Effects of anonymous peer observation on adolescents' preference for immediate rewards

Research suggests that the presence of peers influences adolescent risk‐taking by increasing the perceived reward value of risky decisions. While prior work has involved observation of participants by their friends, the current study examined whether observation by an anonymous peer could elicit similarly increased reward sensitivity. Late adolescent participants completed a delay discounting task either alone or under the belief that performance was being observed from a neighboring room by an unknown viewer of the same gender and age. Even in this limited social context, participants demonstrated a significantly increased preference for smaller, immediate rewards when they believed that they were being watched. This outcome challenges several intuitive accounts of the peer effect on adolescent risk‐taking, and indicates that the peer influence on reward sensitivity during late adolescence is not dependent on familiarity with the observer. The findings have both theoretical and practical implications for our understanding of social influences on adolescents' risky behavior.     

Peers influence adolescent reward processing,but not response inhibition

Most adolescent risk taking occurs in the presence of peers. Prior research suggests that peers alter adolescents’ decision making by increasing reward sensitivity and the engagement of regions involved in the processing of rewards, primarily the striatum. However, the potential influence of peers on the capacity for impulse control, and the associated recruitment of the brain’s control circuitry, has not yet been adequately examined. In the current study, adolescents underwent functional neuroimaging while they completed interleaved rounds of risk-taking and response-inhibition tasks. Social context was manipulated such that the participants believed they were either playing alone and unobserved, or watched by an anonymous peer. Compared to those who completed the tasks alone, adolescents in the peer condition took more risks during the risk-taking task and exhibited relatively heightened activation of the striatum. Activity within this striatal region also predicted individual differences in overall risk taking. In contrast, the presence of peers had no effect on behavioral response inhibition and had minimal impact on the engagement of typical cognitive control regions. In a subregion of the anterior insula engaged mutually by both tasks, activity was again found to be sensitive to social context during the risk-taking task, but not during the response-inhibition task. These findings extend the evidence that the presence of peers biases adolescents towards risk taking by increasing reward sensitivity rather than disrupting cognitive control.     

Enriching the Genetic Counseling Recruitment Pipeline: A National Cross-Sectional Study of Public High School Counselors

Early awareness of careers is helpful in recruiting students into a career pipeline. School counselors are among the top resources that students turn to when seeking advice about choosing their career. Studies show that high school is the ideal time to generate interest in the genetic counseling career, especially for minorities. This novel study of 291 high school counselors working in ethnically diverse public school districts in the United States examined to what extent members of this important group discuss genetic counseling as a career option with their students. The findings indicate that the majority of school counselors in this study (83%) did not discuss genetic counseling with their students, citing a lack of resources and lack of student interest as the major barriers. Suggestions of ways to increase high school counselors’ awareness of the genetic counseling career in order to enhance the goal of enriching recruitment of ethnic minorities into the genetic counseling pipeline are presented.     

Self-Objectification and Pregnancy: Are Body Functionality Dimensions Protective?

Objectification theory contends that women are socialized to view their body as an object to be evaluated by others (Fredickson and Roberts 1997). In contrast, pregnancy may be a time that women are more attuned to their body??s functionality. Extending objectification theory, we investigate relationships among body surveillance, awareness and appreciation of body functionality, depressive symptoms, and prenatal health behaviors among an on-line sample of 156 predominantly White, middle-class pregnant women from throughout the U.S recruited through maternity stores, message boards, listservs, and snowballing techniques. We examine whether higher levels of awareness and appreciation of body functionality may attenuate, and thereby possibly protect women from the negative effects of high body surveillance. We found that higher body surveillance was associated with depressive symptoms and, although not significant, tended to be associated with engagement in unhealthy prenatal behaviors. Awareness and appreciation of body functionality were each associated with fewer depressive symptoms and less engagement in unhealthy prenatal behaviors. Supporting our hypotheses, we found that at higher levels of appreciation of body functionality, the relationship between body surveillance and engagement in unhealthy behaviors was attenuated. However, in contrast to our hypotheses, the relationship between body surveillance and depression was stronger at higher levels of awareness of body functionality, and attenuated at lower levels. These findings suggest appreciation of body functionality may buffer negative effects of body surveillance. Future research examining these relationships over the course of pregnancy, and among ethnically and socioeconomically diverse women, is needed.     

Children's low affective perspective-taking ability is associated with low self-initiated pro-sociality

Children's affective perspective-taking (APT) may provide a basis for efficient social interaction. The APT abilities of 83 children from 46 same-sex sibling pairs (ages 36 to 72 months, M = 52.8; SD = 12.6) were assessed through their reactions to affectively loaded story situations, and children whose APT ability (but not general cognitive abilities) was low relative to other children of their age were designated as Low-APT children. These children were not less pro-social when specific social cues or requests for pro-social behavior were given by experimenters. However, low APT may hinder children's ability to infer the need for pro-social action from relatively subtle social cues. Although 46.9% of nonlow APT children behaved pro-socially in at least two of three opportunities they were given to perform a self-initiated pro-social behavior, none of the children who were low on APT did.     

Designing Programs with a Purpose: To Promote Civic Engagement for Life

Curricular and co-curricular civic engagement activities and programs are analyzed in terms of their capacity to contribute to a common set of outcomes associated with nurturing civic-minded graduates: academic knowledge, familiarity with volunteering and nonprofit sector, knowledge of social issues, communication skills, diversity skills, self-efficacy, and intentions to be involved in communities. Different programs that promote civic-mindedness, developmental models, and assessment strategies that can contribute to program enhancement are presented.     

Dispositions and subjunctives

It is generally agreed that dispositions cannot be analyzed in terms of simple subjunctive conditionals (because of what are called “masked dispositions” and “finkish dispositions”). I here defend a qualified subjunctive account of dispositions according to which an object is disposed to Φ when conditions C obtain if and only if, if conditions C were to obtain, then the object would Φ ceteris paribus. I argue that this account does not fall prey to the objections that have been raised in the literature.