Factors associated with adolescent saving and spending patterns

This study examined the saving and spending behaviors of 1,619 employed high school seniors from over 1,000 private and public schools across the United States. Students were categorized as savers, necessity spenders, and discretionary spenders based on their responses to the question, "How do you spend the money that you earn?" Associations of student spending and saving patterns with individual and family factors were analyzed. Student savers were from families who saved and planned money use. Students who spent more for necessities were from families with fewer resources and greater financial difficulties. Discretionary spenders felt that money was important and were from families with higher income and socioeconomic status. Findings are discussed in light of the importance of families as socializing agents of their children.     

A Behavior-Analytic Approach to Behavioral Reflexivity

The Psychological Record - The purpose of this paper is to examine the issue of behavioral reflexivity from a behavior-analytic perspective. Two quotations from behavioral researchers are first...     

Social Categorization and Stimulus Equivalence

Northern Irish Protestant subjects, Northern Irish Catholic subjects, and English Protestant subjects were taught a series of conditional discriminations using a matching-to-sample procedure. In the presence of Northern Irish Catholic names, subjects were trained to select three-letter nonsense syllables, and in the presence of the nonsense syllables subjects were trained to select Northern Irish Protestant symbols. Subjects were then tested to determine whether the Protestant symbols and Catholic names had become related through symmetry and transitivity. A generalization test was employed to allow for a preliminary investigation of the transfer of experimentally generated equivalence responding to untrained, socially loaded names. Preliminary findings suggest that prior social learning might interfere with equivalence responding. The relevance of these results to the theoretical interpretation of the equivalence phenomenon and to social attitude measurement in general is discussed.

     

Leisure, coping and health: the role of social, family, school and peer relationship factors

The relationship between social, family, peer and school factors and leisure engagement within a transactional model of stress and health was investigated in 655 young adults. Results show that the family environment, encouragement from parents and teachers, relationships with peers and socioeconomic factors in childhood predict adult attitudes to and engagement in leisure. In turn, leisure attitude and engagement are related to psychological distress, optimism, perceived control and social support. It is argued that the development of patterns of leisure attitudes and engagement in childhood need to be understood in predicting and changing adult leisure behaviours relevant to health and illness.     

EMERGENCE OF TACTS FOLLOWING MAND TRAINING IN YOUNG CHILDREN WITH AUTISM

This study sought to examine the effects of training mands on the emergence of tacts with the same response forms. Results indicated that training adjective sets as mands resulted in the emergence of adjective sets as tacts under modified, but not standard, antecedent conditions. The findings suggested that the apparent functional independence of mands and tacts may be explained by a lack of appropriate antecedent control over responding.     

Generalized Break Equivalence II: Contextual Control Over A Generalized Pattern of Stimulus Relations

The Psychological Record - In an earlier work (Gomez, Barnes-Holmes, & Luciano, 2001), it was found that although generalized break equivalence was achieved for 3 subjects (i.e., responding...     

Experiential avoidance and aversive visual images: response delays and event-related potentials on a simple matching task

In Experiment 1, participants high (n=15) or low in avoidance (n=14), as measured by the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire, completed a simple matching task that required them to choose whether or not to look at an aversive visual image. Only the high-avoidance participants took longer to emit a correct response that produced an aversive rather than a neutral picture. Additionally, the high-avoiders reported greater levels of anxiety following the experiment even though they rated the aversive images as less unpleasant and less emotionally arousing than their low-avoidant counterparts. In Experiment 2, three groups, representing high-, mid- and low-avoidance (n=6 in each) repeated the matching task with the additional recording of event-related potentials (ERPs). The findings of Experiment 1 were replicated in terms of reaction times and subjective ratings. The ERPs confirmed that the participants attended to the content of the images and differentiated between the aversive and neutral image types. The ERPs also showed significantly greater negativity for electrodes over the left hemisphere relative to the midline for only the high-experiential avoidance (EA) group. Given the left hemisphere dominance for language, the data suggest that the high-EA group engaged in verbal strategies to regulate their emotional responses.     

The (sexual) politics of evolution: popular controversy in the late 20th-century United Kingdom

This article outlines the major threads of controversy around the emerging subject of evolutionary psychology in the U.K. mass media during the 1990s. Much of this controversy centered on the role of evolution in shaping human gender roles and sexualities, contributing to the subject's mass appeal. This case is used to illustrate the argument that in theorizing about evolution and humans, "human nature" and "human origins" both provide a flexible resource for making arguments about how people do and should relate to one another and that such theorizing is therefore reflective of how power is held (and contested) in society. In the case of popular evolutionary psychology, shifts in the U.K. political landscape during the 1990s combined with changes in gender and sexual politics to create a situation where evolutionary theorizing about humans became more acceptable than it had been in the past. This was particularly true in left-liberal media, where a newfound compatibility between certain aspects of Darwinism and feminism created a very different space for debating gender, sexuality, and the role of human nature in today's society.