The Santa Fe style in American anthropology: Regional interest,academic initiative,and philanthropic policy in the first two decades of the Laboratory of Anthropology,Inc.

During the 1920s the American Southwest, an area rich in ethnographic and archelogical resources, became an important focus of interest on the part of both eastern academic anthropologists and the Rockefeller philanthropies. Successfully coopting or overriding previously established regional anthropological interests, nationally oriented anthropologists were instrumental in establishing a Laboratory of Anthropology modelled in part on the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. When Rockefeller funding was terminated in the middle 1930s, the Laboratory was left to forage in the economic desert of the depression Southwest and was unable to find either adequate financial support or a clearly defined mission. In 1947, it was incorporated into the State Museum system, where it functions today as a coordinating center for archeological research in the Rio Grande Basin.     

Antenatal caregiving representations and perinatal behavior in mothers with severe lifetime psychopathology

Psychopathology poses a risk for optimal parenting. The current study explored antenatal caregiving representations as markers for later risk of nonoptimal maternal behavior among mothers with severe mental illness. Sixty-five mothers diagnosed with psychosis, bipolar disorder, depression (psychopathology group), and nonclinical controls participated in a longitudinal study from pregnancy to 16 weeks after birth. Mental health diagnoses and caregiving representations were assessed during pregnancy. Maternal behavior was assessed during the 5-min recovery phase of the still-face paradigm at 16 weeks. Mothers with psychopathology reported significantly higher levels of “heightened” caregiving representations (i.e., separation anxiety from the child) than did controls. The only significant diagnostic group difference in perinatal maternal behavior was that mothers diagnosed with depression exhibited more overriding-intrusive behavior than did nonclinical control mothers. Regression modeling results showed that antenatal caregiving representations of “role reversal” predicted significantly lower levels of sensitivity and higher levels of overriding-intrusive behavior independent of the effect of psychopathology. The findings can be interpreted in the context of representational transformation to motherhood during pregnancy. The results provide preliminary evidence for the potential of a new questionnaire measure of caregiving representations as a screening instrument for antenatal representational risk.     

Providing more or less detailed information in job advertisements—Does it matter?

Job advertising is a common and useful recruitment marketing method that is available to a wide range of candidates and offers a practical way to widen the applicant pool. Frequently, retail advertisements only briefly introduce job requirements, but others provide more detailed information. Existing message studies, however, are inconclusive about the effectiveness of message specificity. A scenario‐based experiment that included 164 participants revealed that the type of decision maker (maximizer or satisficer) moderates the specificity effects in recruitment messages. After receiving a detailed job message, more satisficers stop their search process, but only maximizers perceive the company as more attractive and increase intentions toward the advertised job. A follow‐up qualitative study involving 30 participants provided further insights.     

Building cardiovascular disease competence in an urban poor Ghanaian community: A social psychology of participation approach

This paper describes conceptual, methodological, and practical insights from a longitudinal social psychological project that aims to build cardiovascular disease (CVD) competence in a poor community in Accra, Ghana's capital. Informed by a social psychology of participation approach, mixed method data included qualitative interviews and household surveys from over 500 community members, including people living with diabetes, hypertension, and stroke, their caregivers, health care providers, and GIS mapping of pluralistic health systems, food vending sites, bars, and physical activity spaces. Data analysis was informed by the diagnosis‐psychosocial intervention‐reflexivity framework proposed by Guareschi and Jovchelovitch. The community had a high prevalence of CVD and risk factors, and CVD knowledge was cognitive polyphasic. The environment was obesogenic, alcohol promoting, and medically pluralistic. These factors shaped CVD experiences and eclectic treatment seeking behaviours. Psychosocial interventions included establishing a self‐help group and community screening and education. Applying the “AIDS‐competent communities” model proposed by Campbell and colleagues, we outline the psychosocial features of CVD competence that are relatively easy to implement, albeit with funds and labour, and those that are difficult. We offer a reflexive analysis of four challenges that future activities will address: social protection, increasing men's participation, connecting national health policy to community needs, and sustaining the project.     

Attachment and resource sharing

In three studies we examined the associations between resource sharing (RS) and attachment, and the enhancement of RS using attachment security primes. In Study 1, we showed that attachment avoidance was negatively associated with RS. We also identified differences and similarities between RS and pro‐sociality. In Studies 2 and 3, we showed that research participants were more likely to share their monetary resources after they were primed with attachment security. Study 3 further revealed that security priming affected mainly people low on state attachment anxiety. Our findings extend previous work on pro‐sociality into the specific realm of RS, provide behavioral evidence, and tie attachment and close relationships in with game theory and research on economic decision making.     

Women are not swayed by sugar‐coated acts of verbal sexual coercion

Sexual coercion is receiving much attention with the #MeToo movement. Not all of the tactics that perpetrators use to coerce sex are perceived to be equally unacceptable. This study examined factors that may mitigate negative perceptions, including features of the perpetrator's tactics (verbal vs. physical tactics, relationship‐focused vs. self‐focused reasons to coerce sex) and raters' own current relationship (commitment, dependence, sexually coercive experiences). College women (N = 498) rated whether the perpetrator's behavior was acceptable, was excusable, and would adversely affect a relationship. Verbal (vs. physical) coercion, dependence on a current partner, and sexually coercive experiences in a current relationship mitigated negative perceptions. However, participant ratings were not influenced by the perpetrator's use of relationship‐focused reasons for coercing sex (vs. self‐focused reasons), suggesting that women may resist male attempts to sugar‐coat sexual coercion.     

Statistical learning of multiple speech streams: A challenge for monolingual infants

Language acquisition depends on the ability to detect and track the distributional properties of speech. Successful acquisition also necessitates detecting changes in those properties, which can occur when the learner encounters different speakers, topics, dialects, or languages. When encountering multiple speech streams with different underlying statistics but overlapping features, how do infants keep track of the properties of each speech stream separately? In four experiments, we tested whether 8‐month‐old monolingual infants (N = 144) can track the underlying statistics of two artificial speech streams that share a portion of their syllables. We first presented each stream individually. We then presented the two speech streams in sequence, without contextual cues signaling the different speech streams, and subsequently added pitch and accent cues to help learners track each stream separately. The results reveal that monolingual infants experience difficulty tracking the statistical regularities in two speech streams presented sequentially, even when provided with contextual cues intended to facilitate separation of the speech streams. We discuss the implications of our findings for understanding how infants learn and separate the input when confronted with multiple statistical structures.