Sexual Orientation and Substance Use: The Moderation of Parental Attachment

There is a substantial amount of research exploring patterns of sexual orientation and substance use, often finding increased substance use for non-heterosexuals. An additional body of research explores the concept of family support from a number of perspectives. There is a noted lack of overlay between family support, sexual orientation, and substance use. This research uses data from Waves III and IV of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to examine how parental attachment, as a measure of family support, may moderate the association between sexual orientation and substance use. We test the notion that as parental attachment increases, substance use patterns will decrease for both heterosexual and non-heterosexual individuals. We also hypothesize that parental attachment will have a stronger effect of decreasing substance use for non-heterosexuals than for heterosexuals.     

“Reading” Paintings: Evidence for Trans-Symbolic and Symbol-Specific Comprehension Processes

Art-based reading instruction and interventions for elementary and middle school students are growing in popularity despite scant theoretical rationale and empirical research support. This study explored the degree to which painting comprehension processes map onto text comprehension processes in this population. In particular, we used think aloud protocols to examine the painting comprehension processes used by 35 fourth-grade and 34 eighth-grade students and compared the manifest processes to the literature on text comprehension. Protocol analysis revealed six painting comprehension processes—observing, activating prior knowledge, inferring and interpreting, elaborating, evaluating and responding, and monitoring—comprising 23 subprocesses. Of the identified painting comprehension subprocesses, 17 are commonly associated with text comprehension. These findings suggest that compositions—be they encoded visually, linguistically, or in another symbol system—may entail comprehension processes that transcend symbol systems, as well as processes that are particular to a given symbol system.     

Choosing Your Words and Pictures Wisely: When Do Individuation Instructions Reduce the Cross‐Race Effect?

Recognition accuracy for faces of an individual's own race typically exceeds recognition accuracy for other‐race faces. The categorization–individuation model (Hugenberg, Young, Bernstein, & Sacco, 2010) attributes this cross‐race effect to motivation to encode distinctive features of own‐race faces but category defining features for other‐race faces. Two experiments using different stimuli tested hypotheses generated from this model with both Black and White participants. For White participants, instructions to individuate reduced the cross‐race effect in both studies but did not eliminate it in Study 1. Black participants did not exhibit the cross‐race effect in either study, but individuation instructions improved both their same‐race and other‐race sensitivity. The present quality of interracial contact moderated the relationship between instructions and other‐race sensitivity for both Black and White participants in Study 1 but not in Study 2. Overall, results provide mixed support for this social categorization model. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The development of route learning in Down syndrome,Williams syndrome and typical development: investigations with virtual environments

The ability to navigate new environments has a significant impact on the daily life and independence of people with learning difficulties. The aims of this study were to investigate the development of route learning in Down syndrome (N = 50), Williams syndrome (N = 19), and typically developing children between 5 and 11 years old (N = 108); to investigate use of landmarks; and to relate cognitive functions to route‐learning ability in these groups. Overall, measures of attention and long‐term memory were strongly associated with route learning, even once non‐verbal ability was controlled for. All of the groups, including 5‐ to 6‐year‐old TD children, demonstrated the ability to make use of all landmark types to aid route learning; those near junctions, those further from junctions, and also distant landmarks (e.g. church spire, radio mast). Individuals with WS performed better than a matched subset of TD children on more difficult routes; we suggest that this is supported by relatively strong visual feature recognition in the disorder. Participants with DS who had relatively high levels of non‐verbal ability performed at a similar level to TD participants.