The development of social networks from early to middle childhood: Gender differences and the relation to school competence

The purpose of this study was to examine gender differences in social network development from early to middle childhood and the relation of network characteristics to school competence. Maternal report of 75 children's kin, nonkin adult, and friendship networks were collected at 3, 6, and 9 years of age. Teacher ratings of school competence were obtained at 9 years. While children showed changes in their social networks over time, expected gender differences were not found in the extensive nature of the nonkin network. However, as expected, preference for same-sex friends was noted in early childhood and intensified with age into middle childhood. For girls, but not for boys, social network characteristics were related to teacher ratings of social competence in school.The preparation of this paper was made possible by the support of the William T. Grant Foundation.     

The child's social network: Sex differences from three to six years

The social networks of 85 young children as they make the transition from a home-centered to a more school-centered existence is examined using longitudinal data. When the children were three and six years of age, their mothers completed a questionnaire of network structure; at six years both the child and mother independently reported the friends that the child would invite to a birthday party. The effects of age and sex of child on the number and daily contact with peers, adults, kin, nonkin, males, and females were found. As expected, as children reached formal school age they had increased contact with peers and decreased contact with kin, while adult contact remained fairly consistent over the three- to six-year age period. Sex differences were also apparent. As predicted, children as early as 3 years, and to an even greater extent at six years, showed more same-sex compared to opposite-sex peer contact. At six years both children and mothers reported more same- as compared to opposite-sex friends who would be invited by the child to a birthday party. The findings suggest how children's social networks, as shaped by their parents and themselves, provide a framework within which experience and interaction is structured to fit cultural norms.     

Visual working memory depends on attentional filtering

Working memory holds information actively being used in cognitive performance. Two important aspects of working memory are how many items it can hold, and how efficiently it can be used. Recently, Vogel and colleagues used event-related brain potentials to show that these two things are related. People who could remember more objects from a spatial array also more efficiently excluded irrelevant objects. The results raise important questions about what aspect of working memory is most fundamental.     

When do visual and verbal memories conflict? The importance of working-memory load and retrieval

Examinations of interference between verbal and visual materials in working memory have produced mixed results. If there is a central form of storage (e.g., the focus of attention; N. Cowan, 2001), then cross-domain interference should be obtained. The authors examined this question with a visual-array comparison task (S. J. Luck & E. K. Vogel, 1997) combined with various verbal memory load conditions. Interference between tasks occurred if there was explicit retrieval of the verbal load during maintenance of a visual array. The effect was localized in the maintenance period of the visual task and was not the result of articulation per se. Interference also occurred when especially large silent verbal and visual loads were held concurrently. These results suggest central storage along with code-specific passive storage.     

Nipping psychopathy in the bud: an examination of the convergent, predictive, and theoretical utility of the PCL-YV among adolescent girls

Over the last decade rates of violence among adolescent girls have increased. Within high-risk contexts, urgent calls for assessment options have resulted in the extension of adult and male-based instruments to adolescent females in spite of the absence of strong empirical support. The current study evaluates the downward extension of psychopathy within a population of female juvenile offenders (N=125). The convergent and predictive validity of the Psychopathy Checklist-Youth Version (PCL-YV) were evaluated within a structural equation modeling (SEM) framework. Results indicated that while a specific component of psychopathy, deficient affective experience, was related to aggression, the effect was negated once victimization experiences were entered into the models. In addition, PCL-YV scores were not predictive of future offending, while victimization experiences significantly increased the odds of re-offending. Implications for research, policy, and clinical practice are discussed.     

Three steps to open science for qualitative research in psychology

Principles and applications of open science (also referred to as open research or open scholarship) in psychology have emerged in response to growing concerns about the replicability, transparency, reproducibility, and robustness of psychological research alongside global moves to open science in many fields. Our objective in this paper is to inform ways of collectively constructing open science practices and systems that are appropriate to, and get the best out of, the full range of qualitative and mixed-method approaches used in psychology. We achieve this by describing three areas of open research practice (contributorship, pre-registration, and open data) and explore how and why qualitative researchers might consider engaging with these in ways that are compatible with a qualitative research paradigm. We argue it is crucial that open research practices do not (even inadvertently) exclude qualitative research, and that qualitative researchers reflect on how we can meaningfully engage with open science in psychology.     

Sexual and nonsexual marital aggression: Legal considerations, epidemiology, and an integrated typology of perpetrators

In this paper, the legal history of marital rape and the current status of “marital rape allowances” to sexual assault statutes are reviewed. The prevalence of marital rape and its comorbidity with nonsexual violence, as well as the physical and psychological sequelae found to be specifically associated with sexual aggression in marriage is reviewed. Our current limited theoretical understanding of the relationship between sexual and nonsexual violence in marriage is extended by integrating marital rape and marital violence batterer typology research. Specifically, we offer a four-type batterer typology integration (i.e., family-only, dysphoric/borderline, generally violent/antisocial, and sexually obsessive batterers) that fully describe husbands that are only nonsexually violent, both physically and sexually violent, or only sexually violent. Theoretical and practical implications of this integration are identified. Future research directions are outlined, and the need for greater clinical attention to the phenomena of sexual violence in marriage is highlighted.     

From correlates to causes: can quasi-experimental studies and statistical innovations bring us closer to identifying the causes of antisocial behavior?

Longitudinal, epidemiological studies have identified robust risk factors for youth antisocial behavior, including harsh and coercive discipline, maltreatment, smoking during pregnancy, divorce, teen parenthood, peer deviance, parental psychopathology, and social disadvantage. Nevertheless, because this literature is largely based on observational studies, it remains unclear whether these risk factors have truly causal effects. Identifying causal risk factors for antisocial behavior would be informative for intervention efforts and for studies that test whether individuals are differentially susceptible to risk exposures. In this article, we identify the challenges to causal inference posed by observational studies and describe quasi-experimental methods and statistical innovations that may move researchers beyond discussions of risk factors to allow for stronger causal inference. We then review studies that used these methods, and we evaluate whether robust risk factors identified from observational studies are likely to play a causal role in the emergence and development of youth antisocial behavior. There is evidence of causal effects for most of the risk factors we review. However, these effects are typically smaller than those reported in observational studies, suggesting that familial confounding, social selection, and misidentification might also explain some of the association between risk exposures and antisocial behavior. For some risk factors (e.g., smoking during pregnancy, parent alcohol problems), the evidence is weak that they have environmentally mediated effects on youth antisocial behavior. We discuss the implications of these findings for intervention efforts to reduce antisocial behavior and for basic research on the etiology and course of antisocial behavior.     

Hemifacial preferences for the perception of emotion and attractiveness differ with the gender of the one beheld

Though the left cheek appears more emotive, perceptions of attractiveness vary with gender. For the first time, this study assessed the relationship between perceptions of emotion (happiness) and attractiveness in naturalistic photographic portraits. One hundred ninety-two participants (63 male; 129 female) viewed pairs of left and right cheek poses, and made a forced-choice decision indicating which image appeared (a) more emotive and (b) more attractive (order counterbalanced). Half the images were mirror-reversed to control for perceptual biases. Results indicated a striking gender difference: for males, the left cheek appears both more emotive and more attractive; for females, preferences are subject to stronger perceptual influences, with the right cheek bias for emotion and attractiveness reversing to a left cheek bias when images are mirror-reversed. These findings suggest that if you want to show the world your "best side", men should lead with the left but for women, the right cheek is right.