Images of Nuclear Activists in Four Countries

Students at colleges or universities in North Carolina (United States), Bath (England), Munich (West Germany) and Selangor (Malaysia) were asked to evaluate a nuclear activist who had engaged in one of three forms of protest against nuclear weapons, ranging from conventional to nonconventional. The age and gender of the activist was also varied; the activist was either male or female and either 22 years old or 72 years old. The overall images of the various activists were positive in all four locations, though the nature of the positive image differed in the four studies. In all four studies, the nature of the activism was of much greater importance than either the age or gender of the activist; the activist who engaged in the most nonconventional form of protest (resulting in his or her arrest) received the least positive ratings. Women evaluated the activists more positively than did men.     

Building youths' resilience within a psychiatric outpatient setting: results from a pilot clinical intervention project

The relevance of resilience research for clinical practice has not yet been established. In this intervention pilot study, the aim was to explore how group work based on enhancing the participants' creativity, self-efficacy, active coping, and sense of continuity could be utilized within a clinical context for adolescents with stressful background experiences. 31 participants and 24 parents completed pre-, post-, and 1-yr. follow-up assessments of the youths' behavior difficulties, as well as depression, positive life attitude, coping, and prosocial behavior. Apart from a drop in self-rated prosocial behavior, no significant treatment effects were found. Implications for clinical practice and research are indicated.     

Recurring auditory experience in the 28- to 34-week-old fetus

This study describes the influence of recurring auditory experience on the fetus during a transitional time period in neurobehavioral development (28-34 weeks gestation). Findings demonstrate that fetal responding can be influenced by earlier experiences and that this effect is potentially influenced by maturity of the autonomic nervous system.     

The longitudinal relation between personality disorder symptoms and depression in adolescence: the mediating role of interpersonal stress

The relation between personality disorder (PD) symptoms, depression, and interpersonal stress were examined over 6 months in a sample of 143 adolescents from a low-income urban high school. Both self report questionnaires in the full sample and structured interviews in a subset of 54 girls indicated the following: PD symptoms predicted greater depressive symptoms and interpersonal stress over time; PD symptoms were highly stable; depressive symptoms did not predict change in PD symptoms over time. Moreover, an integrative model was supported, wherein the route by which PD symptoms led to greater depression was via the generation of interpersonal stress. These results suggest that adolescents' PD symptoms play a destructive role in the construction of interpersonal circumstances during a key period for depression onset.     

Familiarity seekers are fast and novelty seekers are slow

Christie and Klein (1995) demonstrated that a familiar item (word) rapidly attracts attention when presented simultaneously with an unfamiliar item (nonword). However, this finding has never been replicated. The current study is an attempt at such a replication. Participants were presented a familiar word and unfamiliar nonword in the experimental condition. At varying times after stimulus onset one of the items moved, and the participant reported the direction of the movement. A replication of Christie and Klein would be obtained if performance was better for movement discrimination of the familiar item shortly after onset but not at later intervals. The original finding was replicated in fast participants while slower participants show a different effect. A potential individual difference variable is suggested to explain this difference between the fast and slow participants.     

Vector averaging of inhibition of return

Observers detected targets presented 400 msec after a display containing one cue or two to four cues displayed simultaneously in randomly selected locations on a virtual circle around fixation. The cue arrangement was completely uninformative about the upcoming target’s location, and eye position was monitored to ensure that the participants maintained fixation between the cue and their manual detection response. Reflecting inhibition of return (IOR), there was a gradient of performance following single cues, with reaction time decreasing monotonically as the target’s angular distance from the cued direction increased. An equivalent gradient of IOR was found following multiple cues whose center of gravity fell outside the parafoveal region and, thus, whose net vector would activate an orienting response. Moreover, on these trials, whether or not the targeted location had been stimulated by a cue had little effect on this gradient. Finally, when the array of cues was balanced so that its center of gravity was at fixation, there was no IOR. These findings, which suggest that IOR is an aftermath of orienting elicited by the cue, are compatible with population coding of the entire cue (as a grouped array for multiple cues) as the generator of IOR.     

Cognition and Citizen Participation in Social Action1

Citizen participation in social action may depend, in part, on certain beliefs about the world and one's power to initiate change. Existing tests of internality and belief in a just world were modified, creating independent measures of belief in personal power and belief in possible injustices in society. The paper reports data on the reliability and the convergent and discriminant validity of the new Personal Power and Injustice scales. In Studies 1 and 2 the scales predicted outcomes in theoretically relevant experiments. In Study 3 they discriminated among community groups who did, or did not, engage in social action.     

The fragmentation of the religious tradition of the creation,after‐life and morality: Modernity not post‐modernity

Religion asks three central questions: ‘What becomes of us after death?’, ‘How should we lead a moral life?’, and ‘How and why were the universe, life and human beings created?’ In the past, these questions were answered together as part of a single unified narrative. From the mid‐nineteenth century onwards, the growth of modern science and of spiritualism led to a fragmentation of this religious tradition so that the questions are now often asked separately and the answers combined in unexpected ways. This phenomenon is an outgrowth of modernity, not post‐modernity. Post‐modernists have suggested that there has been a recent, new and definitive ending of modernity with a collapse of all dominant grand narratives. Religion is one of the grand narratives supposed to have suddenly unravelled and fragmented in this recent sea‐change, although post‐modernists in general have not bothered to provide the empirical evidence to demonstrate this. The detailed account of the long, slow process of religious fragmentation and the particular role of nineteenth‐century spiritualism given here shows that the post‐modernist thesis does not work for Europe's most important grand narrative—the Christian religion. We can see rather a process of slow unravelling of the origins which go back at the very least to the latter half of the nineteenth century, a time of classic modernity and confidence in progress. This tendency towards fragmentation has continued at least in Europe, but religion persists; it has not experienced the mushroom rise and sudden implosion that has characterised the (until recently) fashionable, grand narratives of the secular intellectuals. We are living in modern, not post‐modern, times.     

Residential Relocation of People Who Are Older: Relationships Among Life Satisfaction,Perceptions, Coping Strategies,and Other Variables

A model of social stress was used to examine variables associated with life satisfaction of older people who were making residential relocations from one level of independence to another level of independence. Data were collected regarding life satisfaction, perceptions of the relocation, coping strategies, and possible conditioning variables.