A Multilevel Contextual Model of Neighborhood Collective Efficacy

Different data sources were used to examine hypothesized relations among neighborhood-, family-, and individual-level variables, and perceptions of neighborhood collective efficacy. Data were from 1,105 individuals (56% female, 42% African American, and 58% White) nested within 55 neighborhoods and 392 families, analyzed within a multilevel design using a 3-level model. At the neighborhood level, the study examined relations between Census, police, and neighborhood representative indicators. At the family level, the model examined the influence of marital status and family income. At the individual level, gender and age were examined. Results indicated that age at the individual level, marital status at the family level, and poverty and perceived gang activity at the neighborhood level predicted levels of neighborhood collective efficacy. The study illustrated significant variation across neighborhoods and families, and demonstrates the utility of combining different sources of neighborhood data to examine relations of interest within a multilevel framework.     

Social projection of transient drive states

The authors hypothesized that people's predictions of how other people feel in emotionally arousing situations are often based on people's predictions of how they themselves would feel in those situations. Indeed, most participants in Study 1 reported predicting hungry hikers' feelings by mentally trading places with them, imagining what their own feelings would be in the hikers' situation. Because people's predictions of their own feelings tend to be biased in the direction of their current drive states, we hypothesized that mentally trading places would lead to social projection of transient drive states. In Study 2, participants' predictions of whether thirst or hunger would be more bothersome to hikers lost without food or water were biased in the direction of participants' own exercise-induced thirst. Furthermore, participants' predictions of how they would feel in the hikers' situation statistically mediated the effect of exercise on their predictions of the hikers' feelings.     

Stereotype susceptibility narrows the gender gap in imagined self-rotation performance

Three studies examined the impact of stereotype messages on men’s and women’s performance of a mental rotation task involving imagined self-rotations. Experiment 1 established baseline differences between men and women; women made 12% more errors than did men. Experiment 2 found that exposure to a positive stereotype message enhanced women’s performance in comparison with that of another group of women who received neutral information. In Experiment 3, men who were exposed to the same stereotype message emphasizing a female advantage made more errors than did male controls, and the magnitude of error was similar to that for women from Experiment 1. The results suggest that the gender gap in mental rotation performance is partially caused by experiential factors, particularly those induced by sociocultural stereotypes.     

EPS Mid-Career Award 2004: brain mechanisms of attention

There are many varieties of "attention", to some extent separate yet working together to produce coherent perception, thought, and behaviour. Using data from human behaviour, functional neuroimaging, and single-cell recording in the behaving monkey, I consider different levels of attention and their basis in physiological mechanisms of biased competition. Beginning with visual attention, I suggest that processing is competitive in many brain systems that code visual input. Competition is biased towards stimuli that match task requirements and is integrated between systems coding different object properties. The result is flexible, object-based attentional selection. In the second part of the paper, I describe recent experiments on attentional competition within and between sensory modalities. Though competition is often modality specific, more global levels of interference are also easy to demonstrate. In the third part of the paper, I move to frontoparietal cortex and to a pattern of similar brain regions recruited by many different cognitive demands. This multiple-demand (MD) pattern, I suggest, reflects neurons with highly flexible response properties, adapting to represent the information and events of many different tasks. Biased competition in MD regions may play a central role in broad attentional capacity limits and attentional focusing. More generally, I suggest that biased competition is characteristic of many different cognitive domains and brain systems. Coherent "attention" develops as different systems converge to work on related cognitive content.     

Child well-being in an era of welfare reform: the sensitivity of transitions in development to policy change

This study examined the age-specific pattern of effects of welfare policies on child achievement. Drawing from 7 random-assignment welfare and antipoverty evaluations that provided more than 30,000 observations of children's achievement, this study found that times of developmental transition are the only periods sensitive to the changes in families brought about by these policies. More specifically, small positive effects of welfare and antipoverty policies were found for children making the transition into middle childhood, and small negative effects of these same policies were found for children making the transition out of middle childhood and into early adolescence. Effects were robust across various program groupings and could not be attributed to family characteristics that differ for children of different ages. This research informs the understanding of how changes in employment and income for low-income parents affect development across childhood.     

Relationship satisfaction and conflict over minor and major issues in romantic relationships

In this study the question of whether conflicts over minor issues and over major issues were equally strongly related to satisfaction in romantic relationships was examined. Sixty-four women and 29 men completed the Hendrick (1988) Relationship Assessment Scale for their current main romantic relationship and a 12-item conflict scale (Cramer, 2000b) for minor and major issues. All the relationships were heterosexual. Satisfaction was significantly and equally negatively correlated with conflict over minor and major issues, suggesting that whether an issue is of major or minor importance does not affect satisfaction or dissatisfaction in a romantic relationship. Thus, assessing conflict over major issues may be unnecessary in predicting relationship satisfaction. Conflict over minor and major issues was significantly and positively correlated even when satisfaction was controlled, indicating consistency in conflict resolution.     

Assessment of fine motor skill in musicians and nonmusicians: differences in timing versus sequence accuracy in a bimanual fingering task

While professional musicians are generally considered to possess better control of finger movements than nonmusicians, relatively few reports have experimentally addressed the nature of this discrepancy in fine motor skills. For example, it is unknown whether musicians perform with greater skill than control subjects in all aspects of different types of fine motor activities. More specifically, it is not known whether musicians perform better than control subjects on a fine motor task that is similar, but not identical, to the playing of their primary instrument. The purpose of this study was to examine the accuracy of finger placement and accuracy of timing in professional musicians and nonmusicians using a simple, rhythmical, bilateral fingering pattern and the technology that allowed separate assessment of these two parameters. Professional musicians (other than pianists) and nonmusicians were given identical, detailed and explicit instructions but not allowed physically to practice the finger pattern. After verbally repeating the correct pattern for the investigator, subjects performed the task on an electric keyboard with both hands simultaneously. Each subject's performance was then converted to a numerical score. While musicians clearly demonstrated better accuracy in timing, no significant difference was found between the groups in their finger placement scores. These findings were not correlated with subjects' age, sex, limb dominance, or primary instrument (for the professional musicians). This study indicates that professional musicians perform better in timing accuracy but not spatial accuracy while executing a simple, novel, bimanual motor sequence.     

Conditions Equivalent to Unit Representations of Ordered Relational Structures

This paper studies several concepts about subgroups of automorphisms of linearly ordered relational structures. In particular, it focuses on conditions that are equivalent to the translations (automorphisms with no fixed points plus the identity) forming a homogeneous, Archimedean ordered group under the asymptotic order. For the automorphisms of an ordered relational structure, these properties are equivalent to the structure having a numerical representation whose scale type lies between, but does not exclude, the ratio and interval types (Alper, 1987; Luce, 1987; Narens, 1981a, 1981b). One result of this paper (Theorem 5) is that for the automorphisms of an ordered relational structure the following necessary conditions for such a representation are also sufficient: the asymptotic order induced on the automorphisms is connected, the structure is homogeneous, the translations are Archimedean, and the dilations (i.e., automorphisms with fixed points) are Archimedean relative to all automorphisms. The last property is equivalent to there being at most one proper, nontrivial convex subgroup. Contrary to hope, these results do not seem to lead to a simpler proof than Alper's for the Dedekind complete case. The paper concludes with an examination of the structure of parallel automorphisms. Copyright 2001 Academic Press.