Maternal structure and autonomy support in conversations about the past: contributions to children's autobiographical memory

The authors examined the contributions of maternal structure and autonomy support to children's collaborative and independent reminiscing. Fifty mother-child dyads discussed past experiences when the children were 40 and 65 months old. Children also discussed past events with an experimenter at each age. Maternal structure and autonomy support appeared as 2 distinct and separable components of mothers' reminiscing style and acted in an additive fashion to predict children's memory. Children whose mothers demonstrated both high structure and high autonomy support provided the greatest memory in these conversations, whereas children whose mothers were low on both dimensions provided minimal memory. The authors discuss the implications of these effects for children's autobiographical memory development.     

Children's, adolescents', and young adults' reward allocations to hypothetical siblings and fairness judgments: effects of actor gender, character type, and allocation pattern

The authors studied the reward allocation patterns, reasoning, and fairness judgments of 112 participants at 4 grade levels: kindergarten, 3rd grade, 9th grade, and college. Three story characters (an oldest, the most productive, and the physically disadvantaged) were depicted as siblings of the same gender, either sisters or brothers, who poured lemonade at a school picnic. Kindergartners' pattern of reward allocations indicated the use of an equality and productivity-based equity rule, whereas most of the older participants integrated considerations of both productivity and physical disadvantage in their allocations. Reasoning data were generally consistent with the allocation patterns. Reward allocations differed significantly by the gender of the characters, and fairness ratings differed significantly by the gender of the characters and the gender of the participant. Conclusions discuss the increasing coordination and consideration of more than one claim to the reward with development.     

Selective target processing: perceptual load or distractor salience?

Perceptual load theory (Lavie, 1995) states that participants cannot engage in focused attention when shown displays containing a low perceptual load, because attentional resources are not exhausted, whereas in high-load displays attention is always focused, because attentional resources are exhausted. An alternative "salience" hypothesis holds that the salience of distractors and not perceptual load per se determines selective attention. Three experiments were conducted to investigate the influence that target and distractor onsets and offsets have on selective processing in a standard interference task. Perceptual load theory predicts that, regardless of target or distractor presentation (onset or offset), interference from ignored distractors should occur in low-load displays only. In contrast, the salience hypothesis predicts that interference should occur when the distractor appears as an onset and would occur for distractor offsets only when the target was also an offset. Interference may even occur in highload displays if the distractor is more salient. The results supported the salience hypothesis.     

Adult shyness: the interaction of temperamental sensitivity and an adverse childhood environment

This article examines the relation between adult shyness and sensory-processing sensitivity and posits a new model in which the interaction of sensitivity and adverse childhood environment leads to negative affectivity (with the highly sensitive being more impacted), which in turn leads to shyness. Consistent with this model, two questionnaire studies (Ns = 96 and 213) supported three hypotheses: (a) sensory-processing sensitivity interacts with recalled quality of childhood parental environment to predict shyness, (b) sensory-processing sensitivity interacts in the same way with childhood environment to predict negative affectivity, and (c) the interaction effect on negative affectivity mediates the effect on shyness. Hypothesis 2 was tested and supported in an additional questionnaire study (N = 393) and also in an experiment (N = 160) that manipulated negative contemporaneous experience as an analog for adverse childhood environment.     

Perception without awareness: further evidence from a Stroop priming task

In the present research, we examined the influence of prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) on Stroop-priming effects from masked words. Participants indicated the color of a central target, which was preceded by a 33-msec prime word followed either immediately or after a variable delay by a pattern mask. The prime word was incongruent or congruent with the target color on 75% and 25% of the trials, respectively. The words followed by an immediate mask produced reliable Stroop interference at SOAs of 300 and 400 msec but not at SOAs of 500 and 700 msec. The words followed by a delayed mask produced a reversed (i.e., facilitatory) Stroop effect, which reached significance at an SOA of 400 msec or longer, but never at the shorter 300-msec SOA. Such an differential time course of both types of Stroop priming effects provides further evidence for the existence of qualitative differences between conscious and nonconscious perceptual processes.     

Age differences and the identity negative priming effect: an updated meta-analysis

A recent meta-analysis (P. Verhaeghen & L. De Meersman, 1998a) revealed that older adults show a reliable but significantly reduced negative priming effect compared with young adults. The present study provides an updated quantitative review on the effect of aging on the magnitude of the negative priming effect in identity tasks. This analysis demonstrated that the negative priming effect was not significantly different between young and old adults. This result differs from P. Verhaeghen and L. De Meersman's study. The implications of this finding for inhibitory-based theories of cognitive aging are discussed.     

The crucial roles of stimulus matching and stimulus identity in negative priming

Negative priming refers to the situation in which an ignored item on an initial prime trial suffers slowed responding when it becomes the target item on a subsequent probe trial. In this experiment (and a replication), we demonstrate two ways in which stimulus consistency (matching) governs negative priming. First, negative priming for identical words occurred only when the prime distractor changed color when it became the probe target (i.e., constant cue to read the red word); negative priming disappeared when the prime distractor retained its color as the probe target (i.e., cue switches from read the red prime word to read the white probe word). Second, negative priming occurred for identical words, but not for semantically related words, whether related categorically or associatively. This pattern of results is consistent with a memory retrieval account, but not with an inhibition account of negative priming, and casts doubt on whether there is semantic negative priming for words.     

The Impact of Adolescent Deviance on Marital Trajectories

Marriage is a key life event that has numerous benefits. Recent research extends these benefits to include desistance from crime and drug use yet there has been little investigation regarding whether deviant behavior in adolescence impacts long-term marital patterns. Since rates of marriage are low among African Americans and rates of adolescent deviance and crime are high, we investigate the long-term relationship between the two drawing on longitudinal data from the Woodlawn cohort of urban African Americans. This article investigates whether serious adolescent delinquency and marijuana use predict marital trajectories, controlling for known correlates. Multivariate findings indicate that within this African-American population, deviance predicts the probability of marriage, stability of marriage, and timing of marriage for men yet deviance relates solely to the probability of marriage for women.     

Concepts and methods of explicit marital negotiation training with the marriage contract game

Abstract

The Marriage Contract Game was designed to help couples negotiate relationship and task problems in an explicit, rational manner. This paper describes the game's conceptual ties to modes of behavioral family intervention and to the social psychology of bargaining. The game's procedures are described in detail to permit the replication and dismantling required for empirical investigation. The paper concludes with an example of the game's application to a distressed couple.     

The antecedents of anticipatory purchase: Reconciling the two routes to optimism

Consumers often behave optimistically, purchasing products that they are unable to use at the time of purchase, but anticipate being able to use in the future. This research investigates such anticipatory purchase behavior, and demonstrates that optimism exerts its influence on anticipatory purchase via two distinct routes. One is driven by the perceived ease of the process required to achieve a given outcome and prevails when sufficient cognitive resources are available, while the other is driven directly by the perceived favorability of the outcome itself and holds when cognitive resources are constrained. Within each route, the focus of thought (process vs. outcome-focus) moderates the influence of optimism, and the two routes converge on enhanced motivation. Multiple experiments provide support for predictions derived from this framework, illuminating the substantive domain of anticipatory purchasing and providing theoretical insights into the nature of optimism.