Discussing transgender topics within gay-straight alliances: Factors that could promote more frequent conversations

ABSTRACT

Background: Gay-straight alliances (GSAs) have potential to facilitate conversations on transgender and gender-diversity issues among members. We examined how frequently GSA members discussed transgender and gender-diversity topics within GSAs, whether GSAs varied from one another in the extent to which these conversations occurred, and identified factors that distinguished which members and GSAs discussed such topics more often than others.

Methods: Participants were 295 members of 33 high school GSAs in the state of Massachusetts who completed surveys that assessed their experiences within their GSA.

Results: On average, youth discussed transgender and gender-diversity issues with some regularity, but this varied significantly across GSAs and among youth within each GSA. Youth who had transgender friends, perceived a more respectful GSA climate, and accessed more information/resources and engaged in more advocacy within the GSA reported more frequently discussing transgender and gender-diversity issues. Also, GSAs with transgender members, whose members collectively perceived a more respectful climate, accessed more information/resources and did more advocacy, and who reported lower socializing or support discussed transgender and gender-diversity issues more frequently than other GSAs.

Conclusions: This information could inform GSA programming to facilitate more transgender and gender-diversity topic discussions and ensure that members feel encouraged to participate in them.     

Persistence of Initial Misanalysis With No Referential Ambiguity

Previous research reported that in processing structurally ambiguous sentences comprehenders often preserve an initial incorrect analysis even after adopting a correct analysis following structural disambiguation. One criticism is that the sentences tested in previous studies involved referential ambiguity and allowed comprehenders to make inferences about the initial interpretation using pragmatic information, suggesting the possibility that the initial analysis persisted due to comprehenders' pragmatic inference but not to their failure to perform complete reanalysis of the initial misanalysis. Our study investigated this by testing locally ambiguous relative clause sentences in Japanese, in which the initial misinterpretation contradicts the correct interpretation. Our study using a self‐paced reading technique demonstrated evidence for the persistence of the initial analysis with this structure. The results from an eye‐tracking study further suggested that the phenomenon directly reflected the amount of support given to the initial incorrect analysis prior to disambiguating information: The more supported the incorrect main clause analysis was, the more likely comprehenders were to preserve the analysis even after the analysis was falsified. Our results thus demonstrated that the preservation of the initial analysis occurs not due to referential ambiguities but to comprehenders' difficulty to fully revise the highly supported initial interpretation.     

Contextual cueing facilitation arises early in the time course of visual search: An investigation with the `speed-accuracy tradeoff task

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics - Visual search is expedited in a spatial context encountered repeatedly. A much-debated question is how early the facilitation by contextual memory...     

Multidimensional Profiles of Welfare and Work Dynamics: Development, Validation, and Associations with Child Cognitive and Mental Health Outcomes

This prospective longitudinal study addresses the research gap in the literature regarding multidimensional variation in welfare use and employment patterns, and relationships of such variation with parent earnings and child development outcomes. This study also aims to address the limitations of welfare dynamics studies that do not examine how multiple dimensions of welfare receipt and employment co-occur. Cluster analysis was utilized, using monthly welfare and employment data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, to examine variation within the welfare population in their welfare and work patterns across the first 5 years of children's lives. Six cluster profiles of welfare and work dynamics were found: Short-Term, Short-Term Work Exit, Working Cyclers, Nonworking Cyclers, Cycle to Long-Term Exit, and Long-Term. The clusters were validated using mother's 6th-year earnings as the criterion. The clusters' associations with child development outcomes in the cognitive and mental health domains (at ages 6 and 7) were then explored. Work following short-term welfare use was associated with higher child reading scores than that following long-term use (a moderate-size effect). Cycling on and off welfare in the context of high levels of employment was associated with higher child internalizing symptoms than cycling accompanied by low levels of employment (a moderate-size effect). Implications for evaluation of TANF welfare-to-work policies are discussed.     

Index to Volume 27

Other Index

Index to Volume 27     

Syntactic priming in comprehension: the role of argument order and animacy

Two visual-world eye-movement experiments investigated the nature of syntactic priming during comprehension--specifically, whether the priming effects in ditransitive prepositional object (PO) and double object (DO) structures (e.g., "The wizard will send the poison to the prince/the prince the poison?") are due to anticipation of structural properties following the verb (send) in the target sentence or to anticipation of animacy properties of the first postverbal noun. Shortly following the target verb onset, listeners looked at the recipient more (relative to the theme) following DO than PO primes, indicating that the structure of the prime affected listeners' eye gazes on the target scene. Crucially, this priming effect was the same irrespective of whether the postverbal nouns in the prime sentences did ("The monarch will send the painting to the president") or did not ("The monarch will send the envoy to the president") differ in animacy, suggesting that PO/DO priming in comprehension occurs because structural properties, rather than animacy features, are being primed when people process the ditransitive target verb.     

Priming ditransitive structures in comprehension

Many studies have shown evidence for syntactic priming during language production (e.g., Bock, 1986). It is often assumed that comprehension and production share similar mechanisms and that priming also occurs during comprehension (e.g., Pickering & Garrod, 2004). Research investigating priming during comprehension (e.g., Branigan, Pickering, & McLean, 2005; Scheepers & Crocker, 2004) has mainly focused on syntactic ambiguities that are very different from the meaning-equivalent structures used in production research. In two experiments, we investigated whether priming during comprehension occurs in ditransitive sentences similar to those used in production research. When the verb was repeated between prime and target, we observed a priming effect similar to that in production. However, we observed no evidence for priming when the verbs were different. Thus, priming during comprehension occurs for very similar structures as priming during production, but in contrast to production, the priming effect is completely lexically dependent.     

Searching for a perceived stare in the crowd

Gaze direction can be represented in terms not only of local-feature information (ie the location of the pupil in the eye socket), but also of an emergent property---whether the perceived gaze direction is straight or averted. To examine whether this emergent property is preferentially accessed when searching for an oddly directed gaze, we experimentally manipulated the local-feature information and the emergent property independently, in order to investigate the influences of both types of information on visual searches for an oddly directed gaze. We found that the primary determinant of search efficiency was not the local-feature information of eye region, but the emergent property--the perceived direction of the gaze. This finding is consistent with the idea that important social signals are recognised primarily by their emergent properties.     

Relationship between frames of reference and mirror-image reversals

The mirror puzzle related to the perception of mirror images as left-right reversed can be more fully understood by considering an extended problem that includes also the perception of mirror images that are not left-right reversed. The purpose of the present study is to clarify the physical aspect of this extended problem logically and parsimoniously. Separate use of the intrinsic frame of reference that belongs to the object and one that belongs to its mirror image always leads to the perception of left-right reversal when the object has left-right asymmetry; on the other hand, the perception of left-right nonreversal is always due to the application of a common frame of reference to the object and its mirror image.