Ego development in college

Using the Sentence Completion Test for ego development, we studied several cohorts of students between 1971 and 1979 at a technological institute (Tech) and between 1974 and 1979 at a predominantly liberal arts university (MU). Ego level tended to rise slightly except among women at MU, for whom there was a slight but consistent loss. This particular finding challenges one assumption of a widely accepted version of Piagetian theory: that stage development is irreversible. Women tended to enter MU slightly ahead of men in ego level, but left at the same level. Contrary to expectation, men and women appeared to gain more at Tech than at MU; the difference was significant only for women.     

Disclosure on Campus: Students’ Decisions to Tell Others About Unwanted Sexual Experiences,Intimate Partner Violence,and Stalking

The scope of student victimization occurring on college campuses is problematic, drawing the attention of researchers and campus officials. While most researchers of the disclosure of these unwanted experiences tend to examine just 1 form of victimization, a direct comparison of the disclosure of different types of campus victimization within a singular study is missing in the literature. The current study aimed to address this issue by examining 4 types of victimization experiences (unwanted sexual contact, unwanted sexual intercourse, intimate partner violence, and stalking) in a college population. A common set of possible predictors of disclosure were examined, including both demographic (e.g., gender, race, age) and situational factors (e.g., alcohol use, level of fear, relationship with perpetrator). While patterns of similarity across all victimization experiences emerged, the impact of gender, race, age, and alcohol use on disclosure decisions varied substantially by victimization type. The findings of this study address the gap in the current literature by providing a comparison and contrast of the influence of predictors across different types of victimization. Furthermore, the findings provide needed information that could help colleges and universities develop ways to encourage support-seeking and reporting among students.     

Factors Influencing Gay Men's Attitudes,Subjective Norms,and Intentions With Respect to Performing Sexual Behaviors1

In a recent paper (Fishbein et al., 1992) gay men's attitudes and subjective norms were found to be accurate predictors of their intentions to perform a variety of sexual behaviors. In addition, the relative importance of norms as determinants of intention was found to be greater in Seattle (a city with a well organized gay community) than in Albany (a city in which the gay community is not well organized). The purpose of the present study was to investigate the extent to which the men's attitudes, subjective norms, and intentions were influenced by a number of situational and individual difference variables. Three hundred and fourteen self-identified gay or bisexual men from Seattle (134), Denver (78), and Albany (102) completed a questionnaire specifically designed for this study. As expected, type of partner and type of sexual activity significantly influenced attitudes, perceived norms, and intentions. In addition, these dependent variables were also influenced, in part, by city of residence, age, and perceived risk of HIV infection. The findings provide additional justification for developing different interventions for gay men in different cities, age, and perceived risk groups.     

Visual narrative comprehension: Universal or not?

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - Visual narratives of sequential images – as found in comics, picture stories, and storyboards – are often thought to provide a fairly universal and...     

You're a Good Structure,Charlie Brown: The Distribution of Narrative Categories in Comic Strips

Cohn's (2013) theory of “Visual Narrative Grammar” argues that sequential images take on categorical roles in a narrative structure, which organizes them into hierarchic constituents analogous to the organization of syntactic categories in sentences. This theory proposes that narrative categories, like syntactic categories, can be identified through diagnostic tests that reveal tendencies for their distribution throughout a sequence. This paper describes four experiments testing these diagnostics to provide support for the validity of these narrative categories. In Experiment 1, participants reconstructed unordered panels of a comic strip into an order that makes sense. Experiment 2 measured viewing times to panels in sequences where the order of panels was reversed. In Experiment 3, participants again reconstructed strips but also deleted a panel from the sequence. Finally, in Experiment 4 participants identified where a panel had been deleted from a comic strip and rated that strip's coherence. Overall, categories had consistent distributional tendencies within experiments and complementary tendencies across experiments. These results point toward an interaction between categorical roles and a global narrative structure.     

Imagining the future in health anxiety: the impact of rumination on the specificity of illness-related memory and future thinking

Individuals with health anxiety experience catastrophic fears relating to future illness. However, little research has explored cognitive processes involved in how health anxious individuals picture the future. Ruminative thinking has been shown to impede the ability to recall specific autobiographical memories, which in turn is related to maladaptive, categoric future thinking processes. This study examined the impact of rumination on memory and future thinking among 60 undergraduate participants with varying health anxiety (35% clinical-level health anxiety). Participants were randomized to experiential/ruminative self-focus conditions, then completed an Autobiographical Memory Test and Future Imaginings Task. Responses were coded for specificity and the presence of illness concerns. Rumination led to more specific illness-concerned memories overall, yet at the same time led to more categoric illness-related future imaginings. Rumination and health anxiety together best predicted overgeneral illness-related future imaginings. Highly specific illness-related memories may be maintained due to their personal salience. However, more overgeneral illness-related future imaginings may reflect cognitive avoidance in response to the threat of future illness. This divergent pattern of results between memory and future imaginings may exacerbate health anxiety, and may also serve to maintain maladaptive responses among individuals with realistic medical concerns, such as individuals living with chronic illness.     

On Muddled Reasoning and Mediation Modeling

The hope of mediation modeling is that psychologists can go beyond tests of association to truly uncover mechanisms of change. We argue this hope can be realized only if psychologists make important distinctions regarding causality and inference. From the perspective of Aristotelian philosophy, mediation models are sequences of efficient causes, and psychologists should therefore seek to identify those persons who can be traced through the entire sequence successfully. By reanalyzing data from two mediation studies we demonstrate that contemporary, aggregate methods of analysis are not suitable for this task because they are instead focused on making inferences about population parameters. In both studies alternative, person-centered methods revealed that majorities of participants were not traceable through the statistically significant mediation models.