Increasing following headway with prompts, goal setting, and feedback in a driving simulator

We evaluated the effects of prompting, goal setting, and feedback on following headway of young drivers in a simulated driving environment and assessed whether changes produced in following headway were associated with reductions in hard braking when drivers were and were not using cell phones. Participants were 4 university students. During baseline, drivers spent half of the time talking on cell phones while driving. At the start of the intervention, drivers were prompted to increase following headway while on the cell phones and were provided a specific target for following headway. Drivers were given feedback on increasing following headway when on cell phones at the end of each session. The intervention package was associated with an increase in following headway and a decrease in hard braking when participants were on and off the cell phones. Cell phone use did not affect any of the measures.     

Evidence for hypodescent and racial hierarchy in the categorization and perception of biracial individuals

Individuals who qualify equally for membership in two racial groups provide a rare window into social categorization and perception. In 5 experiments, we tested the extent to which a rule of hypodescent, whereby biracial individuals are assigned the status of their socially subordinate parent group, would govern perceptions of Asian-White and Black-White targets. In Experiment 1, in spite of posing explicit questions concerning Asian-White and Black-White targets, hypodescent was observed in both cases and more strongly in Black-White social categorization. Experiments 2A and 2B used a speeded response task and again revealed evidence of hypodescent in both cases, as well as a stronger effect in the Black-White target condition. In Experiments 3A and 3B, social perception was studied with a face-morphing task. Participants required a face to be lower in proportion minority to be perceived as minority than in proportion White to be perceived as White. Again, the threshold for being perceived as White was higher for Black-White than for Asian-White targets. An independent categorization task in Experiment 3B further confirmed the rule of hypodescent and variation in it that reflected the current racial hierarchy in the United States. These results documenting biases in the social categorization and perception of biracials have implications for resistance to change in the American racial hierarchy.     

Predictors of Health Care Use Among Individuals Seeking Therapy for Marital and Family Problems: An Exploratory Study

A number of studies have examined variables associated with health care use. However, no study is known to have considered health care use among people seeking services for marital and family problems. In this study, health care use of persons (N = 110) seeking these services was investigated to determine the strongest psychosocial correlates of health care use. The goal was to identify potential “targets” of clinical intervention that may be driving excessive health care use. “Informational support” and “somatization” were the strongest correlates for the complete sample, with the model explaining 24% of the variance in health care use. For “high users” of health care, “hostility” was the strongest correlate, accounting for more than 36% of the variance in health care use.     

Expanding the boundaries of psychological resource theories

This article introduces JOOP's special section on expanding the boundaries of resource theories in occupational and organizational psychology. After an introduction of the most relevant resource theories and their current application in occupational and organizational psychology – key resource theories, conservation of resources theory, resource theory of social exchange, and selective optimization with compensation theory – the opportunities and challenges for future research are outlined, as well as the innovative trends emerging from the contributions in this special section.     

Conceptual complexity and the bias/variance tradeoff

In this paper we propose that the conventional dichotomy between exemplar-based and prototype-based models of concept learning is helpfully viewed as an instance of what is known in the statistical learning literature as the bias/variance tradeoff. The bias/variance tradeoff can be thought of as a sliding scale that modulates how closely any learning procedure adheres to its training data. At one end of the scale (high variance), models can entertain very complex hypotheses, allowing them to fit a wide variety of data very closely—but as a result can generalize poorly, a phenomenon called overfitting. At the other end of the scale (high bias), models make relatively simple and inflexible assumptions, and as a result may fit the data poorly, called underfitting. Exemplar and prototype models of category formation are at opposite ends of this scale: prototype models are highly biased, in that they assume a simple, standard conceptual form (the prototype), while exemplar models have very little bias but high variance, allowing them to fit virtually any combination of training data. We investigated human learners’ position on this spectrum by confronting them with category structures at variable levels of intrinsic complexity, ranging from simple prototype-like categories to much more complex multimodal ones. The results show that human learners adopt an intermediate point on the bias/variance continuum, inconsistent with either of the poles occupied by most conventional approaches. We present a simple model that adjusts (regularizes) the complexity of its hypotheses in order to suit the training data, which fits the experimental data better than representative exemplar and prototype models.     

Comparison of different strategies to decrease negative affect and increase positive affect in women with borderline personality disorder

Background

In this study we compared the effect of different emotion regulation strategies on positive and negative emotions in patients with borderline personality disorder.

Methods

Emotion regulation strategies were a distracting task, individual positive memory imagery, individual soothing imagery, and a neutral comparison condition. During two separate sessions, 17 participants watched either neutral or negative movie segments before using these strategies.

Results

All three strategies influenced emotions into a favorable direction as compared to the neutral comparison condition. The positive memory image increased positive emotions significantly stronger than counting colors and distracting.

Discussion

Different strategies seem to have similar effects in decreasing negative emotions. Positive emotions may be affected in particular by positive and soothing imagery techniques.     

Superordinate shape classification using natural shape statistics

This paper investigates the classification of shapes into broad natural categories such as animal or leaf. We asked whether such coarse classifications can be achieved by a simple statistical classification of the shape skeleton. We surveyed databases of natural shapes, extracting shape skeletons and tabulating their parameters within each class, seeking shape statistics that effectively discriminated the classes. We conducted two experiments in which human subjects were asked to classify novel shapes into the same natural classes. We compared subjects’ classifications to those of a naive Bayesian classifier based on the natural shape statistics, and found good agreement. We conclude that human superordinate shape classifications can be well understood as involving a simple statistical classification of the shape skeleton that has been “tuned” to the natural statistics of shape.     

Sex and the Spectacle of Music Videos: An Examination of the Portrayal of Race and Sexuality in Music Videos

This content analysis used two studies to examine sexual behaviors and sex role portrayals in music videos televised in the United States. The first study included 120 videos recorded from MTV, MTV2, VH-1, BET, and CMT and revealed African American videos were significantly more likely to portray sexual content and female characters in provocative clothing than White videos. The second study analyzed 20 videos from BET??s late-night program, Un:Cut. Results revealed Un:Cut videos depicted seven times as many sexual acts and featured significantly more discouraged sexual behaviors than videos from the five major music video channels. Findings from these studies clarify that race is an important factor when gender roles and sexual content are examined in music videos.     

Relation Between Outcomes on a Continuous Performance Test and ADHD Symptoms Over Time

This study examined the relationship between the developmental trajectories of neuropsychological functioning and ADHD symptomatology in a longitudinal sample of children ages 9 to 14. Participants and measures were derived from the Multimodal Treatment Study for ADHD including 534MTA participants and 254 normal controls. Despite improvement over time, MTA participants continued to receive higher ratings of ADHD symptomatology and exhibit greater difficulties across the majority of neuropsychological outcomes. No relations were found between improvements in neuropsychological functioning and ADHD symptomatology over time. Findings provide support for the persistence of neuropsychological functioning and ADHD symptomatology. Findings did not support the hypothesized relation between improvements in frontally-mediated neuropsychological functioning and ADHD symptomatology possibly due to the brief 1-year lag and limited assessment battery. Findings are discussed in relation to neuropsychological development including recommendations for future research.     

The context of control: a cross-national investigation of the link between political institutions, efficacy, and collective action

Most research on efficacy and participation in collective action has focused on single country samples with little attention paid to the relationship between efficacy and country-level structural factors. Drawing on value expectancy theory, we theorize a link between macro-level political institutions and micro-level efficacy. To address the previous limitations in the efficacy and collective action literature, we use multi-level, cross-national data, and present results from a series of hierarchical models testing whether efficacy increases collective action cross-nationally, whether political institutions affect efficacy, and whether the effect of efficacy on collective action is conditional on political institutions. We find that efficacy increases collective action, that certain political institutions increase efficacy, and that the effect of efficacy on collective action is partly conditional on the inclusiveness of a country's political institutions. These findings suggest the insufficiency of purely structural as well as social psychological explanations of collective action.