Risk avoidance: Graphs versus numbers

There have long been speculations that graphical and numerical presentations of risk statistics differ in their impact on people’s willingness to pursue actions that could harm or even kill them. But research has been unclear about the processes whereby the pictorial character of graphical displays per se might affect those risky decisions or even whether such effects actually occur. In two studies, we demonstrate that the pictorial nature of a graphical risk display can, indeed, increase risk avoidance. This increase is associated with a heightened impression of the riskiness of less safe alternatives. The results suggest that this picture-driven, intensified sense of riskiness, in turn, rests on two kinds of mechanisms: one cognitive, the other affective. Cognitively, pictorial presentations impose weaker upper bounds on people’s internal representations of the chances that riskier alternatives will bring about actual harm. Affectively, pictures ignite stronger, more aversive negative associations with riskier options and their outcomes.     

Inner-City African American Parental Involvement in Children's Schooling: Racial Socialization and Social Support from the Parent Community

Parents (n = 161) and teachers (n = 18) from an urban elementary school serving primarily African American children completed questionnaires regarding racial socialization, social support, and involvement in activities that support youth educational achievement at home and school. Parental reports of racism awareness, and contact with school staff were significantly correlated with parent reports of at-home involvement and at-school involvement. Parent reports of social support from the parent community were significantly related to at-home involvement only. Relative to teacher reports, parents reported more formal contacts with school staff, and higher levels of racism awareness, religiosity, and African American cultural pride. Teachers and parents agreed on school climate and parental levels of at-home and at-school involvement. The results suggest that racial socialization processes are related to parent involvement in children's schooling and that increased efforts are needed to bridge a cultural gap between parents and teachers in inner-city communities.     

Do masks terminate the icon?

Iconic memory is operationally defined by part-report experiments (Sperling, 1960). If a mask is presented after the target, the mask is thought to be superposed on the target in the iconic representation, or to displace it from the representation. But could a cue presented after a pattern mask still allow selection within the target array? A target array of letters was followed by a checkerboard mask. We compared two target-mask interstimulus intervals (ISIs; 0 and 100 ms), and six cue delays. At ISI = 0 ms, performance was at chance, for part report and whole report. At ISI = 100 ms, with the shortest cue delay, observers demonstrated a part-report advantage of 25-30%. As cue delay increased the part-report advantage decreased. These results are inconsistent with an iconic memory that is automatically displaced or overwritten by new information. We consider two alternatives: a second-stage store, which represents letters in terms of their high-level features and which the mask cannot penetrate, or a four-dimensional store that preserves separately the representations of the target and its aftercoming mask. We discuss the implications of our results for studies that use backward masking to "terminate the icon".     

Concurrent reinforcement schedules: behavior change and maintenance without extinction

We evaluated the effects of concurrent schedules of reinforcement on negatively reinforced problem behavior and task completion with 3 children with autism. Results indicated that problem behavior occurred at high levels and relatively few tasks were completed when problem behavior produced a break (from tasks) and task completion produced either no consequence or a break. By contrast, problem behavior was eliminated and tasks were completed when problem behavior produced a break and task completion produced a break with access to preferred activities. Treatment gains were maintained without the use of extinction when the response requirement was increased and the schedule of reinforcement was thinned.     

Selective attention to threat: A test of two cognitive models of anxiety

Two experiments evaluated differential predictions from two cognitive formulations of anxiety. According to one view, attentional biases for threat reflect vulnerability to anxiety; and as threat inputs increase, high trait anxious individuals should become more vigilant, and low trait individuals more avoidant, of threat (Williams, Watts, MacLeod, & Mathews, 1988, 1997). However, according to a “cognitive-motivational” view, trait anxiety influences the appraisal of stimulus threat value, rather than the direction of attentional bias, and both high and low trait anxious individuals should exhibit greater vigilance for high rather than mild threat stimuli (Mogg & Bradley, 1998). To test these predictions, two experiments examined the effect of manipulating stimulus threat value on the direction of attentional bias. The stimuli included high threat and mild threat pictorial scenes presented in a probe detection task. Results from both studies indicated a significant main effect of stimulus threat value on attentional bias, as there was increased vigilance or reduced avoidance of threat, as threat value increased. This effect was found even within low trait anxious individuals, consistent with the “cognitive-motivational” view. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.     

Atheism in religious clothing? Accounting for atheist interventions in the public sphere

In this paper I review several recent attempts to recast atheism in religious form in Canada, the US and the UK. First, several atheists have argued for the redefinition of atheism as a creed deserving of religious protections from the state. Second, various atheist ‘churches’ have gained publicity in recent years, in part due to their appropriation of the Protestant church format and the rhetoric of religious association. Both of these expressions of atheism stand in marked contradiction to older forms of atheism which emerged in response to (and rejection of) Christianity in the West, and they also stand in contrast to popular forms of atheism today, of the kind espoused by Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. As a result, the cases reviewed here represent the ways in which contemporary atheist movements constitute several different counterpublics, and they mark a significant change in the state’s acknowledgement of atheism as a positive form of belief.     

Using Temporal Profiles and a Deviation from Balanced Approach to Understand Alcohol and Mental Health Problems

Abstract

The present study examined how multiple operationalizations of Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZTPI) scores (raw scores; temporal profiles, based on cluster analysis; and the Deviation from a Balanced Time Perspective, or ‘transformed’ methodology) were related to both alcohol-related problems and symptoms of anxiety and depression. Participants were a large (N?=?816) university sample in the United Kingdom. A total of four time perspective profiles were observed: Futures, Presents, Past Negative-Futures, and Fatalists. Having a Present profile was associated with the worst alcohol-related outcomes. With regard to psychopathology, individuals with a Future profile reported the least anxious and depressive symptoms, and individuals with a Fatalistic profile reported the highest levels of depression. The effect of transformed scores was less robust, though greater deviation from a balanced perspective was associated with somewhat higher symptoms of anxiety and depression. Further, models using raw ZTPI dimension scores explained a greater amount of variance than models using the transformed scores. This study suggests that operationalizing the ZTPI in different ways produces results, which differ both in magnitude and statistical significance. We recommend that future studies using the ZTPI employ these various operationalizations in order that consensus on the optimal approach can be reached.     

A Data Analysis Method for Using Longitudinal Binary Outcome Data from a SMART to Compare Adaptive Interventions

Sequential multiple assignment randomized trials (SMARTs) are a useful and increasingly popular approach for gathering information to inform the construction of adaptive interventions to treat psychological and behavioral health conditions. Until recently, analysis methods for data from SMART designs considered only a single measurement of the outcome of interest when comparing the efficacy of adaptive interventions. Lu et al. proposed a method for considering repeated outcome measurements to incorporate information about the longitudinal trajectory of change. While their proposed method can be applied to many kinds of outcome variables, they focused mainly on linear models for normally distributed outcomes. Practical guidelines and extensions are required to implement this methodology with other types of repeated outcome measures common in behavioral research. In this article, we discuss implementation of this method with repeated binary outcomes. We explain how to compare adaptive interventions in terms of various summaries of repeated binary outcome measures, including average outcome (area under the curve) and delayed effects. The method is illustrated using an empirical example from a SMART study to develop an adaptive intervention for engaging alcohol- and cocaine-dependent patients in treatment. Monte Carlo simulations are provided to demonstrate the good performance of the proposed technique.