Adolescent unwed prospective fathers: readiness for fatherhood and behaviors toward the mother and the expected infant

Despite the increased emphasis on assessing and meeting the needs of unmarried pregnant adolescents, less than adequate attention has been directed toward understanding unwed adolescent prospective fathers who frequently are the mates of pregnant teenagers. As part of a prenatal education intervention study, 28 unmarried adolescent fathers responded to a questionnaire containing items about their readiness for fatherhood, antepartal behavioral interactions, and projected postpartal behaviors with their pregnant adolescent partners, as well as their projected behaviors with their infants. The adolescent males reported that initially they either were definitely unready for paternity (75%) or were undecided about readiness for fatherhood (21%). However, as pregnancy advanced beyond the second trimester, only 57% of the respondents did not want to become fathers. To a significant extent, those who did not were least likely to engage in behaviors supportive of their mate's health antepartally, or to indicate a desire to care for and interact with their expected infant. In addition, they tended to project lower levels of postnatal involvement with the adolescent mothers of their children as compared to those males who were more accepting of their pending fatherhood. Moreover, males who had maintained long prepregnancy relationships with their mates tended to be more supportive of them prenatally, and to perceive themselves as maintaining close relationships with both the mothers and infants after delivery. Finally, 86% of the adolescent fathers planned to work to contribute to the support of their infants. The data demonstrate that unreadiness for fatherhood may be associated with responsible as well as irresponsible behaviors. Accordingly, these data are interpreted as having implications for the establishment of programs and policies which focus on the adolescent male population in order to interdict the high rate of unwed adolescent pregnancy.     

Assessing Community Quality of Life in the Context of Tourism Development

One of major purposes of tourism development in a destination is to improve the quality of life (QOL) of host community. This study aims to assess tourism-related community quality of life (TCQOL). The study applied Sirgy and Cornell’s community QOL model (2001) and modified the measuring approach incorporating resident perceptions of satisfaction, importance, and tourism effects (Andereck and Nyaupane 2010) to evaluate resident perceptions of community quality of life in the context of tourism development. The assessment incorporating the community quality of life model and the modified measuring approach that could be a useful tool for tourism practitioners and scholars to understand resident perceptions of community QOL, assess changes of resident perceived community QOL in a host community, and compare the community QOL experiences to other areas.     

Implementing a Comprehensive Program for the Prevention of Conduct Problems in Rural Communities: The Fast Track Experience

Childhood conduct problems are predictive of a number of serious long-term difficulties (e.g., school failure, delinquent behavior, and mental health problems), making the design of effective prevention programs a priority. The Fast Track Program is a demonstration project currently underway in four demographically diverse areas of the United States, testing the feasibility and effectiveness of a comprehensive, multicomponent prevention program targeting children at risk for conduct disorders. This paper describes some lessons learned about the implementation of this program in a rural area. Although there are many areas of commonality in terms of program needs, program design, and implementation issues in rural and urban sites, rural areas differ from urban areas along the dimensions of geographical dispersion and regionalism, and community stability and insularity. Rural programs must cover a broad geographical area and must be sensitive to the multiple, small and regional communities that constitute their service area. Small schools, homogeneous populations, traditional values, limited recreational, educational and mental health services, and politically conservative climates are all more likely to emerge as characteristics of rural rather than urban sites (Sherman, 1992). These characteristics may both pose particular challenges to the implementation of prevention programs in rural areas, as well as offer particular benefits. Three aspects of program implementation are described in detail: (a) community entry and program initiation in rural areas, (b) the adaptation of program components and service delivery to meet the needs of rural families and schools, and (c) issues in administrative organization of a broadly dispersed tricounty rural prevention program.     

Recovery from one-trial overshadowing

Prevailing models of associative learning can all account for multitrial overshadowing. However, they fail to account for one-trial overshadowing, which is ordinarily explained in terms of distraction of the subject by the more salient of two simultaneously trained cues from the less salient cue, which interferes with associative acquisition. In the present study, we demonstrate that recovery from overshadowing can be obtained through two techniques that have previously been found to restore responding to overshadowed cues in multitrial training situations. Specifically, recovery from one-trial overshadowing was obtained by extinguishing the overshadowing stimulus and also by administering a posttraining reminder treatment consisting of brief exposure to the overshadowed cue. The similarity of these observations to those in multitrial overshadowing suggests that one-trial and multitrial overshadowing arise from a common underlying mechanism and further augments the view that all cue competition is due (at least in part) to a failure to express acquired information, rather than to a failure to learn.     

Amount of surround and test-inducing separation in simultaneous brightness contrast

Simultaneous brightness contrast is investigated in the fovea as a function of (1) amount of surround of the inducing field (Experiment 1) and (2) separation between the test and inducing fields (Experiment 2). Circular test and match fields subtending 14 min (radius) are used throughout. The inducing field, held constant in area, is a circular annulus (615 sq min) varying from a quadrant on one side of the test circle to an annulus completely surrounding the test circle. Test-field apparent brightness is not significantly affected by amount of inducing-field surround when the separation between centers of the test and inducing fields is held constant (Experiment 1). Experiment 2, though, shows that apparent brightness increases significantly as the separation between the centers of the test and inducing fields is increased.     

The Impact of Case Characteristics and Prior Jury Experience on Jury Verdicts1

An archival analysis of records from 206 criminal cases was used to evaluate the impact of personal and situational factors on jury verdicts. In particular, we evaluated whether repeated jury service produced bias in jurors that was sufficient to affect jury decisions. A variety of case characteristics and indices of prior jury experience was examined for their relative impact on trial outcomes. Several of the case characteristics were related to verdicts, but the personal characteristics were not. Although more than half of the juries contained experienced jurors, juror experience had little influence on verdicts in either major or subsidiary analyses. However, there was a slight tendency for small juries with large proportions of experienced jurors to convict. This result is consistent with data from Kentucky; a meta-analysis across the two data sets indicates that it is a reliable finding. The results have implications for the determination of jury size. We suggest that future research examine the possibility that increasing jury size may reduce the influence of an individual's bias by providing a balance of other jurors with no or offsetting biases.     

Chlordiazepoxide-induced discrimination impairment

Chlordiazepoxide (5.0 and 10.0 mg/kg but not 2.5 mg/kg) administered on 10 successive sessions, significantly impaired the reinforcement-cued discrimination performance of male Sprague-Dawley rats. On three postdrug (saline) recovery sessions, groups previously treated with the drug demonstrated good recovery in discrimination performance. An analysis of response components indicated that the discrimination impairment was due to less inhibition of responding during "no-go" phases of the task by the drugged than control animals. While changes in responding during reinforcement phases may also contribute to the performance of drugged animals, no clear pattern emerges from the present study.     

Mechanisms of aural encoding: VII. Differences in consonant and vowel recall in a Peterson and Peterson short-term memory paradigm

Ss either saw or heard lists of three syllables which differed by their initial consonant phoneme or their final vowel phoneme. After 5 or 15 sec of mental arithmetic, Ss were required to recall the syllables. Following auditory presentation, vowels were recalled more accurately than consonants in all serial positions and at both delays. In addition, spoken consonants and vowels showed primacy and recency effects. Following visual presentation, consonants and vowels were recalled with equal accuracy at both delays, and no recency effects were observed. These data suggest that superior recall of vowels over consonants results from differential decay of these stimuli in an acoustic storage. These data are consistent with previous experiments showing that, during serial recall, the final vowels in a sequence are recalled more accurately than the final consonants.