Stigma,Disclosure and Relationship Agency in Black Women’s Sexual Relationships with Behaviorally Bisexual Black Men

The health needs and relationships of Black women partnered with behaviorally bisexual Black men are under addressed in the public health literature. This paper explores the relationship dynamics of Black women’s sexual relationships with behaviorally bisexual Black men. We conducted thirty qualitative interviews with a group of HIV negative and HIV positive women partnered with behaviorally bisexual Black men in the San Francisco Bay Area. Women took part in a one-time qualitative interview that addressed relationships, bisexual partners, sexuality, HIV risk behaviors, and disclosure. Women described experiences of their own and their partner’s experiences of disclosure and sexual stigma, along with structural racism and masculine cultural norms that contribute to men’s non-disclosure of sex with men. The paper identifies the ways in which disclosure and stigma are experienced by a sample of women in relationships with behaviorally bisexual Black male partners, pointing to the ways in which these women demonstrate sexual agency in these relationships. These sexual narratives emphasize the ways in which Black women are at once agentic and also navigate gendered vulnerability in their relationships with bisexual men. These findings of Black women’s sexual agency present a call to develop health interventions resonant with Black women’s relationship experiences and structures of bisexual relationships.     

Re‐examination of Oostenbroek et al. (2016): evidence for neonatal imitation of tongue protrusion

The meaning, mechanism, and function of imitation in early infancy have been actively discussed since Meltzoff and Moore's (1977) report of facial and manual imitation by human neonates. Oostenbroek et al. (2016) claim to challenge the existence of early imitation and to counter all interpretations so far offered. Such claims, if true, would have implications for theories of social‐cognitive development. Here we identify 11 flaws in Oostenbroek et al.'s experimental design that biased the results toward null effects. We requested and obtained the authors’ raw data. Contrary to the authors’ conclusions, new analyses reveal significant tongue‐protrusion imitation at all four ages tested (1, 3, 6, and 9 weeks old). We explain how the authors missed this pattern and offer five recommendations for designing future experiments. Infant imitation raises fundamental issues about action representation, social learning, and brain–behavior relations. The debate about the origins and development of imitation reflects its importance to theories of developmental science.     

The Role of Language in Temporal Cognition in 6- to 10-Year-Old Children

The ability to recognize temporal patterns and position events in time emerges during the preschool years and is refined in middle childhood. This study explored individual differences in temporal cognition in relation to verbal and nonverbal abilities. Children (30 boys, 32 girls; M_age = 8;2, age range = 6;0?10;8) completed 3 temporal-cognition tasks measuring estimation of temporal distance (how far events are from the present), knowledge of conventional times of events (specific days or months of events), and flexibility in using the calendar system (arranging nonconsecutive months in order), along with assessments of nonverbal intelligence, verbal short-term memory, visual-spatial working memory, receptive vocabulary, receptive grammar, and reading mastery. Controlling for age, performance across temporal-cognition tasks correlated with language abilities; nonverbal abilities accounted for little to no additional variance. The findings link language skills with the acquisition of conventional time patterns; such patterns developed alongside the ability to gauge distances of events in the past or future and form an organized timeline.     

A survey of neuropsychologists’ use of validity tests with children and adolescents

A web-based survey of validity test use by North American neuropsychologists was conducted, with 282 participants meeting inclusion criteria. Respondents indicated that they use a median of one stand-alone performance validity test (PVT), one embedded PVT, and one symptom validity test (SVT) per pediatric assessment. The vast majority of respondents indicated they give at least one PVT (92%) and at least one SVT (88%) during each pediatric assessment. A meaningful difference in validity use (i.e., at least a medium effect size) was only found for those who engage in forensic work, with those clinicians giving more stand-alone PVTs than those who do not conduct forensic work. The most frequently used validity measures in pediatric assessments are presented, as are reasons participants reported for both using and not using validity tests. Limitations and qualitative comparisons to other surveys on validity test use with adults are discussed.     

The MR2: A multi-racial,mega-resolution database of facial stimuli

Faces impart exhaustive information about their bearers, and are widely used as stimuli in psychological research. Yet many extant facial stimulus sets have substantially less detail than faces encountered in real life. In this paper, we describe a new database of facial stimuli, the Multi-Racial Mega-Resolution database (MR2). The MR2 includes 74 extremely high resolution images of European, African, and East Asian faces. This database provides a high-quality, diverse, naturalistic, and well-controlled facial image set for use in research. The MR2 is available under a Creative Commons license, and may be accessed online.     

Event-related potentials reveal the relations between feature representations at different levels of abstraction

In this paper, we use behavioural methods and event-related potentials (ERPs) to explore the relations between informational and instantiated features, as well as the relation between feature abstraction and rule type. Participants are trained to categorize two species of fictitious animals and then identify perceptually novel exemplars. Critically, two groups are given a perfectly predictive counting rule that, according to Hannah and Brooks (2009. Featuring familiarity: How a familiar feature instantiation influences categorization. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology/Revue Canadienne de Psychologie Expérimentale, 63, 263–275. Retrieved from http://doi.org/10.1037/a0017919), should orient them to using abstract informational features when categorizing the novel transfer items. A third group is taught a feature list rule, which should orient them to using detailed instantiated features. One counting-rule group were taught their rule before any exposure to the actual stimuli, and the other immediately after training, having learned the instantiations first. The feature-list group were also taught their rule after training. The ERP results suggest that at test, the two counting-rule groups processed items differently, despite their identical rule. This not only supports the distinction that informational and instantiated features are qualitatively different feature representations, but also implies that rules can readily operate over concrete inputs, in contradiction to traditional approaches that assume that rules necessarily act on abstract inputs.     

Recognizing speech under a processing load: Dissociating energetic from informational factors

Effects of perceptual and cognitive loads on spoken-word recognition have so far largely escaped investigation. This study lays the foundations of a psycholinguistic approach to speech recognition in adverse conditions that draws upon the distinction between energetic masking, i.e., listening environments leading to signal degradation, and informational masking, i.e., listening environments leading to depletion of higher-order, domain-general processing resources, independent of signal degradation. We show that severe energetic masking, such as that produced by background speech or noise, curtails reliance on lexical-semantic knowledge and increases relative reliance on salient acoustic detail. In contrast, informational masking, induced by a resource-depleting competing task (divided attention or a memory load), results in the opposite pattern. Based on this clear dissociation, we propose a model of speech recognition that addresses not only the mapping between sensory input and lexical representations, as traditionally advocated, but also the way in which this mapping interfaces with general cognition and non-linguistic processes.     

Exploring the time course of semantic interference and associative priming in the picture-word interference task

The picture-word interference (PWI) task is a widely used technique for exploring effects of semantic context on lexical access. In this task, printed words are superimposed over pictures to be named, with the timing of the interfering word relative to the picture systematically manipulated. Two experiments (N = 24 adults in each) explored the time course of effects of associates (e.g., CARROT superimposed on a picture of a rabbit) versus coordinates (e.g., CHIPMUNK superimposed on a picture of a rabbit) on naming latencies. Associates led to faster picture naming than did unrelated words, with facilitative effects occurring at stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs, in ms) ranging from -450 to 0. Coordinates led to slower naming latencies, with the interference effect restricted to SOAs of -150 and 0. The overlapping time course of associative priming and coordinate interference provides important constraints on models of lexical access in speech production.