The Matching of Facial Expressions by Deaf and Hearing Children and Their Production and Comprehension of Emotion Labels

This paper reports the results of three tasks comparing the development of the understanding of facial expressions of emotion in deaf and hearing children. Two groups of hearing and deaf children of elementary school age were tested for their ability to match photographs of facial expressions of emotion, and to produce and comprehend emotion labels for the expressions of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise. Accuracy data showed comparable levels of performance for deaf and hearing children of the same age. Happiness and sadness were the most accurately matched expressions and the most accurately produced and comprehended labels. Anger was the least accurately matched expression and the most poorly comprehended emotion label. Disgust was the least accurately labeled expression; however, deaf children were more accurate at labeling this expression, and also at labeling fear, than hearing children. Error data revealed that children confused anger with disgust, and fear with surprise. However, the younger groups of deaf and hearing children also showed a tendency to confuse the negative expressions of anger, disgust, and fear with sadness. The results suggest that, despite possible differences in the early socialisation of emotion, deaf and hearing children share a common understanding of the emotions conveyed by distinctive facial expressions.     

Honoring accounts for sexual harassment: A factorial survey analysis

This study analyzes a factorial survey, incorporating vignettes about student-to-student sexual harassment, completed by undergraduates at a small liberal arts college. As in previous studies, perceived seriousness levels for such incidents are shown to depend primarily on the perpetrator's behavior. However, perceived seriousness also depends strongly on the accounts offered by the perpetrator for his behavior and to a lesser extent on verbal reactions of the female victim. Furthermore, some types of accounts reduce the perceived seriousness of the behavior, while others increase it. Male and female respondents differ in their overall means, but do not differ significantly in the factors that influence perceived seriousness. Some implications of these results for the study of sexual harassment and of accounts are noted.     

Enhancing the training integrity of human service staff using pyramidal behavioral skills training

This experiment used a pyramidal training model to evaluate the effects of behavioral skills training (BST), delivered in a 1-time group-training format, on the extent to which 25 human service staff implemented BST when training others how to implement behavioral procedures. Results indicated that (a) the training workshop increased BST integrity to mastery levels for the majority of participants with varying levels of education, organizational positions, and training experience, (b) the training effects generalized to teaching an untrained skill, and (c) high levels of BST integrity maintained at follow-up 4 to 6 weeks after training for all 3 participants with whom probes were conducted. Moreover, participants indicated high levels of satisfaction with both the training workshop and BST as a training procedure.     

Links between social network closure and child well-being: the organizing role of friendship context

Third grade children (N = 404) and their mothers completed questionnaires and participated in interviews designed to identify children's friendships across multiple contexts, determine levels of social network closure for these friendships, and assess child well-being. Cluster analyses revealed distinct patterns in the contexts in which children's friendships were maintained. Closure was highest for children whose friendship clusters heavily represented relatives as friends and lowest when friends were from schools and the broader community. Intermediate levels of closure were observed for the clusters of neighborhood friends and friends from church and school. Both friendship cluster and, to some extent, ethnicity moderated associations between closure and indicators of well-being.     

Self-esteem and in-group bias among members of a religious social category

In a sample of New Zealand university students, the author extended earlier research into the relationship between self-esteem and intergroup discrimination. He found no support for the hypothesis that social-category members (i.e., Christians) experience an elevation in the domain of self-esteem (i.e., religious self-esteem) judged as more relevant to the in-group after evaluations favoring the in-group. Regardless of whether the evaluation targets behaved positively or negatively, the respondents in the experimental condition evaluated in-group (Christian) targets more highly than out-group (Atheist) targets. After evaluations favoring the in-group, the respondents did not experience an elevation of religious self-esteem, global self-esteem, or mathematical self-esteem (judged as less relevant to the in-group).     

Social influences on reality-monitoring decisions

A modified Asch (1951) conformity paradigm was used to study the impact of social influence on reality-monitoring decisions about new items. Subjects studied pictures of some objects and imagined others. In a later test phase, they judged whether items had been perceived in the study phase, had been imagined, or were new. Critically, for some items, the subjects were informed of a confederate's response before rendering a judgment. Although the confederate was always correct when they responded to old items, for new items, the confederate responded perceived, imagined, or new, or did not respond (baseline). In two experiments, we show that memory for new items was influenced by an erroneous response of the confederate. Social conformity was reduced by undermining the credibility of the confederate (Experiments 1A and 1B), and the confederate's influence was evident even after there was only a 20-min delay between study and test (Experiment 2), when the subjects were 87% accurate on new baseline items. These experiments reveal the power of social influence on reality-monitoring accuracy and confidence.