Exploratory study of best friendship dissolution characteristics and psychological difficulties during early adolescence

Few studies have evaluated best friendship dissolutions and especially the circumstances surrounding the dissolutions. In this exploratory study of young adolescents (N = 273, M_age = 11.83 years; 51% boys), we investigate young adolescents' experiences with two types of best friendship dissolution (complete dissolutions, downgrade dissolutions) and two characteristics of such experiences: initiation status (self- versus friend-initiation) and emotional reactions (degree of happiness, anger, sadness, and embarrassment). We also consider whether these characteristics of best friendship dissolutions are related to psychological difficulties (loneliness, depressive symptoms). Results indicated that most young adolescents perceive their friends initiated their recent complete and downgrade dissolutions. When young adolescents did initiate their complete dissolutions, however, they reported less negative (anger) and more positive (happiness) emotional responses. Initiation status was not related to psychological difficulties, but variability in several types of emotional responses (e.g., embarrassment) was related to variability in loneliness and depressive symptoms. Findings underscore the importance of considering not only the type of dissolution, but also the circumstances surrounding dissolutions, during early adolescence.     

Ambiguity attitudes in qualitative contexts: The role of prior beliefs

Most studies of ambiguity aversion rely on experimental paradigms involving monetary bets. Thus, the extent to which ambiguity aversion occurs outside of such contexts is much less understood, particularly when the situation cannot easily be reduced to numerical terms. The present work seeks to understand whether people prefer to avoid ambiguous decisions in a variety of different qualitative domains (e.g., work, family, love, friendship, exercise, study, and health), and, if so, to determine the role played by prior beliefs in those domains. Across three studies, we presented participants with 24 vignettes and measured the degree to which they preferred risk to ambiguity in each. We also asked them for their prior probability estimates about the likely outcomes in the ambiguous events. Ambiguity aversion was observed in the vast majority of vignettes, but at different magnitudes. It was predicted by whether the vignette involved gain or loss as well as by people's prior beliefs; however, the heterogeneity between people meant that the role of prior beliefs was only evident in an individual-level analysis (i.e., not at the group level). Our results suggest that the desire to avoid ambiguity occurs in a wide variety of qualitative contexts but to different degrees for different people and may be partially driven by unfavorable prior estimates of the likely outcomes of the ambiguous events.     

Retinal locus and the letter-span error function

The effect of retinal locus on the letter-span error function was investigated by requiring Ss to fixate at the left, middle, or right of lines of letters presented for 100 msec. Stimulus presentations consisted of lines of eight letters presented across the visual field, and lines of four letters presented alternately in the left and right visual hemifields. Locus of fixation and relative letter position were found to be significantly related to whether or not a letter was correctly localized. A significant interaction between locus of fixation and letter position was observed.     

Self-esteem, attitude similarity, and attraction

Subjects evaluated three stimulus persons on several rating scales who were either 10%, 50%, or 90% similar to themselves in attitudes Subjects were divided into low, moderate, and high self-esteem groups on the basis of an earlier Q sort The results showed a strong positive relation between perceived similarity and positive attribution for each of the dependent variables, including liking, sophisticated, intelligent, sincere, happy, and a social distance scale A negative relation was obtained for two undesirable traits, arrogant and cynical Self-esteem interacted with similarity on several of the measures The difference between self-esteem groups was largely restricted to highly dissimilar stimulus persons Moderate esteem subjects were more favorable toward dissimilar persons than either of the other two groups, and the high and low groups tended to resemble each other more than either group resembled the moderate esteem group These results were discussed in terms of the relation between self-esteem and adjustment, and in terms of McGuire's (1968) theory that predicts a nonmonotonic relation between self-esteem and attitudes.     

Averaged occipital responses to stimulation of sites in the upper and lower halves of the retina

Averaged responses of the occipital lobes to flashes imposed along the midline of the upper part of the retina are larger and of shorter latency than responses to flashes imposed on the lower retina. Since reaction times also are shorter when the upper retina is stimulated, this study provides further evidence for the generalization that reaction time varies inversely with amplitude and directly with latency of the evoked response.