Identification of Early Child and Family Risk Factors for Aggressive Victim Status in First Grade

This prospective investigation sought to discriminate children who were both aggressive towards and victimized by peers in the first grade, from those who were only aggressive, only victimized, or neither (i.e., socially adjusted), using early child and family risk factors. Two hundred thirty-eight children, their mothers, and teachers participated in a longitudinal study since birth. All three aggressor/victim subgroups showed greater temperamental dysregulation than the socially adjusted children, but only aggressive victims had significantly poorer social perception skills. Aggressive victims were distinguished from aggressors by greater exposure to maternal depression and from victims by lower levels of early inhibition, but they shared the experiences of negative family emotional expressiveness with aggressors and greater mother-child negativity with victims. The identification of early risk factors is crucial to prevention and early intervention efforts that have the potential to attenuate the long term emotional, social, and academic problems associated with aggressive victim status.     

Adolescents without adolescence: reflections on adolescents' formation of subjectivity and their families in a neoliberal context

This study seeks to determine how certain social situations cannot help but influence subjectivity and family ties. The Keynesian age encouraged and promoted a relatively stable socioeconomic matrix based on a probable future and achievable promise. The installation of a family model related to protective parents who were capable of caring for and protecting their children has been observed. Adolescent subjectivity is constructed based on parameters like generational confrontation and growth, and happiness before the possibility of exercising autonomy. On the other hand, neoliberalism produces a "retraction" of social spaces, dismisses the future, and feelings of instability and insecurity are prevalent, making the family model a "structure that overwhelms parents." Adolescent subjectivity seems incapable of executing generational confrontation, predominantly showing a desire to "protect" the family ("exacerbated messiah complex") by means of a fantasy that acts as a "threading scene" capable of annulling the search for autonomy and growth.     

The Relationship between Religiosity and Drug Use among “At Risk” Women

This study focuses on the interplay between religiosity and drug use in a sample of 250 adult women from the Atlanta, Georgia metropolitan area who were interviewed between August 1997 and August 2000. The research addresses two principal questions: (1) Is there a relationship between the level of religiosity and the amount of illegal drug use reported? (2) If so, is this relationship maintained in multivariate analysis when the effects of other potentially relevant factors like demographic characteristics, childhood maltreatment experiences, psychosocial traits, and substance user-related measures are taken into account? We found that religiosity is related to the amount of drugs women used. Four variables were retained in the final multivariate drug use prediction model: religiosity, coping with everyday stresses, number of family members who are substance abusers, and amount of oral sex. Greater amounts of drugs were used by women who were less religious, less capable of coping with stress, had more drug-abusing family members, and reported having more oral sex. Together, these items explained nearly one-fifth of the variance in the dependent variable. The implications for substance abuse prevention and intervention efforts are discussed.     

Inhibition of return

Immediately following an event at a peripheral location there is facilitation for the processing of other stimuli near that location. This is said to reflect a reflexive shift of attention towards the source of stimulation. After attention is removed from such a peripheral location, there is then delayed responding to stimuli subsequently displayed there. This inhibitory aftereffect, first described in 1984 and later labeled 'inhibition of return (IOR)', encourages orienting towards novel locations and hence might facilitate foraging and other search behaviors. Since its relatively recent discovery, IOR has been the subject of intensive investigation, from many angles and with a wide variety of approaches. After describing the seminal contribution of Posner and Cohen ('Who'), this review will discuss what causes IOR and, once initiated, what effects IOR has on subsequent processing ('What'). The time course ('When') and spatial distribution ('Where') of IOR, and what is known about IOR's neural implementation ('How') and functional significance ('Why') are also discussed.     

The influence of intergroup comparisons on Africans' intelligence test performance in a job selection context

Sub-Saharan Africans living in Belgium (N = 69) completed a culture-free intelligence test in a simulated job selection environment. Prior to testing, the authors instructed participants that Africans' average performance on this test was generally better (positive comparison), worse (negative comparison), or equal to Belgians' performance. In a control condition, no such information was given. Results indicated that, compared with the equal and control conditions, performance was lower when intergroup comparisons were negative. In the former condition, participants were also more likely to endorse external factors that may account for lower performance. The authors interpreted the findings in line with stereotype threat theory (C. M. Steele & J. Aronson, 1995). In the context of job selection, the validity of intelligence tests conducted with members of stigmatized groups may be affected by the salience of social stereotypes and intergroup social comparisons.     

The influence of multiple readings on the missing-letter effect revisited

In searching for a target letter while reading, participants make more omissions when the target letter is embedded in frequent function words than when it is embedded in less frequent content words. According to the guidance-organization (GO) model, this occurs because high-frequency function words are processed faster than low-frequency content words, leaving less time available for letter processing. We tested this hypothesis in three experiments by increasing word-processing speed through text repetition, which should translate into higher omission rates. Participants either read the text and searched for the target letter once or read the text three times and searched for a target letter on all readings or the final reading only. In all the experiments in which participants could not anticipate the target letter to be used, results revealed the presence of a large missing-letter effect that was unaffected by familiarity with the text. In addition, when participants knew from the start the target letter to be used on the final reading, the missing-letter effect was eliminated. Repeated search of the same text for different targets increased omissions equally for function words and content words, but this finding was present even when a new text was used, suggesting that repetition of the search task, rather than familiarity with the text, was responsible.     

The relationship of life event stress and working memory capacity

The relationship between life stress and working memory capacity (WM) was examined in three studies. Participants with more life event stress performed more poorly on Turner and Engle's ( 1989 ) operation‐word span WM task, and this impairment was more pronounced on longer operations. Life event stress also predicted intrusion errors. Finally, self‐reports of intrusive and avoidant thinking predicted functional WM capacity as did the recency of negative life events. The results are interpreted using a limited capacity model of WM in which cognitive representations of stressful life events compete with task demands for attentional resources. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Maintaining Positive Self-Evaluations: Reducing Attention to Diagnostic but Unfavorable Social Comparison Information When General Self-Regard Is Salient

We predicted that when (1) people are faced with diagnostic but personally challenging social comparison information in a domain, and (2) their self-regard is salient, they will be less likely to use the comparison information when judging their standing in the domain (making the judgment less inductive). Participants in Study 1 estimated their standing on risk factors for two health problems, and some did so after their self-regard was made salient. Moreover, some received information (about their peers' standing on these risk factors) that challenged participants' self-serving comparative beliefs. As expected, estimates of personal risk factor standing among high self-regard salience/comparison information participants were less correlated with similar estimates collected 2 months earlier, suggesting the estimates had become less inductive. There was also tentative evidence that, in this condition, self-esteem played a greater role in constructing these estimates. In Study 2, participants were led to believe that their comparative standing on risk factors was better than it actually was, and in this case, they were more likely to use this information when making self-judgments about their personal risk. Evidently, the extent to which people use diagnostic comparison information inductively when making self-inferences depends on the favorability of that information.