Effects of gender and sex role orientation on help-seeking attitudes

This study investigated the effects of gender and sex role orientation (masculinity and femininity) on attitudes toward seeking professional psychological help in a sample of 163 student trainee teachers (52 males and 111 females) in Singapore. The mean age of students was 25.39 years (SD = 3.80). ANOVAs revealed statistically significant main effects for gender and femininity on attitudes toward help-seeking. Specifically, females were reported to have more positive overall attitudes toward professional help-seeking and were more willing to recognize a personal need for professional help compared to males. Femininity significantly influenced students’ level of stigma tolerance. These findings suggest that both gender and sex role orientation play an independent role in influencing help-seeking attitudes. In addition, these variables appear to have a differential impact on different aspects of helpseeking.     

Behavior Ratings and Observations of Externalizing Symptoms in Girls: The Role of Child Popularity with Adults

This study examined staff ratings and live observations of externalizing behavior in 149 girls with and without attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), who participated in all-female naturalistic research camps. Girls' popularity with adult camp staff was hypothesized to explain discrepancies between ratings and observations. Compared to behavior observations, staff ratings overestimated the externalizing behavior of girls who were disliked by staff. In contrast, ratings and observations were consistent for girls who were liked by staff. Among girls who were disliked by staff, unpopularity with peers predicted a larger discrepancy between staff ratings and observations, but peer status made little difference in rating–observation discrepancies of girls liked by staff. All results held after controlling for the participants' ADHD versus comparison status. Results suggest that staff ratings may be biased by personal feelings about children and that direct observations may be more immune to such bias.     

Examining the sex- and circadian dependency of a learning phenotype in mice with glycine transporter 1 deletion in two Pavlovian conditioning paradigms

Behavioural characterisation of transgenic mice has been instrumental in search of therapeutic targets for the modulation of cognitive function. However, little effort has been devoted to phenotypic characterisation across environmental conditions and genomic differences such as sex and strain, which is essential to translational research. The present study is an effort in this direction. It scrutinised the stability and robustness of the phenotype of enhanced Pavlovian conditioning reported in mice with forebrain neuronal deletion of glycine transporter 1 by evaluating the possible presence of sex and circadian dependency, and its consistency across aversive and appetitive conditioning paradigms. The Pavlovian phenotype was essentially unaffected by the time of testing between the two circadian phases, but it was modified by sex in both conditioning paradigms. We observed that the effect size of the phenotype was strongest in female mice tested during the dark phase in the aversive paradigm. Critically, the presence of the phenotype in female mutants was accompanied by an increase in resistance to extinction. Similarly, enhanced conditioned responding once again emerged solely in female mutants in the appetitive conditioning experiment, which was again associated with an increased resistance to extinction across days, but male mutants exhibited an opposite trend towards facilitation of extinction. The present study has thus added hitherto unknown qualifications and specifications of a previously reported memory enhancing phenotype in this mouse line by identifying the determinants of the magnitude and direction of the expressed phenotype. This in-depth comparative approach is of value to the interpretation of behavioural findings in general.     

The Dark Triad Traits,Humor Styles,and Schadenfreude: Others' Misery as the Devil's Laughing Stocks1

This research investigated the relationships of the Dark Triad traits, humor styles, and schadenfreude with 169 participants who completed the Short Dark Triad, the Humor Style Questionnaire, and a measure of schadenfreude. Significant correlations imply that those with salient dark traits (psychopathy, Machiavellianism, narcissism) elicit pleasure from others' misfortune. Additionally, schadenfreude can be a product of self-defeating and aggressive humor styles. Indirect effect analysis revealed the significance of the indirect effect of the measured aggressive humor style on the Dark Triad's direct effects on schadenfreude. These results imply that those with salient Dark Triad traits enjoy others' misery as a means to undermine them. Hence, individuals with salient Dark Triad traits tend to engage in downward social comparison.     

How Do You Say Nature?: Opening the Design Space with a Knowledge Environment

In this paper, we describe a design study on how families in Los Angeles experience nature, with a particular focus on how using alternative formats for research analysis and presentation can enrich a design research inquiry. Conducted in Pasadena, CA as a part of Super Studio, the year-long design research class emphasized knowledge building and sharing through design methods of analysis, exhibition, and concept prototypes. After conducting interviews and engaging participants with probes, the class built the results into an open-ended knowledge environment. The main observation from the exhibition – that Angelenos have a limited vocabulary for describing nature and their interaction with it – helped to define the opportunity for design intervention that created connection points between Angelenos and nature. There are few attempts to describe how probe returns evolve into design concepts. Showcased is a process that depends on the unique affordances of design as the vehicle for discovery and invention.     

Toward an intersectional understanding of violence and resilience: An exploratory study of young Southeast Asian men in Alameda and Contra Costa County, California

There is a nascent, but growing, literature on Southeast Asian youth violence that focuses on the role of acculturation, portraying violence as a problem of maladaptation. However, scholars overlook the ways in which violence holds meaning for the youth who experience it and how violence may be related to racial and gender identity formation. We conducted a qualitative study with young Southeast Asian men to elicit the role violence plays in their understanding of what it means for them to be Southeast Asian and male. We conducted focus groups and semi-structured individual interviews with an ethnically diverse group of 21 young Southeast Asian men 13–17 years of age from Alameda and Contra Costa Counties, California. Data were analyzed using the extended case method approach. Our findings illustrate that violence and engagement with community-based organizations are situational tools that these young Southeast Asian men use to navigate their social contexts in an attempt to be resilient in ecological contexts marked by alienation and discrimination, as well as to construct accepted and successful racial and gender identities. Furthermore, we found that their actions were guided by gendered codes of conduct, such as a “code of the street.”     

Discrimination of vowel sounds of very short duration

An experiment was conducted to investigate the discrimination of six vowel sounds of 10 msec duration. Vowels of equal pitch and intensity level were generated by computer. Both phonetically trained (PT) and untrained (UPT) Ss were used. Rapid learning took place, and the PT Ss showed much better discrimination than the UPT Ss. Confusion matrices of the last four learning blocks indicated that /i/ and /u/ sounded very much alike when they were short. The pattern of the test scores was discussed with reference to pure tone perception.     

Curvature is a basic feature for visual search tasks.

A curved target can be found efficiently among straight distractors in a visual search task. This could reflect the status of curvature as a basic feature for visual search. Alternatively, curvature could be detected as a locus of high variation in orientation. In a series of experiments it is shown that efficient search for curvature is possible even if local variation in orientation is eliminated as a cue. This suggests that curvature is part of the set of basic features for visual search and that this set is derived relatively late in the course of visual processing.     

An Examination of the Connections Between Eating Disorder Symptoms,Perceived Burdensomeness,Thwarted Belongingness,and Suicide Risk Among Undergraduate Students

Suicide attempts and premature mortality due to suicide are elevated in people with eating disorders. Informed by the interpersonal theory of suicide, two studies examined the role of perceived burdensomeness and thwarted belongingness in explaining the association between eating disorder symptoms and suicide risk. Results indicated that various eating disorder symptoms had an indirect effect on suicide risk through perceived burdensomeness and thwarted belongingness. Targeting perceived burdensomeness and thwarted belongingness may be useful for decreasing suicide risk among undergraduates with eating disorder symptoms.