Changes in information as a function of a culturally appropriate smoking cessation community intervention for Hispanics

Tested a 7-month, media-based, community intervention among Hispanics in San Francisco designed to change levels of information on the damaging effects of cigarette smoking and on the availability of culturally appropriate cessation services. Three community-wide surveys of Hispanics were conducted with independent random samples, two as baselines (n = 1,660 and 2,053) and one postintervention (n = 1,965). Results showed that changes in the level of awareness of cessation services had taken place after implementation of the intervention. Furthermore, those changes took place primarily among the less acculturated Spanish-speaking Hispanics who were the target of the intervention. The changes in information reported here demonstrate that a culturally appropriate information dissemination campaign that utilizes multiple channels can produce changes in a community's level of information even when the campaign is implemented for a relatively short period.     

Changing contexts and the field of community psychology

Conclusion The legacy of the Swampscott conference 25 years ago is palpable. The scientific accomplishments have been substantial. The four agendas I have presented for the future development of the field depend upon psychologists as individuals and psychologists as participants in our departments, colleges, universities, professional societies, and peer review panels to reduce the constraints that limit the definition and study of psychological phenomena in community settings (Schneider, 1990). As these constraints are addressed, new social norms can be established to expand and diversify the research process. There are some explicit positive side effects that can occur. A new working social structure can be created for how universities and communities can be resources for each other.The four topics I have presented are agendas for keeping at the task of generating active and expanding scientific traditions. These topics when addressed in the context of collaboration with other disciplines and citizens can develop an empirical base of shared wisdom about how to carry out community psychology research. In these ways the benefits of community psychology research can become more empowering for the public and more and more systemic for the scholar.These comments were presented as an Invited Address at the 2nd annual meeting of the American Psychological Society, June 8, 1990, Dallas, Texas.The following persons took time to read and comment on earlier drafts of these comments. I have benefited very much from their appraisals. Eileen Altman, Daniel Cervone, Seeley Chandler-Kelly, Nancy Dassoff, Penny Foster-Fishman, Steve Goldston, Peter Graves, Kenneth Heller, Robert E. Hess, David Henry, Ira Iscoe, Chris Keys, Benjamin Kleinmuntz, Ed Lichtenstein, Philip Mann, Kyoung Oh, Julian Rappaport, Dan Romer, Lonnie R. Snowden, Joseph P. Stokes, Edison J. Trickett, Abe Wandersman, and Marc Alan Zimmerman.     

Are FACES-II ‘family satisfaction’ scores valid?

It has been suggested that family satisfaction can be measured by having a person complete the Family Adaptability and Cohesion Evaluation Scale (FACES-II) twice: once as the person essentially sees the family (actual version), and once as they wish the family to be (ideal version). The discrepancy between the actual and ideal scores is contended to be a measure of satisfaction with family. Though conceptually attractive, this measurement strategy was not verified, as assessed in the present study by correlating the actual-ideal discrepancy scores with family discord (Index of Family Relations) scores. Clinical adoption of the actual-ideal discrepancy-score as a measure of family satisfaction is thus seen as premature, until more supportive evidence is demonstrated.     

Husserl vs. Derrida

This paper was presented as the Aaron Gurwitsch Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, Inc., at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, October 1988.     

Testosterone and personality among college students and military veterans

Relationships of serum and saliva to personality were examined among 401 college students in four laboratory studies and 5,236 military veterans in one archival study. Among the students, there were few relationships between testosterone and traditional personality measures. Among the veterans, MMPI scores and DSM-III diagnoses showed testosterone related to drug and alcohol abuse, antisocial and generally intemperate behavior, and effective disorders. Consistent with social control theory, correlations were higher among veterans who were lower in socioeconomic status. It appears likely that testosterone has innate effects that are socially undesirable but can be attenuated by bonds between the individual and society. Effect sizes were small, suggesting that testosterone will have noticeable effects only in large populations or individuals who differ markedly from the population mean. Further research should focus upon antisocial correlates of testosterone and conditions that produce marked changes in testosterone levels.     

Proof and truth in Lakatos's masterpiece

Proofs and Refutations is Lakatos's masterpiece. This article investigates some of its central themes, in particular: the nature of proofs ('Proofs do not prove, they improve'); the nature of definitions (real, not nominal); and the consequences of all this for ontology (platonism vs Popper's World Three).     

Who's to blame: Attributions regarding causality in spouse abuse

Spouse abuse is examined from the perspective of attribution theory. Aggressors are seen as attributing their violent behavior to external causes, whether by projecting their negative traits onto their spouses or by finding excuses which blame temporary environmental factors. In contrast, victims often attribute the abuse to defects within themselves or situational factors affecting their spouses. The attribution process seems affected by the frequency, intensity and duration of the abuse, with temporal factors playing an important role in the woman's internalizing style. Furthermore, inadequate early coping efforts play a powerful role in establishing cognitive-perceptual patterns that serve to perpetuate the abuse.     

Mental rotation as a mediator for sex-related differences in visualization

This study was designed to analyze whether Mental Rotation (MR) played a role as a mediating variable for sex-related differences in Visualization (VZ). Two psychometric tests measuring MR and VZ were applied to a representative sample of 309 males and 390 females in their last year of high school. Three non-zero correlations between sex and MR, sex and VZ, and MR and VZ were found, and the effect of sex on VZ was eliminated when MR was introduced as a covariable. When three subgroups of different VZ ability were made by dividing up the VZ distribution by the first and third quartiles, sex-differences were only found for the high-scorers group, for which previous results were replicated. Results clearly indicate that MR is a plausible mediator variable for sex differences in VZ when such differences do exist. Theoretical, methodological and practical consequences of these results are discussed.     

Proactive interference plays a role in the word-length effect

The word-length effect is the advantage that lists of short words show over lists of long words in immediate recall. Typically, the word-length effect is used as strong support for decay-based theories of immediate retention. However, the present two experiments show that the traditional word-length effect emerges only after several trials in an experimental session, a result reminiscent of earlier findings in distractor-based short-term forgetting experiments. These results suggest that any complete account of the word-length effect will need to consider a role for proactive interference.     

The perception of shape and curvedness from binocular stereopsis and structure from motion

The integration of binocular stereopsis and kinetic depth was measured for two distinct aspects of 3-Dstructure: (1)shape index, which is a measure of scale-independent structure, and (2)curvedness, which is a measure of scale-dependent structure. We found that motion contributes significantly more to judged shape index than it does to judged curvedness, and stereo contributes significantly more to judged curvedness than it does to judged shape index. This suggests that the differences in the relative contribution of motion and stereo reported here occurred because these two sources do not equally specify the scale-dependent and scale-independent aspects of surface structure. Furthermore, these results seem to be inconsistent with integration models in which the different visual cues all initially contribute to the same single representation of 3-Dstructure.