The Relative Contribution of Sibling Deviance and Peer Deviance in the Prediction of Substance Use Across Middle Childhood

This study investigated the quality of sibling relationships and sibling deviancy in a sample of children at-risk for substance use and antisocial behavior. Based on a history of empirical and theoretical models suggesting strong associations between children's development in the context of relationships and the emergence of delinquency and drug use, this research extends previous efforts by including sibling relationships in this developmental model, linking siblings with later substance use. Sibling relationship quality as well as peer deviance were examined using a multirater, multimethod assessment procedure. We tested 3 constructs (deviancy, warmth, and conflict) related to sibling behavior. Only sibling deviance and peer deviance directly predicted substance use. When both sibling deviance and peer deviance were examined as predictors of changes in substance use over time, only sibling deviance was significant. Implications for the development of substance use behavior in middle childhood are discussed.     

Perspective and prejudice: antecedents and mediating mechanisms

The present work investigated mechanisms by which Whites' prejudice toward Blacks can be reduced (Study 1) and explored how creating a common ingroup identity can reduce prejudice by promoting these processes (Study 2). In Study 1, White participants who viewed a videotape depicting examples of racial discrimination and who imagined the victim's feelings showed greater decreases in prejudice toward Blacks than did those in the objective and no instruction conditions. Among the potential mediating affective and cognitive variables examined, reductions in prejudice were mediated primarily by feelings associated with perceived injustice. In Study 2, an intervention designed to increase perceptions of a common group identity before viewing the videotape, reading that a terrorist threat was directed at all Americans versus directed just at White Americans, also reduced prejudice toward Blacks through increases in feelings of injustice.     

Gender, social class, and the subjective experience of aging: self-perceived personality change from early adulthood to late midlife

This study explored the applicability of previous research (obtained with groups of college-educated women) about the subjective experience of aging in midlife to men and less-educated people. Two-hundred fifty-nine men and women who graduated from a public high school in 1955-1957 retrospectively assessed their feelings of identity certainty, confident power, generativity, and concern about aging for their 60s, 40s, and 20s. Participants reported higher levels of identity certainty, confident power, and concern about aging at each age, and a leveling off of generativity in their 60s. There were some gender and social class differences. Although men and women recalled the same trajectory of these feelings, men reported higher levels of identity certainty and confident power across age. Non-college-educated men recalled the highest levels of concern about aging across age. We discuss how these findings add to our understanding of the experience of aging in these domains.     

Ethical Assumptions in Economic Theory: Some Lessons from the History of Credit and Bankruptcy

This paper evaluates the economic assumptions of economic theory via an examination of the capitalist transformation of creditor–debtor relations in the 18th century. This transformation enabled masses of people to obtain credit without moral opprobrium or social subordination. Classical 18th century economics had the ethical concepts to appreciate these facts. Ironically, contemporary economic theory cannot. I trace this fault to its abstract representations of freedom, efficiency, and markets. The virtues of capitalism lie in the concrete social relations and social meanings through which capital and commodities are exchanged. Contrary to laissez faire capitalism, the conditions for sustaining these concrete capitalist formations require limits on freedom of contract and the scope of private property rights.     

Analyzing the Process and Content of Genetic Counseling in Familial Breast Cancer Consultations

A detailed examination of the process of genetic counseling has been identified as a priority area for research by previous authors. This multicenter longitudinal study examined the process and content of genetic counseling in initial consultations with women from high-risk breast cancer families. One hundred and fifty-eight consultations with women unaffected and affected with breast cancer were audio taped and transcribed verbatim. A detailed coding system was developed. Clinical geneticists and genetic counselors demonstrated consistently good practice in giving detailed information on essential aspects related to familial breast cancer such as screening and management, genetic testing, breast cancer genetics, and prophylactic surgery. Eliciting emotional concerns and facilitating communication were found to be inconsistently present. As clinical practice guidelines and the general communication literature emphasize the importance of these factors, this is an area where training in or self-monitoring of such behaviors may assist consultants to further develop these skills.     

Linguistic focus and good-enough representations: An application of the change-detection paradigm

A number of lines of study suggest that word meanings are not always fully exploited in comprehension. In two experiments, we used a text-change paradigm to study depth of semantic processing during reading. Participants were instructed to detect words that changed across two consecutive presentations of short texts. The results suggest that the full details of word meanings are not always incorporated into the interpretation and that the degree of semantic detail in the representation is a function of linguistic focus. The results provide evidence for the idea that representations are only good enough for the purpose at hand (Ferreira, Bailey, & Ferraro, 2002).     

Potential noradrenergic targets for cognitive enhancement in schizophrenia

Substantial evidence suggests that alterations in noradrenergic function contribute to the cognitive impairments of schizophrenia. Activation of post-junctional alpha 2a-adrenergic receptors in the prefrontal cortex by the alpha 2a-selective agonist guanfacine has demonstrated some preliminary benefit in subjects with schizophrenia treated with atypical antipsychotics. alpha 1-adrenergic receptor activity may be less important in mediating the cognitive impairments of schizophrenia. beta-adrenergic receptors may serve as another potential target for cognitive remediation in schizophrenia. However, the potential increase in memory consolidation in schizophrenia patients produced by beta-adrenergic agonists may be outweighed by the impairment in cognitive flexibility and executive functioning produced by beta-adrenergic agonists. Finally, norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors, such as atomoxetine, hold promise as potential cognitive enhancers in schizophrenia because of their ability to indirectly but selectively increase extracellular dopamine concentrations in the prefrontal cortex.     

When does word meaning affect immediate serial recall in semantic dementia?

Patients with semantic dementia can show superior immediate recall of words that they still understand relatively well, as compared with more semantically degraded words, suggesting that conceptual knowledge makes a major contribution to phonological short-term memory. However, a number of studies have failed to show such a recall difference, challenging this view. We examined the effect of several methodological factors on the recall of known and degraded words in 4 patients with semantic dementia, in order to investigate possible reasons for this discrepancy. In general, our patients did exhibit poorer recall of the degraded words and made more phonological errors on these items. In addition, set size affected the magnitude of the recall advantage for known words. This finding suggests that semantic degradation influenced the rate of learning in the immediate recall task when the same items were presented repeatedly. The methods used to select known and degraded items also impacted on the recall difference. List length, however, did not affect the advantage for known words. The coherence of items in phonological short-term memory was affected by their semantic status, but not by the length of the material to be retained. The implications of these findings for the role of semantic and phonological representations in verbal short-term memory are discussed.     

The effects of emotional content and aging on false memories

After studying a list of words related to a nonpresented lure word, people often falsely recall or recognize the nonpresented lure. Older adults are particularly susceptible to these forms of false memories. The age-related false memory enhancement likely occurs because older adults do not encode, or later retrieve, items in enough detail to allow them to discriminate between presented words and other associated but nonpresented items. Pesta, Murphy, and Sanders (2001) suggested that the emotional salience of the lures may provide distinctiveness, so that individuals would be less likely to endorse an emotional lure as a studied item than to endorse a neutral lure. In the present investigation, young and older adults were less likely to falsely recall or recognize emotional, as compared with neutral, lures. Both age groups appeared capable of using the distinctiveness of the emotional lures to reduce, although not to eliminate, false recall and recognition.     

Data quality affects meta-analytic conclusions: a response to Miner and Raju (2004) concerning entrepreneurial risk propensity

J. B. Miner and N. S. Raju (2004) contended that there are additional studies that compare the risk propensity of entrepreneurs and managers, which, when added to the data from W. H. Stewart and P. L. Roth (2001) and meta-analyzed, produce relationships between risk propensity and entrepreneurial status that are substantially weaker than previously believed. This conclusion was evaluated by identifying and examining methodological problems associated with their inclusion of effect sizes (i.e., ds) from studies with variables not relevant to research questions, dependent samples, extraneous variance in outcome variables, and confusion of constructs. When these methodological issues were addressed, a new meta-analysis indicated an overall conclusion consistent with that of Stewart and Roth, but the results varied according to instrumentation, particularly objective instrumentation (observed d = 0.31) versus the Miner Sentence Completion Scale-Form T (observed d = -0.35).