Associations between the repressive adaptive style and self-reported hope in Mexican American and Euro-American children

A large literature has examined the associations between Weinberger, Schwartz, and Davidson's (1979) repressive adaptive style (RAS) construct and various self-report measures of distress or unpleasant emotional states in adults and children. Fewer investigations have examined the role of RAS in self-reported positive psychology constructs. In this investigation, we used Weinberger et al.'s (1979) categorical typology to examine the associations between adaptive style and hope in Euro-American (n = 60) and Mexican American (n = 49) children (M age = 11.4 years) who were students at 1 of 3 parochial schools in a large Midwestern city. Partially supporting the hypotheses, a univariate 2 (ethnic group) x 2 (repressor group) analysis of variance indicated a significant main effect for adaptive style group but no significant main effect for ethnic group and no significant interaction effect. Results extend the literature on the associations between adaptive style and self-report instruments and indicate that (similar to self-reported measures of distress) self-reported hope may be subject to social desirability bias.     

Rapid detection of person information in a naturalistic scene

A preferential-looking paradigm was used to investigate how gaze is distributed in naturalistic scenes. Two scenes were presented side by side: one contained a single person (person-present) and one did not (person-absent). Eye movements were recorded, the principal measures being the time spent looking at each region of the scenes, and the latency and location of the first fixation within each trial. We studied gaze patterns during free viewing, and also in a task requiring gender discrimination of the human figure depicted. Results indicated a strong bias towards looking to the person-present scene. This bias was present on the first fixation after image presentation, confirming previous findings of ultra-rapid processing of complex information. Faces attracted disproportionately many fixations, the preference emerging in the first fixation and becoming stronger in the following ones. These biases were exaggerated in the gender-discrimination task. A tendency to look at the object being fixated by the person in the scene was shown to be strongest at a slightly later point in the gaze sequence. We conclude that human bodies and faces are subject to special perceptual processing when presented as part of a naturalistic scene.     

Attributions of Blame in Sexual Assault to Perpetrators and Victims of Both Genders1

Previous research found that men attribute more blame to rape victims than do women; men also attribute less blame to perpetrators. In rape situations with a male perpetrator and a female victim, the roles of perpetrator and victim are confounded with gender category. To determine whether men are more lenient toward perpetrators or toward other males, the present study examined attributions of blame in scenarios that varied the gender category of both perpetrator and victim. Results showed that men's and women's attributions of blame to perpetrators were based on the role that was enacted, rather than gender per se: Men attributed less blame to perpetrators than did women, regardless of the perpetrator's gender category, indicating that men were more lenient toward perpetrators than were women. In addition, when the victim was female, the perpetrator was blamed more and the victim was blamed less than when the victim was male.     

Preference Assessment for Dimensions of Reinforcement to Inform Token Economies Targeting Problem Behavior

The purpose of the current two-experiment study was to examine the use of a preference assessment for dimensions of reinforcement to inform an effective token economy arrangement. Three participants diagnosed with developmental disabilities who engaged in negatively reinforced problem behavior participated in this study. During Experiment 1, a preference assessment for four dimensions of reinforcement (i.e., quality, immediacy, magnitude, and rate) occurred to inform a more- and less-preferred token economy arrangement. During Experiment 2, a treatment evaluation compared these two token economy arrangements. Results for all three participants showed lower rates of problem behavior under the more-preferred token economy arrangement compared to the less-preferred token economy arrangement. Rates of task completion were higher under the more-preferred token economy arrangement for one of the three participants. Results are discussed in terms of their practical implications for clinicians and educators implementing token economies to manage problem behavior.     

The influence of anxiety on processing capacity for threat detection

In the present study, we explored the proposition that an individual’s capacity for threat detection is related to his or her trait anxiety. Using a redundant signals paradigm with concurrent measurements of reaction times and eye movements, participants indicated the presence or absence of an emotional target face (angry or happy) in displays containing no targets, one target, or two targets. We used estimates of the orderings on the hazard functions of the RT distributions as measures of processing capacity (Townsend & Ashby, 1978; Wenger & Gibson, Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance, 30,708–719, 2004) to assess whether self-reported anxiety and the affective state of the face interacted with the level of perceptual load (i.e., the number of targets). Results indicated that anxiety was associated with fewer eye movements and increased processing capacity to detect multiple (vs. single) threatening faces. The data are consistent with anxiety influencing threat detection via a broadly tuned attentional mechanism (Eysenck, Derakshan, Santos, & Calvo, Emotion, 7,336–353, 2007).     

Incomes of ministers

Pastoral Psychology -     

The Role of the Hippocampus in Trace Conditioning: Temporal Discontinuity or Task Difficulty?

It is well established that the hippocampal formation is critically involved in the acquisition of trace memories, a paradigm in which the conditioned (CS) and unconditioned stimuli (US) are separated by a temporal gap (Solomon et al., 1986). The structure is reportedly not critical for the acquisition of delay memories, where the CS and the US overlap in time (Berger & Orr, 1983; Schmaltz & Theios, 1972). Based on these results, it is often stated that the hippocampus is involved in "filling the gap" or otherwise associating the two stimuli in time. However, in addition to the presence of a temporal gap, there are other differences between trace and delay conditioning. The most apparent difference is that animals require many more trials to learn the trace task, and thus it is inherently more difficult than the delay task. Here, we tested whether the hippocampus was critically involved in delay conditioning, if it was rendered more difficult such that the rate of acquisition was shifted to be analogous to trace conditioning. Groups of rats received excitotoxic lesions to the hippocampus, sham lesions or were left intact. Using the same interstimulus intervals (ISI), control animals required more trials to acquire the trace than the delay task. As predicted, animals with hippocampal lesions were impaired during trace conditioning but not delay conditioning. However, when the delay task was rendered more difficult by extending the ISI (a long delay task), animals with hippocampal lesions were impaired. In addition, once the lesioned animal learned the association between the CS and the US during delay conditioning, it could learn and perform the trace CR. Thus, the role of the hippocampus in classical conditioning is not limited to learning about discontiguous events in time and space; rather the structure can become engaged simply as a function of task difficulty.