Latina Mothers’ Involvement in an HIV/STI and Substance Use Prevention Program for Adolescents: A Parallel Intervention Curriculum

As part of a larger HIV/STI/Substance Abuse Prevention intervention targeted to middle school students, we offered students’ parents an opportunity to participate in an adult education class. The same curricular materials were used for students enrolled in the intervention and for their parents. In the current study, mothers who had completed the adult education class participated in a focus group. The focus group explored what components of the intervention were perceived by mothers as particularly useful to them or to their child. Three core themes emerged from interpretive analyses of the focus group: (1) positive relationships with intervention staff and school personnel enticed students to participate in the intervention and facilitated parents’ involvement; (2) both students and parents felt respected and empowered by the intervention’s cornerstone values and curricular philosophy of cultural richness and pride in Hispanic/Latino heritage; and (3) mothers perceived their mastery of the course content—materially wholly dedicated to the health and wellness of their children—benefitted them in terms of both understanding the material and potentially allowing mothers to discuss health-oriented behavior with their young adolescent child.     

Bridging team faultlines by combining task role assignment and goal structure strategies

This study tests whether the detrimental effects of strong diversity faultlines on team performance can be counteracted by combining 2 managerial strategies: task role crosscutting and superordinate goals. We conducted a 2 (crosscut vs. aligned roles) × 2 (superordinate vs. subgroup goals) experimental study. Seventy-two 4-person teams with faultlines stemming from gender and educational major performed a complex decision-making task. The results show that teams with crosscut roles perform better when they are assigned a superordinate goal than a subgroup goal, whereas teams with aligned roles are not affected by goal manipulations. This effect is mediated by elaboration of task-relevant information. Implications for theory and management of team faultlines are discussed.     

Do infants bind mental states to agents?

Recent findings suggest that infants understand others’ preferential choice and can use the perspectives and beliefs of others to interpret their actions. The standard interpretation in the field is that infants understand preferential choice as a dispositional state of the agent. It is possible, however, that these social situations trigger the acquisition of more general, not person-specific knowledge. In a looking-time study we showed an Agent A demonstrating a choice, that only could have been interpreted as preferential based on the perspective (and thus the belief) of the agent, not the observer. Then we introduced a new agent (Agent B), who chose consistently or inconsistently with Agent A; also varying whether Agent B was an adult or a child. Results show that infants expected Agent B (both the adult and the child) to choose as Agent A, but only in the condition where according to Agent A’s knowledge two objects were present in familiarization(confirming previous evidence on the importance of contrastive choice). We interpret these results in the following way: (1) infants do not encode the perspectives of other agents as person-specific sources of knowledge and (2) they learn about the object, rather than the agent’s disposition towards that object. We propose that early theory of mind processes lack the binding of belief content to the belief holder. However, such limitation may in fact serve an important function, allowing infants to acquire information through the perspectives of others in the form of universal access to general information.     

Increasing outgroup trust,reducing infrahumanization,and enhancing future contact intentions via imagined intergroup contact

The present study was designed to test whether imagined intergroup contact (Crisp & Turner, 2009) affects attributions of human emotions to outgroup members and positive behavioral intentions toward the outgroup via increased outgroup trust. Italian fourth-graders took part in a three-week intervention, where they were asked to imagine meeting an unknown immigrant child in various social settings. One week after the last session, they were administered the dependent measures. Results revealed an indirect effect of imagined contact on both behavioral intentions and attributions of uniquely human emotions to outgroup members via outgroup trust. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed, and an integration of the imagined contact and infrahumanization literature is suggested.     

The Arena System: a novel shared touch-panel apparatus for the study of chimpanzee social interaction and cognition

We report on the development of a novel shared touch-panel apparatus for examining a diverse range of topics in great ape social cognition and interaction. Our apparatus—named the Arena System—is composed of a single multitouch monitor that spans across two separate testing booths, so that individuals situated in each booth have tactile access to half of the monitor and visual access to the whole monitor. Additional components of the system include a smart-film barrier able to restrict visual access between the booths, as well as two automated feeding devices that dispense food rewards to the subjects. The touch-panel, smart-film, and feeders are controlled by a PC that is also responsible for running the experimental tasks. We present data from a pilot behavioral game theory study with two chimpanzees in order to illustrate the efficacy of our method, and we suggest applications for a range of topics including animal social learning, coordination, and behavioral economics. The system enables fully automated experimental procedures, which means that no human participation is needed to run the tasks. The novel use of a touch-panel in a social setting allows for a finer degree of data resolution than do the traditional experimental apparatuses used in prior studies on great ape social interaction.     

On the importance of avoiding shortcuts in applying cognitive models to hierarchical data

Psychological experiments often yield data that are hierarchically structured. A number of popular shortcut strategies in cognitive modeling do not properly accommodate this structure and can result in biased conclusions. To gauge the severity of these biases, we conducted a simulation study for a two-group experiment. We first considered a modeling strategy that ignores the hierarchical data structure. In line with theoretical results, our simulations showed that Bayesian and frequentist methods that rely on this strategy are biased towards the null hypothesis. Secondly, we considered a modeling strategy that takes a two-step approach by first obtaining participant-level estimates from a hierarchical cognitive model and subsequently using these estimates in a follow-up statistical test. Methods that rely on this strategy are biased towards the alternative hypothesis. Only hierarchical models of the multilevel data lead to correct conclusions. Our results are particularly relevant for the use of hierarchical Bayesian parameter estimates in cognitive modeling.