Turning Fantasies About Positive and Negative Futures into Self-Improvement Goals

Contrasting fantasies about the future with reflections on reality that impedes fantasy realization creates a tight link between expectations of success and forming commitments to self-improvement goals. This effect applies to both fantasies about a positive future contrasted with impeding negative reality as well as fantasies about a negative future contrasted with impeding positive reality. In Study 1, with 63 student participants, contrasting positive fantasies about benefiting from a vocational training with negative reflections on reality impeding such benefits led to expectancy-dependent willingness to invest in the training, more so than indulging in the positive future and than dwelling on the negative reality. In Study 2, with 158 high school students from former East Berlin, contrasting negative, xenophobic fantasies about suffering from the influx of immigrants with positive reflections on reality impeding such suffering led to expectancy-dependent tolerance and willingness to integrate the immigrants. Findings are discussed in terms of how mental contrasting facilitates self-improvement and personal development by making people form expectancy-dependent goal commitments to approach positively-perceived as well as negatively-perceived futures.     

Disclosure of HIV-Positive Status to Latino Gay Men's Social Networks

This study explored disclosure of serostatus in a sample of 155 HIV-positive Latino gay men from New York City and Washington, DC. We examined rates of disclosure to different members of the social network: mothers, fathers, close friends, and primary sexual partners. There were high rates of disclosure of HIV-positive serostatus to main partners and closest friends and lower rates to fathers and mothers. We examined the role of 3 contextual target-dependent factors (emotional closeness to target, anticipated reactions from target, and target's knowledge of sexual orientation), as well as acculturation and time since diagnosis. Three separate logistic regression models were performed to predict disclosure of HIV-positive status to 3 targets: mothers, fathers, and closest friends. We found that disclosure was not a generalized tendency, but rather different factors were influential depending on the target. Whether the target was aware of participant's sexual orientation was associated with disclosure in all 3 models. Greater emotional closeness also predicted disclosure to mother and father; greater U.S. acculturation was associated with disclosure to father and marginally to mother. A longer time since diagnosis was associated with disclosure to the closest friend. These findings highlight the importance of taking into account roles and relationships, and their effect on disclosure.     

The development and psychometric evaluation of a new measure of dissociative activities

The psychometric properties of a new measure of dissociative behaviors, the Scale of Dissociative Activities (SODAS), were evaluated. Undergraduates (n = 533) completed the SODAS, 2 other established self-report measures of dissociative behaviors, and a measure of socially desirable responding. A randomly selected subset of participants (n = 100) also participated in an additional reliability and validity follow-up study. The SODAS was found to be internally consistent (a =.95) and temporally stable (r =.77) over an average 38-day interval. The validity of the SODAS was established by a moderately low negative correlation with social desirability, high correlations with other self-report measures of dissociation, and moderate to high correlations with samples of dissociative activities assessed in naturalistic environments with experience sampling methodology. Overall, the SODAS compared favorably to other existing self-report measures of dissociative behaviors. Directions for future research on the SODAS are discussed.     

Lenin and the Jacobin identity in Russia

By what process was the Jacobin identity transplanted into nineteenth-century Russian radical culture? According to the conventional account, the Jacobin label was coined by proponents like Zai?nevskij and Tka?ev. Lenin, in turn, is said to have derived his Jacobin identity from them, thus revealing the non-Marxian source of his political ideas. This article contests that interpretation through a study of the origin and spread of the Jacobin terminology in post-emancipation Russia. I show that the Jacobin identity in Russia was invented by anti-Jacobin populists and that there were scarcely any self-proclaimed Jacobins prior to Lenin. I also reconstruct the path by which Lenin came to identify with French Jacobinism. That path remained within the territory of Marxist theory from beginning to end.     

Interval estimation for the intraclass correlation in dirichlet-multinomial data

When the underlying distribution is discrete with a limited number of categories, methods for interval estimation of the intraclass correlation which assume normality are theoretically inadequate for use. On the basis of large sample theory, this paper develops an asymptotic closed-form interval estimate of the intraclass correlation for the case where there is a natural score associated with each category. This paper employs Monte Carlo simulation to demonstrate that when the underlying intraclass correlation is large, the traditional interval estimator which assumes normality can be misleading. We find that when the number of classes is 20, the interval estimator proposed here can generally perform reasonably well in a variety of situations. This paper further notes that the proposed interval estimator is invariant with respect to a linear transformation. When the data are on a nominal scale, an extension of the proposed method to account for this case, as well as a discussion on the relationship between the intraclass correlation and a kappa-type measure defined here and on the limitation of the corresponding kappa-type estimator are given.The authors wish to thank the Editor, the Associate Editor, and the three referees for many valuable comments and suggestions to improve the clarity of this paper. The works for the first, the third, and the fourth authors were partially supported by grant #R01AR43025-01 from the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases.     

Transformations,basic operations and language acquisition

Errors in child speech show that some children initially formulate tense-hopping and subject-auxiliary inversion as copying without deletion. Other errors suggest that some children may formulate other movement rules as deletion without copying. A claim about the nature of the language acquisition device is made on the basis of our analysis of these errors: the language acquisition device formulates hypotheses about transformations in terms of basic operations. The basic-operations hypothesis predicts that for any transformation which is composed of more than one basic operation, there exists a class of errors in child speech correctly analyzed as failure to apply one (or more) of the operations specified in the adult formulation of the rule.     

A Preventive Approach to School Violence and Vandalism: An Experimental Study

School violence and vandalism are at crisis level. The investigators attempted to employ strategies that would attack identified procreators of school violence and vandalism existing within our schools. The effects of these strategies on vandalism costs, student attendance, off-task and disruptive behaviors, and on various kinds of positive teacher-student contacts were investigated in 19 elementary schools. Results indicated that the dollar costs of vandalism and frequency of inappropriate student behaviors decreased more in experimental than in control schools. Student attending and positive teacher-student contacts improved, or remained higher, in the experimental than in the control schools.     

Time course of recovery from gustatory adaptation to NaCl.

Recovery from adaptation to NaCl was tested by comparing some relevant parameters of response to the adapting and test stimuli separated by different recovery intervals. The time course of response was determined using magnitude estimations and using the flow chamber for stimulus delivery. The course of recovery for all parameters used was a negatively accelerated function of the rest time, but the recovery rate of different parameters did not prove to be equal. Recovery was fastest for the initial maximum taste magnitude, followed by the time needed for the taste to disappear. The taste effect summed over time and the time required for the taste magnitude to decrease to 30% of its preadapted maximum were the slowest to recover. Although the recovery processes proceeded at a rapid rate during the initial period, all parameters remained depressed over a rather long period.     

Time course of recovery from gustatory adaptation to NaCl

Recovery from adaptation to NaCl was tested by comparing some relevant parameters of response to the adapting and test stimuli separated by different recovery intervals. The time course of response was determined using magnitude estimations and using the flow chamber for stimulus delivery. The course of recovery for all parameters used was a negatively accelerated function of the rest time, but the recovery rate of different parameters did not prove to be equal. Recovery was fastest for the initial maximum taste magnitude, followed by the time needed for the taste to disappear. The taste effect summed over time and the time required for the taste magnitude to decrease to 30% of its preadapted maximum were the slowest to recover. Although the recovery process proceeded at a rapid rate during the initial period, all parameters remained depressed over a rather long period.     

Relationship between maternal aggression and maternal care in the rat

Aggression among female rats is almost entirely confined to the period of late pregnancy and lactation. Behaviorally it is similar to the aggression of males including piloerection and lateral attacks, but it differs in its function. Unlike male aggression which serves to establish a social hierarchy and a territory, i. e., is competitive, maternal aggression is protective, i. e., it serves to prevent predation of the mother's offspring. In this respect it is closely related temporally and causally to maternal care; if the offspring are removed maternal aggression wanes almost immediately–its function no longer exists! Studies on aggression by mothers, among rats, from the author's laboratory are reviewed and comparisons made with maternal care. As noted, maternal aggression and maternal care are closely related during the cycle of maternal behavior and they share a similar hormonal basis and possibly the effect of uterine stimulation, but maternal care requires prolactin and the decline of progesterone while maternal aggression appears independent of pituitary hormones and does not require a decline in progesterone. Maternal aggression like maternal care appears to be organized into a hormonal phase, during pregnancy, parturition, and for about a week postpartum and a nonhormonal phase thereafter. Bilateral radiofrequency lesions of the lateral midbrain peripeduncular nucleus (PPN) produce deficits in maternal aggression if made on lactation day 7 (L7), but not earlier, without producing significant deficits in maternal behavior. Experiments showed that the PPN does not mediate hormonally stimulated maternal aggression; it appears to mediate only nonhormonally stimulated maternal aggression. Studies on the role of pregnancy hormones on long-term retention of maternal aggression and the role of olfaction in maternal aggression are also reviewed. © 1994 Wiley-Liss, Inc.