The Beginnings of Expertise for Ballads

To study the beginning stages of expertise, 14 students, who were inexperienced with ballads, heard and recalled a series of 5 ballads over the course of 5 weeks. Compared with their first recall of the first ballad, their first recall of the fifth ballad had one and a half times as many words, two times as many rhyming words, and three times as much line structure evident in the written recall protocols. Compared with novices, the 14 beginning experts more often filled in blank spaces in novel ballads with words of the correct number of syllables and more often chose the original stanza of a novel ballad that was paired with a changed version of the stanza. The beginning experts were also able to compose, in 20 min, ballads about two thirds as long as the 10-stanza ballads they learned. Thirty characteristics were identified in the set of the five learned ballads. The ballads composed by the beginning experts used over half of these. The beginning experts also explicitly stated about one quarter of these 30 characteristics, but there was no statistical relationship between the characteristics used and the characteristics stated. Memory expertise is viewed as a pervasive aspect of cognition in which people make use of a variety of regularities in the material to be learned.     

Campus Student Suicide Rates: Fact or Artifact?

A review of all English-language studies (14 foreign and 17 American) on campus student suicides was undertaken. Only studies reporting original data and containing sufficient demographic information to compute standard mortality rates (SMR) or crude suicide rates were analyzed and organized into single-site studies. Only 4 single-site studies had a higher suicide rate than the comparable populations. Multiple-site collaborative studies done in the United States since 1960 strongly suggest a campus student suicide rate significantly less than in the matched control population. However, deficiencies in case finding, case definition, sampling bias, and statistical techniques may place these conclusions in doubt. The author outlines research methods that might be applied to future multiple-site studies to resolve questions related to late adolescent and young adult suicidal behavior on campus and in other similar educational settings.     

Folk conceptions of fairness and unfairness

This study sought to identify the standards people invoke when judging the fairness or unfairness of outcomes of everyday events, and to determine whether their standards of judgment vary according to the fairness of the outcome and to their perspective, i.e. whether the outcomes are ones they personally experienced or witnessed. The standards of fairness laypeople were found to invoke, even when unprompted, coincided with the standards social scientists have emphasized (e.g. distributive, procedural) in their theories of psychological justice. However, laypeople emphasized these standards differently when accounting for the fairness–unfairness of personal experiences versus those they had witnessed, and when accounting for fair versus unfair outcomes. As predicted, they were more likely to invoke procedural and interpersonal criteria when judging the fairness–unfairness of their own outcomes, but more likely to invoke distributive criteria when judging others' outcomes. Regardless of perspective, laypeople cited procedural criteria as the major determinants of their fairness judgements; but cited procedural, distributive and interpersonal criteria as comparably influential in determining their unfairness judgments. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Paradoxes of praise: Identity‐inconsistent praise results in praise‐inconsistent responses

In four experimental studies, we explored the effect of consistency between central group values and the content of group‐directed praise on group‐based esteem, group identification, and willingness to express attitudes and intentions (in)consistent with the content of praise. Study 1 used pre‐existing groups with clearly defined central values, Study 2 relied on individual differences in perceptions of central group values within the same social group, and Studies 3 and 4 manipulated the centrality of group values experimentally. The results demonstrated that identity‐inconsistent praise resulted in lower group‐based esteem (Studies 1–4), and reduced group identification (Study 4), as compared to identity‐consistent praise. In addition, in all studies, identity‐inconsistent praise led to stronger willingness to reaffirm (the ignored) central group characteristics than identity‐consistent praise. The results are consistent with extensions of the self‐verification approach to the collective self.