What is the right thing at the right time? Interactions between stages and processes of change among smokers who make a quit attempt.

C. A. Perz, C. C. DiClemente, and J. P. Carbonari (1996) claim support for the transtheoretical model notion that success in smoking cessation involves doing the right thing at the right time: emphasising experiential change processes during the contemplation and preparation stages and shifting to behavioral process activities during action. A key methodological limitation of Perz et al. was their failure to control for stage of change, a measure that has been shown to be predictive of cessation. This study replicates the prospective findings of Perz et al. in a different data set, then controls for stage of change when it is predictive of cessation, and finds that the measures of "appropriate" change process use developed by Perz et al. no longer predict cessation. The authors conclude that stage of change, in particular the distinction between smoking and not smoking, is more important than change process use in predicting cessation outcomes.     

Putting personality in social context: extraversion, emergent leadership, and the availability of rewards

The present research tested relations between extraversion and emergent leadership among men in situations that differed in potential reward availability. Four-person groups of men engaged in a Leaderless Group Discussion (LGD) task and were randomly assigned to be evaluated by an attractive female observer, an attractive male observer, or not be evaluated. Evolutionary theories suggest that impressing a female evaluator in an intrasexually competitive situation should hold greater reward potential for men than impressing either a male evaluator or no evaluator. Accordingly, more extraverted men (who are more sensitive to reward cues) should display more group leadership when being evaluated by a woman than either a man or no one. Self-and peer ratings confirmed that more extraverted men were significantly more likely to emerge as leaders, but only in the female-evaluator condition. The results are discussed in terms of the interplay between personality, situational factors, and evolutionary principles.     

Discrimination and the positive-negative asymmetry effect: ideological and normative processes

Research using the minimal group paradigm demonstrates that categorization and ingroup identification can foster intergroup discrimination. However, the positive-negative asymmetry effect shows that less discrimination occurs when negative rather than positive outcomes are distributed. The normative hypothesis explains this asymmetry by the stronger inappropriateness of discrimination in negative than in positive outcome distributions. Results obtained in this minimal group paradigm study (N = 257) did not replicate the asymmetry effect: discrimination occurred in both positive and negative outcome distributions, even if norms against discrimination were stronger in negative than in positive outcome distributions. The absence of the asymmetry effect is explained by the effect of the discrimination-justifying ideology.     

Hong Kong Chinese kindergartners learn to read English analytically

We examined the extent to which young Hong Kong Chinese children, taught to read English as a second language via a logographic "look and say" method, used information about letter names and letter sounds to learn English words. Forty children from each of three kindergarten grade levels (mean ages 3.8, 5.0, and 5.9 years old, respectively) were taught to pronounce novel English spellings that were based on letter-name (e.g., DK = Deke), letter-sound (DK = Dick), or visual (Dk= Jean) cues. By the 2nd year of kindergarten, children performed significantly better in the name condition than the other conditions. The 3rd-year kindergartners performed better in the sound condition than the visual condition as well. The results point to the importance of letter-name and letter-sound knowledge for learning to read English, regardless of native-language background or method of instruction.     

Computational models of the hippocampal region: linking incremental learning and episodic memory

The hippocampal region, a group of brain structures important for learning and memory, has been the focus of a large number of computational models. These tend to fall into two groups: (1) models of the role of the hippocampal region in incremental learning, which focus on the development of new representations that are sensitive to stimulus regularities and environmental context; (2) models that focus on the role of the hippocampal region in the rapid storage and retrieval of episodic memories. Rather than being in conflict, it is becoming apparent that both approaches are partially correct and might reflect the different functions of substructures of the hippocampal region. Future computational models will help to elaborate how these different substructures interact.