Early sexual experiences: the role of Internet access and sexually explicit material.

The current study investigated whether viewing X-rated movies, Internet access in the home, and gender of the participant would differ between age of first initiation for oral sex, age of first initiation for sexual intercourse, and number of sexual partners. An online sample of 437 participants with an average age of 29.46 participated in the study. Each participant completed a survey that assessed early sexual behaviors and Internet and X-rated material exposure. Results discovered males with Internet access during the ages of 12 to 17 reported significantly younger ages for first oral sex compared to males without Internet access. In addition, male and female participants with Internet access, between the ages 12 to 17, reported younger ages for first sexual intercourse compared to participants without Internet access. Study limitations and implications are discussed.     

Parity of match play: an LPGA replication

This study investigated whether the slight advantage of higher seeded players to win in match play on the men's Professional Golfers' Association Tour generalizes to the Ladies Professional Golf Association Tour. Analysis showed no significant advantage for the higher seeded player in match play. The highly restricted range of skill of tour players makes it mainly a matter of chance who will win any match-play event or who will have the better or worse scores on any given day.     

Toward an integrative social identity model of collective action: a quantitative research synthesis of three socio-psychological perspectives

An integrative social identity model of collective action (SIMCA) is developed that incorporates 3 socio-psychological perspectives on collective action. Three meta-analyses synthesized a total of 182 effects of perceived injustice, efficacy, and identity on collective action (corresponding to these socio-psychological perspectives). Results showed that, in isolation, all 3 predictors had medium-sized (and causal) effects. Moreover, results showed the importance of social identity in predicting collective action by supporting SIMCA's key predictions that (a) affective injustice and politicized identity produced stronger effects than those of non-affective injustice and non-politicized identity; (b) identity predicted collective action against both incidental and structural disadvantages, whereas injustice and efficacy predicted collective action against incidental disadvantages better than against structural disadvantages; (c) all 3 predictors had unique medium-sized effects on collective action when controlling for between-predictor covariance; and (d) identity bridged the injustice and efficacy explanations of collective action. Results also showed more support for SIMCA than for alternative models reflecting previous attempts at theoretical integration. The authors discuss key implications for theory, practice, future research, and further integration of social and psychological perspectives on collective action.     

ANIMALIA,HOMO, AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD

Abstract. I selectively and critically review the state of knowledge about human evolution and the place of humans vis‐à‐vis living apes, with emphasis on bipedal posture and locomotion, expansion of the brain and associated cognitive capacities, speech, tool behavior, culture, and society. I end with a personal perspective on God and Heaven.     

The influence of experimentally created extrapersonal associations on the Implicit Association Test

We examined the influence of extrapersonal associations (Olson & Fazio, 2004)—associations that neither form the basis of the attitude nor become activated automatically in response to the object—on the Implicit Association Test (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) by experimentally creating both attitudes and extrapersonal associations. The results revealed that participants who were given extrapersonal information that was inconsistent with their own attitudes were affected by this information when they later performed an IAT. They exhibited significantly reduced IAT scores compared to participants who were provided attitude-consistent extrapersonal information. This attenuation of the IAT effect occurred despite the fact that participants rated the source of the attitude-inconsistent extrapersonal information as irrational and foolish. On the other hand, the extrapersonal associations did not influence a subliminal priming measure in Experiment 1, nor a personalized version of the IAT (Olson & Fazio, 2004) in Experiment 2. These measures proved sensitive to the attitude, regardless of the congruency of the extrapersonal information.     

How to Prove Hume’s Law

Journal of Philosophical Logic - This paper proves a precisification of Hume’s Law—the thesis that one cannot get an ought from an is—as an instance of a more general theorem...     

Beauty is in the 'we' of the beholder: greater agreement on facial attractiveness among close relations

Scientific research on facial attractiveness has focused primarily on elucidating universal factors to which all raters respond consistently. However, recent work has shown that there is also substantial disagreement between raters, highlighting the importance of determining how attractiveness preferences vary among different individuals. We conducted a typical attractiveness ratings study, but took the unusual step of recruiting pairs of subjects who were spouses, siblings, or close friends. The agreement between pairs of affiliated friends, siblings, and spouses was significantly greater than between pairs of strangers drawn from the same race and culture, providing evidence that facial-attractiveness preferences are socially organized.     

Real-world face recognition: the importance of surface reflectance properties

The face recognition task we perform [corrected] most often in everyday experience is the identification of people with whom we are familiar. However, because of logistical challenges, most studies focus on unfamiliar-face recognition, wherein subjects are asked to match or remember images of unfamiliar people's faces. Here we explore the importance of two facial attributes -shape and surface reflectance-in the context of a familiar-face recognition task. In our experiment, subjects were asked to recognise color images of the faces of their friends. The images were manipulated such that only reflectance or only shape information was useful for recognizing any particular face. Subjects were actually better at recognizing their friends' faces from reflectance information than from shape information. This provides evidence that reflectance information is important for face recognition in ecologically relevant contexts.