How automatic are social judgments?

Do people infer personality dispositions automatically when they encode behavior? Tulving's encoding-specificity paradigm was adapted to test three operational indicants of automatism: absence of intention, of interference from other mental activity, and of awareness. Recruited for a digit-recall study, subjects read sentences describing actions during the retention interval of either an easy or a difficult digit recall task. Later, sentence recall was cued by (a) disposition cues, (b) strong semantic associates to the sentence actor, or (c) words representing the gist of the sentence, or (d) sentence recall was not cued. Awareness was measured immediately after the last sentence was read. Disposition-cued recall was higher than (b) or (d) and was unaffected by digit recall difficulty. Awareness of making dispositional inferences was only weakly correlated with disposition-cued recall. Results suggest that disposition inferences occurred at encoding, without intention, without interference by differential drain on processing capacity, and with little awareness. Thus, making dispositional inferences seems to be largely, but not entirely, automatic.     

Socialization and themes in popular drama: An analysis of the content of child-rearing manuals and Don Juan plays in sixteenth to twentieth centuries

A content analysis is reported of child-rearing manuals published in sixteenth to nineteenth centuries and of the themes of the Don Juan plays in seventeenth to twentieth centuries. The relationship between the content of the manuals and the themes of the plays supports the thesis that child-rearing patterns advocated in one century are reflected in the next in the attitudes expressed in popular cultural activities towards aggression, achievement and sex roles.     

An inexpensive sound-activated switch for experiments measuring vocal-response times

An inexpensive sound-activated switch suitable for experiments measuring vocal-response times is described. This switch is comparable to many commercially produced switches in terms of its control over input sensitivity and response delay times, but it can be assembled for a fraction of the cost. Additionally, the present switch provides many features not found on standard commercial models such as a built-in speaker for monitoring the input signal and output jacks to facilitate simultaneous recording of this signal. Reliability estimates suggest that performance for this switch is comparable to that of a Scientific Prototype Model 761-G when both units are equated for frequency sensitivity and response delay time. In all, this switch offers a reliable and practical alternative to commercially produced devices for experiments in which the onset of an auditory signal must be accurately detected.     

PsyExper: Another experimental generation system for the IBM PC

A system for creating and running psychological experiments on IBM PC compatible computers is described. The system attempts to reconcile the demand for flexible and powerful experimental software with the need for systems that are easy to understand and modify. Experiments are created by building a series of displays with variable compositions, durations, and stimulus onset asynchronies. The number, type, location, color, and perceptibility of stimuli within these displays can be systematically varied. Reaction time and other response measures can be collected from the keyboard, a voice-activated switch, or other external switches. The system is assembled from a series of Turbo Pascal and Turbo C routines that may be modified by the user or incorporated into new routines. Custom modules can be added easily to any of the system’s menus. The system is best suited for discrete trial experiments with target detection, perceptual priming, lexical decision, or recognition memory tasks.     

Bayesian PTSD-Trajectory Analysis with Informed Priors Based on a Systematic Literature Search and Expert Elicitation

There is a recent increase in interest of Bayesian analysis. However, little effort has been made thus far to directly incorporate background knowledge via the prior distribution into the analyses. This process might be especially useful in the context of latent growth mixture modeling when one or more of the latent groups are expected to be relatively small due to what we refer to as limited data. We argue that the use of Bayesian statistics has great advantages in limited data situations, but only if background knowledge can be incorporated into the analysis via prior distributions. We highlight these advantages through a data set including patients with burn injuries and analyze trajectories of posttraumatic stress symptoms using the Bayesian framework following the steps of the WAMBS-checklist. In the included example, we illustrate how to obtain background information using previous literature based on a systematic literature search and by using expert knowledge. Finally, we show how to translate this knowledge into prior distributions and we illustrate the importance of conducting a prior sensitivity analysis. Although our example is from the trauma field, the techniques we illustrate can be applied to any field.     

Propagation of innovations in networked groups

A novel paradigm was developed to study the behavior of groups of networked people searching a problem space. The authors examined how different network structures affect the propagation of information in laboratory-created groups. Participants made numerical guesses and received scores that were also made available to their neighbors in the network. The networks were compared on speed of discovery and convergence on the optimal solution. One experiment showed that individuals within a group tend to converge on similar solutions even when there is an equally valid alternative solution. Two additional studies demonstrated that the optimal network structure depends on the problem space being explored, with networks that incorporate spatially based cliques having an advantage for problems that benefit from broad exploration, and networks with greater long-range connectivity having an advantage for problems requiring less exploration. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved).     

Measuring Hong Kong Undergraduate Students’ Attitudes Towards Transpeople

Hill and Willoughby’s (Sex Roles, 53:531–544, 2005) Genderism and Transphobia Scale (GTS), originally developed in Canada, was examined with a Hong Kong sample. Undergraduate students, 82 female and 121 male (total n?=?203), completed a Chinese version of the instrument. Overall scores and factor structure of the Hong Kong sample were compared with Hill and Willoughby’s Canadian data. Gender differences in transphobia were investigated, both in terms of the participants’ gender as well as the gender of the gender variant persons to whom GTS items referred. Transphobia was higher in Hong Kong than in Canada. The factor structure for Hong Kong differed from Canada. Five factors were identified (with a gender effect on Factors II and V). They were: I, Anti Sissy Prejudice; II, Anti Trans Violence; III, Trans Unnaturalness; IV, Trans Immorality; and V, Background Genderism. Hong Kong men were more transphobic than women. Gender variance in men was viewed less favourably than in women.