that optimally discriminate alternative hypotheses. Here, we investigated how the ability to make informative causal interventions changes across development. Ninety participants between the ages of 7 and 25 completed 40 different puzzles in which they had to intervene on various causal systems to determine their underlying structures. Each puzzle comprised a three- or four-node computer chip with hidden wires. On each trial, participants viewed two possible arrangements of the chip's hidden wires and had to select a single node to activate. After observing the outcome of their intervention, participants selected a wire configuration and rated their confidence in their selection. We characterized participant choices with a Bayesian measurement model that indexed the extent to which participants selected nodes that would best disambiguate the two possible causal structures versus those that had high causal centrality in one of the two causal hypotheses but did not necessarily discriminate between them. Our model estimates revealed that the use of a discriminatory strategy increased through early adolescence. Further, developmental improvements in intervention strategy were related to changes in the ability to accurately judge the strength of evidence that interventions revealed, as indexed by participants' confidence in their selections. Our results suggest that improvements in causal information-seeking extend into adolescence and may be driven by metacognitive sensitivity to the efficacy of previous interventions in discriminating competing ideas.     

Parent–Child Conflict Moderates the Relationship Between Executive Functioning and Child Disruptive Behaviors in Youth with T1D

Journal of Clinical Psychology in Medical Settings - Executive function (EF) skills, parent–child conflict, and high blood glucose (BG) may impact child externalizing behaviors. We examined...