Work site group meetings and the effectiveness of a televised smoking cessation intervention

At the work site, smoking accounts for increased health care expenses and worker absenteeism due to smoking-related illness and reduced productivity and lost wages. Developing comprehensive and accessible smoking cessation programs at the work site is an important objective for health care professionals. In this study, employees of 43 corporations participated in a televised smoking cessation program accompanied by self-help manuals. The media component involved presenting a smoking cessation program on a network television affiliate station during the 4:30 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. news for 20 days. Employees at half the corporations also had access to semiweekly self-help group meetings. Adding self-help support groups to a program involving self-help manuals and the media reports was found to significantly increase abstinence and its maintenance over time. The implications of using the media, self-help groups, and work site locations in large-scale community-based interventions are discussed.     

Specific language impairment in children: A cross-linguistic study

A common profile in English-speaking specifically language-impaired children is a moderate deficit across a broad range of linguistic features and a more marked, selective impairment in using bound morphemes and components of the verb system. To gain a clearer understanding of the nature of these more serious problems, we examined the speech of monolingual Italian-speaking as well as English-speaking children with specific language impairment. The evidence suggested that phonological factors contributed significantly to these children's extraordinary problems with particular linguistic features. Contrary to expectations, other marked deficits seemed more related to the opacity of the rules involved and homonymity with other morphemes than to problems with formal grammatical devices in general or components of the verb system in particular.     

The effects of perceptual set on the shape and apparent depth of subjective contours

Two experiments showed the influence of perceptual set on the perception of subjective contours. In the first, the perceived shape of a subjective-contour figure (a minimal version of the Ehrenstein configuration) was varied by altering the observer’s viewing set. The second experiment showed that apparent depth emerged in subjective-contour figures when observers were set to perceive the illusory contours.     

Secobarbital and perceptual processing

An experiment which employed each of 18 subjects in four days of testing was used to examine acute secobarbital dose treatment effects on choice reaction time in a Cooper and Shepard (1973) character recognition task. Manipulations of visual stimulus degradation, character difficulty, 180 degree rotation, and mirror-image reversal were included in order to evaluate the hypothesis that the drug affects performance by disrupting early stimulus input processing. The results indicate significant increases in the effect of secobarbital on reaction time and errors under conditions of visual stimulus degradation. The effects of the drug, however, were not changed by 180 degree rotation of the target character or by the other task variables. The results were interpreted to indicate that secobarbital impairs performance primarily by placing selective stress on hypothetical early encoding activities and that later processing operations (associated with use of an internal representation of the target character) are not affected by the drug. Strengths and weaknesses of the two-stage model of visual stimulus processing are discussed and implications of the model for future drug research are indicated.     

Effect of perceived public stigma on internalized homophobia,anticipated stigma,shame, and guilt: Outness as a moderator

Although previous studies found that distal minority stress contributes to proximal minority stress and shame/guilt among the lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) population, it is unclear whether the extent to which LGB individuals' open display and discussion their sexual orientation moderates these relationships. A total of 1,452 Chinese LGB adults provided demographic information and completed measures of outness, perceived public stigma, internalized homophobia, anticipated stigma, shame, and guilt. Structural equation modelling was conducted to test the hypothesized moderation analyses. Perceived public stigma had positive associations with internalized homophobia, anticipated stigma, shame, and guilt. Outness played a moderating role in the associations of perceived public stigma with internalized homophobia, anticipated stigma, shame, and guilt. Specifically, when LGB individuals had higher levels of outness, the effects of perceived public stigma on internalized homophobia, anticipated stigma, shame, and guilt were lower. Moreover, such moderating effect did not differ by sexual orientation. The degree to which sexual minority individuals' sexual orientation is known by and openly discussed with others may lower the extent to which LGB individuals internalize sexual stigma, expect rejection after coming out, and develop shame and guilt as a result of perceived social prejudice and discrimination.