A longitudinal study of sentence context effects in second-grade children: Tests of an interactive-compensatory model

During the first half of the school year and at the end of the school year second-grade children (mean age: 7 years, 4 months at the first testing) completed a task in which they read words preceded by either a congruous sentence context, an incongruous sentence context, or a neutral context. Prior to the first testing, each child was given practice at recognizing one-half of the words in isolation. Word difficulty was varied orthogonally with practice and context condition. The effect of context on reading times decreased with development and practice, and increased with word difficulty. The results were interpreted as supporting an interactive-compensatory model of the development of reading fluency.     

Racial Mistrust and Deviant Behaviors Among Ethnically Diverse Black Adolescent Boys1

While it has been suggested that mistrust of the dominant White society may be an important protective factor for some members of racial minorities, the question of whether mistrust may also be related to nonnormative behaviors among minority members has not been explored. Using survey data from Miami, Florida, this study empirically tests this hypothesis among a sample of African American, Haitian, and other Caribbean island Black adolescent boys. Bivariate analyses suggest a strong relationship between racial mistrust and conventional forms of delinquency for all three ethnic groups. These findings also held in multivariate analyses in which six traditional predictors of deviance were statistically controlled. The authors conclude that racial mistrust adds a new dimension to empirical prediction models. In addition, they conclude that issues associated with racial mistrust should be considered when developing and implementing prevention strategies.     

Perceptions Now and Then of Occupational Sex Typing: A Replication of Shinar's 1975 Study

College students' perceptions of the sex typing of 129 occupations were gathered and compared with those reported by Shinar (1975). Questionnaires were completed by 72 males and 70 females. As in Shinar's study, a continuum of the perceptions of occupations from masculine to feminine was replicated. A comparison of the mean ratings for the occupations and of the percentages of women in each occupation in 1975 and 1988 is reported in a comprehensive table. The results indicated that occupational sex typing continues to exist and that women tend to perceive jobs as being more neutral than men do. However, the occupational sex typing may not be based on the actual percentages of women in the occupations.     

Examining the Social Context of Bullying Behaviors in Early Adolescence

Familial and adult influences, peer relations, and distal contextual factors were tested as correlates of a continuous measure of bullying behavior within a sample of 558 middle school students. Only 19.5% of the sample reported exhibiting no bullying behavior in the past 30 days. Parental physical discipline, time spent without adult supervision, negative peer influences, and neighborhood safety concerns were each positively associated with bullying behavior. In contrast, positive adult role models were associated with less bullying behavior. Results suggest that counselors should focus prevention and intervention efforts on the risk factors within the larger social context of an adolescent's life.     

An historian's view of American social science

This paper explicates the argument of The Origins of American Science. Starting from my own historical premises and the origin of the social sciences in both historicism and science, I compare the divergent historical orientations of the sociologies of Robert Park and Max Weber. I argue that the inclination of American social science toward scientism and liberalism derives from the national ideology of American exceptionalism. Since this structural feature of American political culture was itself a part of history, I indicate how changes in historical consciousness and politics led American social scientists to reformulate exceptionalism and their disciplines. By the 1920s, their hope of establishing scientific control over, and maintaining the liberal direction of, the fast-changing national history was embodied in scientism. I close with some thoughts about the continuing power of scientism and exceptionalism since the 1920s and the possibility that an historical, Weberian model of social science could bridge the widening gap between scientistic and hermeneutic wings of the social science disciplines.     

Homophobic bullying victimization trajectories: The roles of perpetration,sex assigned at birth,and sexuality

There is a paucity of research on developmental trajectories of bias-based aggression. We examined homophobic bullying victimization trajectories among high school students (N = 3,064; M age = 13.67; Girls = 50.2%) and how these developmental pathways vary as a function of factors like homophobic bullying perpetration, sex assigned at birth, and sexuality. Using data from a 3-wave longitudinal investigation over a 2-year period, we utilized latent growth mixture modeling to explore the aforementioned trajectories. Findings suggested that there were three distinct classes characterized by high initial rates and declines over time, low initial rates, and increases over time, and low, stable, rate across time. Furthermore, results indicated that homophobic bullying perpetration, sex assigned at birth, and sexuality all predicted class membership.     

Escalation of irritable aggression: Control by consequences and antecedents

Two experiments demonstrated that rats could be trained in a negative reinforcement paradigm to display a shock-induced aggressive response on the first shock presented. Later, rats that had been submitted to the negative reinforcement training procedure displayed more shock-induced aggression than did control groups during a test session that was situationally different from the one used during training. A third experiment demonstrated that noxious antecedent events, if presented with sufficient rapidity, can combine to increase the probability of aggressive behavior. The three experiments together suggest that aversive antecedents and reinforcement contingencies could be involved in the escalation of irritable aggression.     

Male chacma baboons (Papio hamadryas ursinus) discriminate loud call contests between rivals of different relative ranks

Males in multi-male groups of chacma baboons (Papio hamadryas ursinus) in Botswana compete for positions in a linear dominance hierarchy. Previous research suggests that males treat different categories of rivals differently; competitive displays between males of similar rank are more frequent and intense than those between disparately ranked males. Here we test whether males also respond differently to male–male interactions in which they are not directly involved, using playbacks of the loud wahoo calls exchanged between competing males in aggressive displays. We played paired sequences of vocal contests between two adjacently ranked and two disparately ranked males to ten subjects, half ranking below the signalers in the call sequences and half above. Subjects who ranked above the two signalers showed stronger responses than lower-ranking subjects. Higher-ranking subjects also responded more strongly to sequences involving disparately ranked, as opposed to adjacently ranked opponents, suggesting that they recognized those individuals relative ranks. Strong responses to sequences between disparately ranked opponents might have occurred either because such contests typically involve resources of high fitness value (defense of meat, estrous females or infants vulnerable to infanticide) or because they indicate a sudden change in one contestants condition. In contrast, subjects who ranked lower than the signalers responded equally strongly to both types of sequences. These subjects may have been able to distinguish between the two categories of opponents but did not respond differently to them because they had little to lose or gain by a rank reversal between males that already ranked higher than they did.