Upsetting Behavior: Reactions to Personal and Bystander Sexual Harassment Experiences

The current research was designed to examine objective and contextual factors related to the appraisal of potentially sexually harassing situations. Working female participants (n = 208) from a mid-sized southwestern university completed a workplace experiences survey in small groups. The majority of participants were Hispanic/Latina (77.9%). We predicted that characteristics of personal harassment experiences (e.g., number of distinct types of behaviors experienced, frequency, duration) and bystander harassment experiences would contribute independently to how upset women were by their own sexual harassment experiences. Results indicated that characteristics of personal harassment experiences and bystander experiences did predict how upset women were by their own gender harassment and by unwanted sexual attention experiences. Results are discussed in terms of the importance of considering multiple types of workplace stressors (e.g., personal and bystander sexual harassment experiences) and their relation to the appraisal process.     

Human Capabilities and the Ethics of Debt

The Journal of Value Inquiry -     

Dysfunctional attitudes and episodes of major depression: Predictive validity and temporal stability in never-depressed, depressed, and recovered women

In a large, community-based sample of women (N = 750), the authors examined the nature of associations between dysfunctional attitudes and depression. Dysfunctional attitudes were evaluated both as a vulnerability factor for depression and as a consequence of depression. A link was found between past depression and baseline elevations in dysfunctional attitudes that was independent of current subsyndromal symptoms, but intensification of dysfunctional attitudes following prospectively evaluated episodes of depression (depressive "scarring") was not observed. Although baseline dysfunctional attitudes predicted an episode of major depression over 3 years of prospective study, this prediction, considered alone or in interaction with negative life events, was redundant with that offered by history of past depression. Further, no significant prediction was evident for the Dysfunctional Attitude Scale (A. N. Weissman & A. T. Beck, 1978) when the formerly depressed and never-depressed cohorts were considered separately. Implications for cognitive theories are discussed.     

Physicians, Patients, and Medical Dialogue in the NYPD Blue Prostate Cancer Story

Extending literature on health information to entertainment television, we analyze the prostate cancer narrative presented in the police drama, NYPD Blue. We explain how the physician-patient interaction depicted on the show followed (and sometimes did not follow) the medical dialogue model. Findings reveal that the producers of this show advocate a more dialogic model of medical interaction. Portrayals of incompetent, ineffective physicians are contrasted with the superior, effective efforts of other physicians. The audience learns that a non-dialogic approach characterizes "bad doctors," while the dialogic method typifies "good doctors." Likewise, medical professionals can use such texts to enhance physician-patient interaction.     

Mindless decision making and environmental issues: gestalt/feature-intensive processing and contextual reasoning in environmental decisions

In the absence of relevant information in working memory during decision consideration, respondents tend to rely on a style of cognitive processing that may result in premature or inaccurate decision making (M. J. Sharps, 2003). M. J. Sharps and S. S. Martin (2002) demonstrated this effect in executive decision making. In the present study, the authors extended these methods to decisions about environmental issues. Respondents rated decisions about issues such as overpopulation, energy policy, and food production in the presence or absence of simple pertinent information. The presence of such information in the immediate context of environmental decisions, and therefore in working memory, significantly improved respondents' ability to understand negative decision consequences. These results demonstrate the importance of contextual information in environmental decision making.     

Information structure expectations in sentence comprehension

In English, new information typically appears late in the sentence, as does primary accent. Because of this tendency, perceivers might expect the final constituent or constituents of a sentence to contain informational focus. This expectation should in turn affect how they comprehend focus-sensitive constructions such as ellipsis sentences. Results from four experiments on sluicing sentences (e.g., The mobster implicated the thug, but we can't find out who else) suggest that perceivers do prefer to place focus late in the sentence, though that preference can be mitigated by prosodic information (pitch accents, Experiment 2) or syntactic information (clefted sentences, Experiment 3) indicating that focus is located elsewhere. Furthermore, it is not necessarily the direct object, but the informationally focused constituent that is the preferred antecedent (Experiment 4). Expectations regarding the information structure of a sentence, which are only partly cancellable by means of overt focus markers, may explain persistent biases in ellipsis resolution.     

Inferior Frontal Regions Underlie the Perception of Phonetic Category Invariance

ABSTRACT— The problem of mapping differing sensory stimuli onto a common category is fundamental to human cognition. Listeners perceive stable phonetic categories despite many sources of acoustic variability. What are the neural mechanisms that underlie this perceptual stability? In this functional magnetic resonance imaging study, a short-interval habituation paradigm was used to investigate neural sensitivity to acoustic changes within and between phonetic categories. A region in the left inferior frontal sulcus showed a pattern of activation consistent with phonetic invariance: insensitivity to acoustic changes within a phonetic category and sensitivity to changes between phonetic categories. Left superior temporal regions, in contrast, showed graded sensitivity to both within- and between-category changes. These results suggest that perceptual insensitivity to changes within a phonetic category may arise from decision-related mechanisms in the left prefrontal cortex and add to a growing body of literature suggesting that the inferior prefrontal cortex plays a domain-general role in computing category representations.     

Iterating between lessons on concepts and procedures can improve mathematics knowledge

Background Knowledge of concepts and procedures seems to develop in an iterative fashion, with increases in one type of knowledge leading to increases in the other type of knowledge. This suggests that iterating between lessons on concepts and procedures may improve learning. Aims The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the instructional benefits of an iterative lesson sequence compared to a concepts‐before‐procedures sequence for students learning decimal place‐value concepts and arithmetic procedures. Samples In two classroom experiments, sixth‐grade students from two schools participated (N = 77 and 26). Method Students completed six decimal lessons on an intelligent‐tutoring systems. In the iterative condition, lessons cycled between concept and procedure lessons. In the concepts‐first condition, all concept lessons were presented before introducing the procedure lessons. Results In both experiments, students in the iterative condition gained more knowledge of arithmetic procedures, including ability to transfer the procedures to problems with novel features. Knowledge of concepts was fairly comparable across conditions. Finally, pre‐test knowledge of one type predicted gains in knowledge of the other type across experiments. Conclusions An iterative sequencing of lessons seems to facilitate learning and transfer, particularly of mathematical procedures. The findings support an iterative perspective for the development of knowledge of concepts and procedures.     

Development and Initial Validation of an Abbreviated Spider Phobia Questionnaire Using Item Response Theory

An abbreviated Spider Phobia Questionnaire (SPQ) was developed using methods based in item response theory. Fifteen of the 31 SPQ items that demonstrated good to excellent discrimination along the spider fear continuum were retained in Study 1 that consisted of 1,555 nonclinical and clinical participants. The SPQ-15 demonstrated good internal consistency and correlated highly with the full SPQ. Structural equation modeling revealed that the SPQ-15 demonstrated excellent convergent validity, with strong associations with small animal disgust and other phobic symptoms. Supportive evidence was also found for divergent validity in relation to panic-related symptoms. The SPQ-15 was uniquely predictive of avoidance behavior and fear and disgust responding towards spiders in nonclinical, analogue, and treatment-seeking samples in Studies 2, 3, and 4. Lastly, in Study 5, the SPQ-15 was sensitive to the effects of exposure-based treatment. These findings suggest that the SPQ-15 has considerable strengths, including decreased assessment and scoring time while retaining high reliability, validity, and sensitivity.