Reactions to internal and external criticism of outgroups: social convention in the intergroup sensitivity effect

Recent research has documented the intergroup sensitivity effect (ISE) whereby people respond more favorably to internal versus external criticism of their group. The present studies examine the reactions of bystanders who do not belong to the criticized group and whose reactions are therefore more likely to be informed by social conventions than by defensiveness. Studies 1 and 2 presented British participants with criticisms of Australians, manipulating their ostensible source. These British bystanders exhibited the ISE, responding more favorably to the speaker and comments when the critic was Australian rather than non-Australian. These responses were driven by the perceived motives of speakers rather than their level of experience with the group (Study 2). Study 3 provides direct evidence that internal criticism is more conventionally acceptable than is external criticism.     

Development of Lexical and Sentence Level Context Effects for Dominant and Subordinate Word Meanings of Homonyms

Nine-ten-and twelve-year-old children (N = 75) read aloud dominant, subordinate or ambiguous bias sentences (N = 120) that ended in a homonym (BALL). After the sentence (1,000 ms), children read aloud targets that were related to the dominant (BAT) or subordinate (DANCE) meaning of the homonym or control targets. Participants were also divided into three reading skill groups based on an independent measure of single word oral reading accuracy. There were three main developmental and reading skill findings. First, 9-year-olds and low skill readers showed lexical level facilitation in accuracy. Second, 9- and 10-year-olds or low and moderate skill readers showed lexical level facilitation in reaction time. Third, 12-year-olds or high skill readers showed sentence level facilitation in reaction time with high skill readers additionally showing sentence level inhibition in reaction time. These results show that lexical level context effects decreased and that sentence level context effects increased with development and skill. These results are discussed in terms of connectionist models of visual word recognition that incorporate distributed attractor principles.     

Community Psychology at the Crossroads: Prospects for Interdisciplinary Research

Effective engagement in interdisciplinary work is critical if community psychology is to achieve its promise as a field of ecological inquiry and social action. The purpose of this paper and special issue is to help make the benefits of interdisciplinary community research clearer and to identify and begin to address its challenges. Although some areas of psychology (e.g., biological, cognitive and health) have made substantial interdisciplinary strides in recent decades, progress in community psychology (and related areas) is more modest. In this article we explore the prospects for expanding and improving interdisciplinary community research. Challenges include designs, measures, and analytical frameworks that integrate multiple levels of analysis from individuals through families, organizations, and communities to policy jurisdictions, and the complexities involved in simultaneously bringing together multiple disciplinary collaborators and community partners. Challenges to interdisciplinary collaboration common to all disciplines include the disciplinary nature of academic culture and reward structures, limited funding for interdisciplinary work and uncertainties related to professional identity and marketability. Overcoming these challenges requires a synergy among facilitative factors at the levels of the interdisciplinary project team (e.g., the framing question; embedded relationships; leadership), the investigators (e.g., commitment to new learning; time to invest), and the external context (e.g., physical, administrative, economic and intellectual resources and support for interdisciplinary work). We conclude by identifying several exemplars of effective interdisciplinary collaborations and concrete steps our field can take to enhance our development as a vibrant community-based, multilevel discipline increasingly devoted to interdisciplinary inquiry and action.     

Proactive personality and the successful job search: a field investigation with college graduates

The current article tests a model of proactive personality and job search success with a sample of 180 graduating college students. Using structural equation modeling, the authors tested a theoretical model that specified the relations among proactive personality, job search self-efficacy, job search behaviors, job search effort, and job search outcomes. Job seekers were surveyed at 2 separate points in time, once 3-4 months prior to graduation and once 2-3 months following graduation. The results suggest that proactive personality (a) significantly influenced the success of college graduates' job search, (b) was partially mediated through job search self-efficacy and job search behavior, and (c) was independent of self-esteem and conscientiousness. The findings are discussed in terms of their general implications for understanding the nature of the process through which distal personality factors, such as proactive personality, affect the nature and success of an individual's job search.     

A computerized task for investigating the relation between attentional and emotional processes in children

The authors' goals in this article are to (a) describe a new task for the assessment of shifting attention between different affective stimuli, The Children's Attentional Shifting Task (CAST); (b) present the theoretical background for the development of the CAST; and (c) report initial information on the developmental appropriateness and validity of the CAST. The task was tested using a sample of kindergarten and 1st-grade children, 50% of whom had social and conduct problems. Preliminary analyses showed that the CAST was not subject to problems arising from fatigue or loss of interest. Moreover, children's ability to shift attention away from angry facial expressions was positively related to teachers' ratings of their ability to shift attention and parents' reports of children's emotion regulation. Shifting away from negative affect also predicted children's academic performance as reported by teachers.     

Peacocks, Picasso, and parental investment: The effects of romantic motives on creativity

Four experiments explored the effects of mating motivation on creativity. Even without other incentives to be creative, romantic motives enhanced creativity on subjective and objective measures. For men, any cue designed to activate a short-term or a long-term mating goal increased creative displays; however, women displayed more creativity only when primed to attract a high-quality long-term mate. These creative boosts were unrelated to increased effort on creative tasks or to changes in mood or arousal. Furthermore, results were unaffected by the application of monetary incentives for creativity. These findings align with the view that creative displays in both sexes may be linked to sexual selection, qualified by unique exigencies of human parental investment.     

Unidimensionality and bandwidth in the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression (CES-D) Scale

In this study, we compared classical test theory (CTT) and item response theory (IRT) approaches in analyzing the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression (CES-D) Scale (Radloff, 1977). Standard item analyses, as well as Rasch (1960) analyses, both revealed item departures from unidimensionality in a sample of 2,455 older persons responding to the CES-D. Positive affect items in the scale performed poorly overall, their removal reducing the scale's bandwidth only slightly. Modeling depression scores derived from Rasch measures and raw totals showed subtle but important differences for statistical inference. The assessment of depressive risk was slightly enhanced by using 16-item scale measures obtained from the results of the Rasch analysis as the dependent variable. Confirmatory factor analysis and parallel analysis verified the advantages of removing positively worded items. IRT and CTT techniques proved to be complementary in this study and can be usefully combined to improve measuring depression.     

Measurement of speech disfluency through magnitude estimation and interval scaling

The purpose was to assess whether equal-appearing interval or magnitude-estimation scaling resulted in a data set with a closer correlation to the physical stimuli, made up of speech samples with varying amounts of disfluency. 20 young adults completed two tasks. In Task 1, subjects used a 7-point equal-appearing interval scale to rate the disfluency of 10 speech samples having varying within sentence pause, presented randomly at 65 dB SPL. In Task 2, subjects used magnitude-estimation scaling to rate these stimuli, presented in a randomized order. Analysis showed significantly high correlations for both scaling techniques and the speech stimuli (Spearman rho=.90 and 1.00, respectively). It appears that subjects can use either scaling technique to rate accurately varied speech disfluency.