Is the Triple P-Positive Parenting Program Acceptable to Parents from Culturally Diverse Backgrounds?

Behavioural parenting programs are an effective intervention for behavioural and emotional problems in children, however these programs have low utilisation rates by culturally diverse parents. We examined the cultural acceptability of program materials, preferences for delivery methods, and barriers to use of the Triple P-Positive Parenting Program. One hundred and thirty seven parents watched a video outlining the 17 strategies in Triple P and read through a tip sheet before completing a series of questionnaires. Results revealed that parents found the strategies highly acceptable, highly useful, were very likely to use the strategies and reported currently using the strategies often. They also rated the program materials as very culturally appropriate and identified group, seminar, television, and individual as the most preferred delivery methods. Parents identified location and timing of services, financial cost, and competing work commitments as the most frequently cited barriers to accessing a parenting intervention. The findings of this study suggest that elements of parenting programs may not be contributing to the low rates of access among culturally diverse parents. These findings highlight the need for more research addressing variables that may contribute to increasing culturally diverse parents’ access of behavioural parenting programs.     

The relationship between implicit and explicit motives, goal pursuit, and autobiographical memory content during a diary study

This online diary study investigated how motives interact with goal pursuit to predict daily autobiographical experiences. Participants (N = 141) completed measures of implicit and explicit achievement, provided daily memories and reports of their goal pursuit during a 3-week diary period. A stronger implicit achievement motive at the onset of the study was associated with more agentic (and fewer communal) autobiographical content. Goal progress was linked with using more agentic words, while goal attainability was related to using more communal words. Interactions between motives and goal pursuit on autobiographical memory suggests a trade-off: Favorable goal pursuit conditions may prompt people not motivated for achievement to shift their focus from agentic to communal themes, while individuals motivated for achievement maintain their priorities.     

Rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) and capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) remember future responses in a computerized task

Planning is an important aspect of many daily activities for humans. Planning involves forming a strategy in anticipation of a future need. However, evidence that nonhuman animals can plan for future situations is limited, particularly in relation to the many other kinds of cognitive capacities that they appear to share with humans. One critical aspect of planning is the ability to remember future responses, or what is called prospective coding. Two monkey species (Macaca mulatta and Cebus apella) performed a series of computerized tasks that required encoding a future response at the outset of each trial. Monkeys of both species showed competence in all tests that were given, providing evidence that they anticipated future responses and that they appropriately engaged in those responses when the time was right for such responses. In addition, some tests demonstrated that monkeys even remembered future responses that were not as presently motivating as were other aspects of the task environment. These results indicated that monkeys could anticipate future responses and retain and implement those responses when appropriate.     

Mock Jurors’ Perception of Stalking: The Impact of Gender and Expressed Fear

Two experiments investigated mock-juror perceptions of intimate stalking using Kentucky’s (United States) anti-stalking legislation. Experiment 1 used a mock-juror methodology in which 177 undergraduates (87 men and 90 women) from a large southeastern US university read a stalking trial summary and rendered individual judgments as mock jurors. The main research question of Experiment 1 was how participant gender impacted trial judgments (e.g., verdict) when the gender of both the defendant and victim were manipulated. Overall, the results showed that men rendered significantly fewer guilty verdicts than women, particularly in conditions that included the prototypical type of intimate stalking (female victim/male defendant). In Experiment 2, also using a mock-juror methodology, 129 undergraduates (51 men and 78 women) from a large southeastern U.S. university read a stalking trial summary (involving a female victim and male defendant) and rendered individual judgments as mock jurors. The main research question of Experiment 2 focused on whether victim fear (high or low) impacted trial judgments (e.g., verdict). The results yielded an interaction of participant gender and victim fear. Specifically, whereas different levels of fear did not impact women, men yielded fewer guilty verdicts in the low victim fear condition compared to the high victim fear condition. The results of the present experiments are discussed in terms of the implications of stalking allegations brought to trial.     

Cognitive mechanisms of false facial recognition in older adults

Older adults show elevated false alarm rates on recognition memory tests involving faces in comparison to younger adults. It has been proposed that this age-related increase in false facial recognition reflects a deficit in recollection and a corresponding increase in the use of familiarity when making memory decisions. To test this hypothesis, we examined the performance of 40 older adults and 40 younger adults on a face recognition memory paradigm involving three different types of lures with varying levels of familiarity. A robust age effect was found, with older adults demonstrating a markedly heightened false alarm rate in comparison to younger adults for "familiarized lures" that were exact repetitions of faces encountered earlier in the experiment, but outside the study list, and therefore required accurate recollection of contextual information to reject. By contrast, there were no age differences in false alarms to "conjunction lures" that recombined parts of study list faces, or to entirely new faces. Overall, the pattern of false recognition errors observed in older adults was consistent with excessive reliance on a familiarity-based response strategy. Specifically, in the absence of recollection older adults appeared to base their memory decisions on item familiarity, as evidenced by a linear increase in false alarm rates with increasing familiarity of the lures. These findings support the notion that automatic memory processes such as familiarity remain invariant with age, while more controlled memory processes such as recollection show age-related decline.     

Evaluating the valence of remembered events: the importance of age and self-relevance

We examined the role of self-relevance in older and younger adults' evaluations of remembered events. In Study 1, participants rated the positivity of their own positive, negative and neutral memories as well as those of a same-aged peer. Older adults rated events more positively than younger adults did, regardless of the memory source. In Study 2, we showed that this age difference is not due to differences in the valence of the events that older and younger adults reported. This effect appears to reflect the more positive mindset of older people, rather than an intention to regulate emotions associated with personal experiences. Finally, there was one effect for self relevance: Regardless of age, participants rated their own remembered events as more emotionally intense than those of a same aged peer.     

Fast thought speed induces risk taking

In two experiments, we tested for a causal link between thought speed and risk taking. In Experiment 1, we manipulated thought speed by presenting neutral-content text at either a fast or a slow pace and having participants read the text aloud. In Experiment 2, we manipulated thought speed by presenting fast-, medium-, or slow-paced movie clips that contained similar content. Participants who were induced to think more quickly took more risks with actual money in Experiment 1 and reported greater intentions to engage in real-world risky behaviors, such as unprotected sex and illegal drug use, in Experiment 2. These experiments provide evidence that faster thinking induces greater risk taking.     

From neural responses to population behavior: neural focus group predicts population-level media effects

Can neural responses of a small group of individuals predict the behavior of large-scale populations? In this investigation, brain activations were recorded while smokers viewed three different television campaigns promoting the National Cancer Institute's telephone hotline to help smokers quit (1-800-QUIT-NOW). The smokers also provided self-report predictions of the campaigns' relative effectiveness. Population measures of the success of each campaign were computed by comparing call volume to 1-800-QUIT-NOW in the month before and the month after the launch of each campaign. This approach allowed us to directly compare the predictive value of self-reports with neural predictors of message effectiveness. Neural activity in a medial prefrontal region of interest, previously associated with individual behavior change, predicted the population response, whereas self-report judgments did not. This finding suggests a novel way of connecting neural signals to population responses that has not been previously demonstrated and provides information that may be difficult to obtain otherwise.