The construction and validation of a measure of Ethno-cultural Identity Conflict

The research describes the construction and validation of the Ethno-cultural Identity Conflict Scale (EICS) based on 3 independent samples totaling 975 immigrants, international students, and members of ethnic minority groups. The convergent validity of the 20-item scale was supported by its correlations with Self-Concept Clarity (r = -.65), Sense of Coherence (r = -.58), Identity Distress (r = .48), and the Cultural Conflict (r = .62) and Cultural Distance (r = .21) components of the Bicultural Identity Integration Scale. EICS was also linked to contemporary acculturation research with integrated migrants experiencing less conflict than those who were separated, assimilated, or marginalized.     

Measuring Religiosity/Spirituality in Diverse Religious Groups: A Consideration of Methods

Minority religious groups continue to grow in the United States, and traditional religious groups are becoming more diverse. The purpose of this paper is to detail the methodology of the measure adaptation and psychometric phase of an ongoing study that is designed to describe the relationship between R/S, emotional extremes, and risk behaviors in Christian, Jewish, and Muslim high school students as they transition to college. Unique challenges associated with measurement, recruitment, and research team dynamics were encountered. These challenges and possible solutions are discussed in the context of conducting research that focuses on religious minority groups.     

Evaluating Merger and Intersection of Equivalence Classes with One Member in Common

Sidman (1994) noted that the existence of a member that is common to more than one class may produce either class merger (union) or class intersection. A multiple-selection, matching-to-sample test was developed to examine the conditions under which these outcomes occur. Test trials each required three conditional discriminations involving selection or rejection of comparison stimuli under control of samples representing two categories. Test results obtained from an initial group of typical adults using familiar stimuli (DOG and BIRD, pictures of dogs and birds and relevant printed breed names (e.g., DALMATIAN, RETRIEVER) showed the conditional stimulus control best described as intersection. For example, the word DALMATIAN provided the context for selecting the dalmatian but not the retriever picture. However, these results may have depended on the participants'' verbal history as English speakers. Would conditional-discrimination training with overlapping sets of laboratory-generated stimuli also result in intersection? Naïve typical adults were assigned to one of three different training conditions. Like the participants tested with familiar stimuli, these participants demonstrated highly reliable test outcomes best described as showing class intersection, regardless of training condition. These findings begin to elucidate the necessary and sufficient conditions for establishing complex category-like classes of stimuli.     

Body image disturbance and relationship satisfaction among college students

Two hundred and eighty-two college undergraduate and graduate students, including 81 males and 201 females, responded to an on-line survey measuring relationship satisfaction, body image distortion and body dissatisfaction, self esteem, and thoughts about weight loss. A modified Kansas Marital Satisfaction Scale (KMSS) queried respondents about their relationship satisfaction as well as their perception of their partner’s satisfaction with the relationship. Respondents checked one of 17 figural drawings indicating their perceived and ideal size as well as judgments of perceived and ideal size of their partner. Females had greater body image size distortion and body dissatisfaction, lower self esteem, and more frequent thoughts about weight loss. Males were more dissatisfied with their partner’s size. Respondent’s body size distortion predicted perceived partner relationship satisfaction, with greater size distortion predicting less perceived partner relationship satisfaction. Greater perceived partner relationship satisfaction predicted increased respondents’ relationship satisfaction. Perceived partner’s dissatisfaction with respondent’s body size only approached significance as a predictor of respondent’s relationship satisfaction. However, the strength of this variable as a predictor warrants further examination of its potential role in relationship satisfaction.     

The Effects of Sample Characteristics and Experience with Infidelity on Romantic Jealousy

Past research has suggested that men are more upset by imagined sexual than emotional infidelity, and women are more upset by imagined emotional infidelity than sexual infidelity. However, experience with infidelity, methodology, and age and gender of the sample may help to explain inconsistent results. Two hundred ninety-four English-speaking undergraduate students and 325 non-college adults in a large mid-Atlantic urban area of the U.S. completed forced-choice or continuous-scale anonymous questionnaires regarding jealousy over a mate??s hypothetical infidelity. Chi-square and MANOVA analyses replicated previous findings of the expected gender difference in all hypothetical forced-choice scenarios. However, results for those participants who reported experience with actual infidelity demonstrated little support for the traditional evolutionary model, as there were no gender differences in which aspect of hypothetical infidelity was reported to be more distressing, and no gender differences at the college level in terms of which aspect of infidelity received the greatest focus. These findings, extrapolated from both undergraduates and adults and accounting for the impact of actual, primed memory of experience of infidelity on hypothetical jealousy scenarios, raise important questions about the validity of hypothetical scenarios of jealousy as proxies for real reactions to actual infidelity. The results of the present study suggest that the lack of a consistent, replicable gender difference across the lifespan may be explained by two related factors: age and actual experience with infidelity.     

The relationship between history of violent and criminal behavior and recognition of facial expression of emotions in men with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder

Social psychological research underscores the relation between aggression and emotion. Specifically, regulating negative affect requires the ability to appraise restraint‐producing cues, such as facial signs of anger, fear and other emotions. Individuals diagnosed with major mental disorders are more likely to have engaged in violent behavior than mentally healthy members of the same communities. We examined whether violent and criminal behavior in men with schizophrenia is related to emotion recognition abilities. Forty‐one men with schizophrenia underwent a computerized emotion discrimination test presenting mild and extreme intensities of happy, sad, angry, fearful and neutral faces, balanced for gender and ethnicity. History of violence was assessed by the Life History of Aggression Scale and official records of arrests. Psychopathology was rated using the Positive and Negative Symptom Scale. Criminal behavior was associated with poor emotion recognition, especially for fearful and angry facial expressions. History of aggression was also associated with more severe positive symptoms and less severe negative symptoms. These findings suggest that misinterpretation of social cues such as angry and fearful expression may lead to a failure in socialization and adaptive behavior in response to emotional situation, which may result in a higher number of criminal arrests. Aggr. Behav. 32:1–8, 2006. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

12 Brain/Mind Learning Principles in Action: The Fieldbook for Making Connections,Teaching, and the Human Brain – Renate Nummela Caine,Geoffrey Caine,Carol McClintic,and Karl Klimek

Books reviewed: 12 Brain/Mind Learning Principles in Action: The Fieldbook for Making Connections, Teaching, and the Human Brain. By Renate Nummela Caine, Geoffrey Caine, Carol McClintic, and Karl Klimek. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Corwin Press, 2005. xvi + 263 pages. ISBN 1‐4129‐0984‐8.     

Gender bias in caregiving professions: The role of perceived warmth

One hypothesized reason for why a disproportionately low number of men enter caregiving fields is how such men are perceived. In two studies, drawing upon the Stereotype Content Model and the lack‐of‐fit model, we tested whether men would encounter more social (e.g., likeability bias) and economic (e.g., hiring or job opportunity bias) penalties than women in caregiving professions due to perceptions that men are less warm than women. In all three studies, we created job or employment materials in which the gender of the candidate or employee was manipulated. In Study 1, a female preschool teacher received higher warmth ratings than a male preschool teacher, which in turn predicted preference for the female teacher over the male teacher. In Study 2, a female social worker was rated more highly in warmth and job hireability than a male social worker; warmth also mediated the relationships between gender and both likeability and job hireability. In Study 3, a male preschool teacher was rated lower in warmth, likeability, job hireability, and job suitability than both a female preschool teacher and a preschool teacher with an unspecified gender. There were no differences between perceived competence of men and women in caregiving positions when competence was assessed. Implications for the factors that predict adverse reactions to and penalties against men in caregiving occupations, as well as interventions to combat the potential negative effects of such penalties on men's interest in caregiving careers, are discussed.     

Self-evaluation as a moderating factor of strategy change in directed forgetting benefits

In list method directed forgetting, instructing people to forget a studied word list usually results in better recall for a newly studied list. Sahakyan and Delaney (2003) have suggested that these benefits are due to a change in encoding strategy that occurs between the study of the first list and the study of the second list. To investigate what might mediate such strategy change decisions, in two experiments we induced bothforget and remember participants to evaluate their memory performance on the two lists. In Experiment 1, they were asked to explicitly recall the items from the first list before studying the second list. In Experiment 2, after the study of the first list, the participants provided a rapid aggregate judgment of learning. Evaluation eliminated the differences between the forget and remember groups for the second list in both experiments, because the remember group achieved recall levels comparable to those for the forget group. The role of performance evaluation in mediating directed forgetting benefits is discussed.     

Caffeine reduces time-of-day effects on memory performance in older adults

For most older adults, memory performance depends on the time of day, with performance being optimal early in the morning and declining during the late afternoon hours. In the present study, we asked whether this decline could be ameliorated by a simple stimulant, caffeine. Adults over the age of 65 who considered themselves "morning types" were tested twice over an interval of 5 to 11 days, once in the morning and once in the late afternoon. Participants ingested either coffee with caffeine or decaffeinated coffee at both sessions. Participants who ingested decaffeinated coffee showed a significant decline in memory performance from morning to afternoon. In contrast, those who ingested caffeine showed no decline in performance from morning to afternoon. The results suggest that time-of-day effects may be mediated by nonspecific changes in level of arousal.