Four‐year‐olds incorporate speaker knowledge into pragmatic inferences

Human communication relies on the ability to take into account the speaker's mental state to infer the intended meaning of an utterance in context. For example, a sentence such as ‘Some of the animals are safe to pet’ can be interpreted as giving rise to the inference ‘Some and not all animals are safe to pet’ when uttered by an expert. The same inference, known as a scalar implicature, does not arise when the sentence is spoken by someone with partial knowledge. Adults have been shown to derive scalar implicatures in accordance with the speaker's knowledge state, but in young children this ability is debated. Here, we revisit this question using a simple visual world paradigm. We find that both 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds successfully incorporate speaker knowledge into the derivation of scalar inferences. However, this ability does not generalize immediately to non‐linguistic communicative contexts. These findings have important implications for the development of pragmatic abilities.     

Injury characteristics across functional classes of self-injurious behavior

Self-injurious behavior (SIB) is inherently problematic because it can lead to injuries, including those that are quite severe and may result in loss of function or permanent disfigurement. The current study replicated and extended Rooker et al. (2018) by classifying the physical characteristics of injuries across groups of individuals with automatically maintained SIB (ASIB Subtypes 2 and 3) and socially maintained SIB. Individuals with Subtype 2 ASIB had the most frequent and severe injuries. Further, an inverse relation was found between the level of differentiation in the functional analysis and the number of injuries across groups. Studying the response products of SIB (the injuries) documents the risks associated with SIB, justifies the need for research and the intensive intervention, and advances knowledge of SIB. Additional research is needed to replicate these findings, and determine the variables that produce different characteristics of injury secondary to SIB.     

Breadwinner Seeks Bottle Warmer: How Women’s Future Aspirations and Expectations Predict Their Current Mate Preferences

Contemporary women in Western cultures are often trying to juggle careers alongside personal and societal expectations for childrearing in an effort to “have it all.” We examine the effects of this balancing act on heterosexual women’s mate selection motivations. Across three Canadian samples (n?=?360), we tested concurrent hypotheses about the desirability of both similar and complementary characteristics in a potential mate. Specifically, women’s aspirations (to prioritize career over family) and their expectations for the roles they will most likely adopt within their future partnerships (primary breadwinner and/or caregiver) were tested as key predictors of mate preferences. Although specific effects varied across samples, a mega-analysis of the combined sample and an internal meta-analysis of effect sizes from the three studies provided support for both complementary and similarity motives (controlling for gender role attitudes). Women’s aspirations to prioritize career (over family) predicted greater similarity in mate preferences, such that they placed less importance on men’s parenting qualities, more importance on their access to financial resources, and preferred a career-oriented over family-oriented exemplar. However, women’s expectations of actually taking on the breadwinner role predicted greater complementarity in mate preferences (greater desirability of parenting qualities and a family-oriented partner; with financial resources rated as less important). Our work expands current understanding of women’s decision-making processes when selecting a mate and has implications for men’s changing traits and roles.

     

Revised Child Anxiety and Depression Scale: a Psychometric Examination in Chinese Youth

There remains a need for a disorder-specific inventory of children’s depression and anxiety that can reliably screen anxious and depressive disorder symptomatology in Chinese children. The Revised Child and Anxiety Depression Scale (RCADS) is a self-report questionnaire assessing anxiety and depression in children (Chorpita et al., 2000; Piqueras et al., 2017). This study sought to evaluate its psychometric properties in a Mainland Chinese sample. Students from the 4th to 11th grades (N?=?1001) participated in this study. Each of the RCADS subscales, by age and sex, possessed reliability coefficients ranging between .63 and .81. Means and standard deviations for RCADS subscales calculated for the age and sex sub-samples were reported. Participants reported slightly lower levels on five subscales than for Chorpita et al. (2000) normative sample. The scales were significantly and strongly correlated with the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) subscales (somatic, withdrawal, anxiety) as well as CBCL internalizing scores. Fit statistics suggested marginal to adequate fit for the six-factor model for the Chinese youth. The present study provides foundational support for the psychometric properties of the RCADS in a large sample of Chinese youth yet indicates that factor structure might be improved through enhanced sampling of culturally relevant symptom expressions.

     

Social Dominance and Sexual Self-Schema as Moderators of Sexist Reactions to Female Subtypes

Theoretically, ambivalent sexism maintains gender hierarchy through benevolence toward conforming women but hostility toward nonconforming women. Men have shown ambivalent sexism to sex-typed vignettes describing “chaste” and “promiscuous” women (Sibley and Wilson 2004). This study of 117 Florida male and female undergraduate participants examined whether, benefiting more from gender hierarchy, men respond more extremely. If sexism supports gender hierarchy, social dominance also should moderate ambivalent sexism. Sexual self-schema (detailed, self-confident sexual information-processing) might moderate men’s and women's hostility. Supporting ambivalent sexism theory, women's hostility targeted the promiscuous character, but their benevolence targeted the chaste character, with men unexpectedly differentiating less. Social dominance enhanced Hostile Sexism and its differentiating the two female subtypes. Sexual self-schema moderated women’s but not men’s hostility.     

Minding the gap between feminist identity and attitudes: the behavioral and ideological divide between feminists and non-labelers

Sexism persists in the contemporary United States and has deleterious effects on women and girls. This suggests that feminism--as a movement, a set of attitudes, or an explicit identity--is still warranted. Although feminist attitudes may buffer against the effects of sexism, notably in health domains, we suggest that there may be an ideological divide between those who hold such attitudes while rejecting the identity (non-labelers) and self-identified feminists. Non-labelers engage in less collective action on behalf of women's rights. On the basis of survey responses of 276 college students, non-labelers appear to be self-interested. We argue that disentangling attitudes from identity is crucial for sharpening predictions about the relation of feminism to other psychological and behavioral variables, and for engaging in broader social change. Furthermore, understanding whether non-labelers' rejection of feminist identity is rooted in fear of stigma associated with the label, neoliberal beliefs, or other explanations is important to those organizing for reform.     

Moral Development and Hawaiian Youths: Does Gender Make a Difference?

This study was designed to assess the moral reasoning of Hawaiian youths. The findings challenge C. Gilligan's (1982) theoretical proposition that gender differences exist in moral development. Implications for counseling theory, research, and practice are discussed.     

Positive Leader Behaviors and Workplace Incivility: the Mediating Role of Perceived Norms for Respect

Scholars have called for research on the antecedents of mistreatment in organizations such as workplace incivility, as well as the theoretical mechanisms that explain their linkage. To address this call, the present study draws upon social information processing and social cognitive theories to investigate the relationship between positive leader behaviors—those associated with charismatic leadership and ethical leadership—and workers’ experiences of workplace incivility through their perceptions of norms for respect. Relationships were separately examined in two field studies using multi-source data (employees and coworkers in study 1, employees and supervisors in study 2). Results suggest that charismatic leadership (study 1) and ethical leadership (study 2) are negatively related to employee experiences of workplace incivility through employee perceptions of norms for respect. Norms for respect appear to operate as a mediating mechanism through which positive forms of leadership may negatively relate to workplace incivility. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications for organizations regarding leader behaviors that foster norms for respect and curb uncivil behaviors at work.