When elaboration leads to appropriation: unconscious plagiarism in a creative task

Brown and Murphy's (1989) three-stage paradigm (generation, recall-own, generate-new) was used to assess the effects of participant elaboration on rates of unconscious plagiarism in two experiments using a creative task. Following the generation phase, participants imagined and rated a quarter of the ideas (imagery elaboration), generated improvements to another quarter (generative elaboration), and listened to a quarter of the ideas again without elaboration, with the remaining ideas acting as control. A week later, participants attempted to recall their own ideas, and generate new solutions to the same cues. In Experiment 1 both forms of elaboration equally increased correct recall, and decreased plagiarism in the generate-new task. However, generative elaboration led to significantly greater plagiarism in the recall-own task, but imagery elaboration did not. Participants in Experiment 2 were encouraged not to plagiarise by means of a financial incentive. However, they showed the same pattern as seen in Experiment 1. Therefore, contrary to a simple strength account, the probability of a person plagiarising another's ideas is linked to the particular nature of the elaboration carried out on that idea, rather than its familiarity.     

Minority adolescents and substance use risk/protective factors: a focus on inhalant use

Despite the fact that inhalant use is a growing problem among youth in the United States, relatively little attention has been paid to the demographic and social factors related to its use. This study used data from a household survey of adolescents in Washington state, and found that race/ethnicity was a strong predictor of lifetime prevalence of inhalant use, with Native-American youth being particularly likely to use inhalants. Comparing the age at initiation of inhalant use to other legal and illegal substances, we found that cigarettes and inhalants showed the lowest age at initiation. We conducted logistic regressions on lifetime prevalence of inhalant use, and compared these models to other substances. In general, we found that attachment to parents. parents' drug use, and school attachment were strong predictors of lifetime use of marijuana, alcohol, and inhalants. However, while peer drug use was a strong predictor of marijuana and alcohol use, it was not a significant predictor of adolescents' use of inhalants. Our final set of analyses included inhalant use in regression models predicting other problem behaviors: these analyses demonstrated that inhalant use was a strong predictor of involvement in problem behavior.     

The Koala Fear Questionnaire: a standardized self-report scale for assessing fears and fearfulness in pre-school and primary school children

The Koala Fear Questionnaire (KFQ) is a standardized self-report scale for assessing fears and fearfulness in children aged between 4 and 12 years. The current article presents six studies which examined the reliability and validity of the KFQ. Study 1 (N=108) demonstrated that the visual fear scales of Koala bears as employed in the KFQ are highly comparable to the standard 3-point scales that are used in other childhood fear measures. Study 2 (N=163) provided support for the convergent validity of the KFQ in a sample of 8- to 14-year-old children. That is, the scale correlated substantially with alternative measures of childhood fear and anxiety. Study 3 (N=189) showed that the KFQ possesses good internal consistency and test-retest stability in a group of 8- to 11-year-old children. The results of Studies 4 (N=129) and 5 (N=176) indicated that the KFQ is suitable for children aged 4 to 6 years and demonstrated that the psychometric properties of the scale in younger children are highly similar to those obtained in older children. Study 6 (N=926) showed that the factor structure of the KFQ was theoretically meaningful: although the data clearly pointed in the direction of one factor of general fearfulness, spurs of the commonly found five-factor solution of childhood fear were found in the KFQ. Altogether, the KFQ seems to be a valuable addition to the instrumentarium of clinicians and researchers who are working with fearful and anxious children.     

Looking at Body Image: The Organization of Self-Knowledge About Physical Appearance and Its Relation to Disordered Eating

This study examined the organization of self-knowledge, with special attention to beliefs about physical appearance, in three groups of college-aged women: high body dissatisfaction with symptoms of disordered eating; high body dissatisfaction with no symptoms of disorder; and low body dissatisfaction. In the nondisordered, dissatisfied group, negative beliefs about physical appearance were organized in the self-structure in a way that isolated those beliefs and might minimize their impact and importance. This group also displayed adaptive types of self-concept organization (evaluative integration for those with important negative self-beliefs and compartmentalization for those with important positive beliefs) and effective coping strategies. Features of self-structure that characterize the nondisordered,dissatisfied group may provide a useful model for helping individuals with disordered eating cope with their negative physical appearance beliefs.     

Eighteen- and 24-month-old infants correct others in anticipation of action mistakes

Much of human communication and collaboration is predicated on making predictions about others' actions. Humans frequently use predictions about others' action mistakes to correct others and spare them mistakes. Such anticipatory correcting reveals a social motivation for unsolicited helping. Cognitively, it requires forward inferences about others' actions through mental attributions of goal and reality representations. The current study shows that infants spontaneously intervene when an adult is mistaken about the location of an object she is about to retrieve. Infants pointed out a correct location for an adult before she was about to commit a mistake. Infants did not intervene in control conditions when the adult had witnessed the misplacement, or when she did not intend to retrieve the misplaced object. Results suggest that preverbal infants anticipate a person's mistaken action through mental attributions of both her goal and reality representations, and correct her proactively by spontaneously providing unsolicited information.     

Movement or goal: goal salience and verbal cues affect preschoolers' imitation of action components

The impact of goal salience and verbal cues given by the model on 3- to 5-year-olds' reproduction of action components (movement or goal) was investigated in an imitation choice task. Preschoolers watched an experimenter moving a puppet up or down a ramp, terminating at one of two target objects. The target objects were either differently colored plastic bowls (low-salient group) or sociofunctionally relevant objects (high-salient group). While demonstrating the action in several trials, the model verbalized either the movement, the goal, both the movement and the goal, or none of the components. Children imitated the action on a second ramp with reversed positions of the target objects, so they needed to decide whether to reproduce the observed movement or the observed end state. In the high-salient group, preschoolers preferentially imitated the goal component, whereas in the low-salient group, they did not show a preference for one of the components. Across trials, preschoolers preferentially imitated the goal when this component or both components were verbalized, whereas they showed no preference when the movement or none of the components was emphasized. Yet, verbal cues seemed to have stronger effects in the low-salient condition. We conclude that sociofunctional salience of action goals and communicative cues of the model affect young children's representation of observed actions, leading to a selective reproduction of those action components that are relevant to the child.     

Assessment of Disgust Sensitivity in Children With an Age-Downward Version of the Disgust Emotion Scale

The present study examined the psychometric properties of the Disgust Emotion Scale for Children (DES-C). Principal components analysis of the DES-C data revealed five factors reflecting disgust toward (a) rotting foods, (b) injection and blood, (c) odors, (d) mutilation and death, and (e) animals, which were largely in keeping with the intended subscales. The DES-C showed good reliability, excellent convergent validity (as established by correlations with an alternative self-report index of disgust), fairly good predictive validity (as assessed by correlations with measures of fear/anxiety and a behavioral index of disgust), and acceptable parent–child agreement (in particular with the mothers). Importantly, the DES-C proved to perform better on some psychometric indicators than an age-downward version of the Disgust Scale. These findings indicate that the DES-C should be regarded as the preferred scale for measuring disgust sensitivity and its role in the etiology and maintenance of anxiety problems in children.