Social Involvement, Disclosure of Sexual Orientation, and the Quality of Lesbian Relationships

Gay and lesbian political activists encourage lesbians to come out and get involved. Is this good advice for lesbian couples? In these secondary analyses of data collected form 784 lesbian couples in 1979 for the American Couples Study (Blumstein & Schwartz, 1983), we examined whether social involvement and disclosure of sexual orientation were systematically associated with the quality of women's relationships. We predicted and found that partners matched on level of social involvement were happier than mismatched couples. The extent of women's social involvement had a curvilinear association with relationship quality: moderately involved couples were the most satisfied. Contrary to predictions, lesbians who had disclosed to a greater number of important others did not have more satisfying romantic relationships, nor did partner matching on self-disclosure enhance relationship quality.     

Face the food: Food plating with facial patterns influences appetite and event-related brain potentials

The presentation of visual food cues (e.g., food plating) can affect our appetite and leads to characteristic changes of early as well as late positivity in the electroencephalogram. The present event-related potential (ERP) study attempted to change ERPs and affective ratings for food pictures by rearranging the components of a depicted meal (conventional presentation) as a smiley or frowny. The images were presented to 68 women (mean age?=?24 years), who rated the wanting and liking of the meals. Compared to conventional food plating, smiley and frowny meals elicited enhanced amplitudes of the P200, P300, and late positive potential (LPP) in a large occipito-parietal cluster. Frowny meals were rated as less appetizing than conventional food presentations. The mentioned ERP components are concomitants of face configuration processing (P200), automatic attention/novelty detection (P300), and voluntary attention/assignment of emotional meaning (LPP). Thus, the combination of two affective cues (food, face) in one stimulus changed the activation in motivational circuits of the brain. Also, serving a meal as a frowny could help to regulate appetite.

     

Nonconvergence,improper solutions,and starting values in lisrel maximum likelihood estimation

In the framework of a robustness study on maximum likelihood estimation with LISREL three types of problems are dealt with: nonconvergence, improper solutions, and choice of starting values. The purpose of the paper is to illustrate why and to what extent these problems are of importance for users of LISREL. The ways in which these issues may affect the design and conclusions of robustness research is also discussed.     

Gender and the phonology of north American first names

This study elicited given and preferred first names from 222 females and 267 male respondents to investigate potential sex-associated features in the structural characteristics of names. Female given names were found to manifest significantly more sounds and syllables, more frequently vary the position of stressed syllable, and more often conclude in a vowel or sonorant sound than male names. In comparison with given names, both female and male preferred names moved in the direction of a potentially ideal structure consisting of a monosyllable that ends in a consonant. The rate of the shift was much less pronounced for female than for male preferred names.The authors would like to thank Bruce Boling for serving as reliability coder.     

Picture recognition without picture identification: a method for assessing the role of perceptual information in familiarity-based picture recognition

The present study examined the claim that unidentifiable test-pictures are processed and recognized on a perceptual, as opposed to a conceptual, level. Using an extension of the recognition without identification paradigm (e.g., Cleary, A. M. & Greene, R. L. (2000). Recognition without identification. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 26, 1063-1069; Peynircioglu, Z. F. (1990). A feeling-of-recognition without identification. Journal of Memory and Language, 29, 493-500), it was observed that when test-pictures were unidentifiable during a masked perceptual identification task, old-new discrimination occurred when the study-list consisted of pictures (Experiments 1-3), but not when the study-list consisted of picture names (Experiment 2) or when picture exemplars served as test-cues (Experiment 3). Results provide converging evidence that a study-test perceptual match is needed for the episodic recognition of unidentified test-pictures. Implications for the present paradigm as a tool for examining the role of perceptual information in recognition-familiarity are discussed.     

The negative consequences of threat: a functional magnetic resonance imaging investigation of the neural mechanisms underlying women's underperformance in math

This study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify the neural structures associated with women's underperformance on math tasks. Although women in a control condition recruited neural networks that are associated with mathematical learning (i.e., angular gyrus, left parietal and prefrontal cortex), women who were reminded of gender stereotypes about math ability did not recruit these regions, and instead revealed heightened activation in a neural region associated with social and emotional processing (ventral anterior cingulate cortex).     

The neural bases of the constructive nature of autobiographical memories studied with a self-paced fMRI design

In Conway and Pleydell-Pearce's model (2000), autobiographical memories are viewed as transitory mental representations, more often generated in an effortful way. An important claim of the model concerns the dynamic process that evolves over time, from the left prefrontal areas to posterior regions, to retrieve specific memories. The present work aims at investigating, using fMRI, the temporal distribution of effortful autobiographical memory construction. In addition, a self-paced design was implemented to elucidate the question of the timing window required to evoke recollections. The results showed a large pattern of brain regions, which included the two major poles of activation predicted by Conway and Pleydell-Pearce's model. Likewise, we were able to detect the earlier implication of the left dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex, by comparison with posterior structures, which seemed to confirm its involvement in the effortful retrieval process. Finally, the self-paced procedure allowed us to refine the timing window necessary to construct past events.     

Anxiety and sensitivity to eye gaze in emotional faces

This paper reports three studies in which stronger orienting to perceived eye gaze direction was revealed when observers viewed faces showing fearful or angry, compared with happy or neutral, emotional expressions. Gaze-related spatial cueing effects to laterally presented fearful faces and centrally presented angry faces were also modulated by the anxiety level of participants, with high- but not low-state anxious individuals revealing enhanced shifts of attention. In contrast, both high- and low-state anxious individuals demonstrated enhanced orienting to averted gaze when viewing laterally presented angry faces. These results provide novel evidence for the rapid integration of facial expression and gaze direction information, and for the regulation of gaze-cued attention by both the emotion conveyed in the perceived face and the degree of anxiety experienced by the observer.     

Virtual and physical venues as contexts for HIV risk among rural men who have sex with men.

Rural men who have sex with men (MSM) have few identifiable venues in which to congregate and meet potential sex partners. The Internet provides a venue for rural MSM to meet, and this is potentially troubling because studies of urban MSM suggest that HIV risk is higher for men who date online. The goals of this study were to identify venues where rural MSM meet their sexual partners and to examine their association with high-risk sexual practices. Six hundred sixty-three predominantly single, gay, Caucasian MSM completed an online survey of their sexual activities. Results showed that the Internet and bars were the most popular venues for meeting sex partners. Highest rates of risk behaviors were associated with Internet dating and venues in which immediate sexual encounters typically occur, suggesting that prevention in rural areas should target multiple-risk environments.     

Is spoken duration a sufficient explanation of the word length effect?

The word length effect is one of the cornerstones of trace decay plus rehearsal models (TDR) of memory. Words of long spoken duration take longer to rehearse than words of short spoken duration and as such suffer more decay and are thus less well recalled. The current experiment manipulates both syllable length and spoken duration within words of fixed syllable length in an aim to test the assumptions of the TDR model. Our procedures produced robust effects of both syllable length and spoken duration in four measures of the time it takes to pronounce the different types of words. Serial recall for the same materials produced robust syllable effects, but no duration effects.