Identifying two potential mechanisms for changes in alcohol use among college-attending and non-college-attending emerging adults

This study tested whether pro-alcohol peer influences and prosocial involvement account for increases in drinking during the transition into emerging adulthood and whether these mechanisms differ depending on college attendance and/or moving away from home. The authors used structural equation modeling of prospective data from 825 young men and women. For 4 groups defined by college and residential status, more drinking in the spring of 12th grade predicted more pro-alcohol peer influences the following fall, and more pro-alcohol peer influences in the fall predicted increases in drinking the following spring. Going to college while living at home was a protective factor against increases in drinking and selection of pro-alcohol peer involvements. Prosocial involvement (measured by involvement in religious activities and volunteer work) was not significantly related to post-high school drinking except among college students living away from home. Prevention efforts should focus on (a) reducing opportunities for heavy drinking for college and noncollege emerging adults as they leave home and (b) increasing prosocial involvement among college students not living at home.     

Socioemotional Selectivity Theory and the Regulation of Emotion in the Second Half of Life

Far more attention has been paid to emotion regulation in childhood than in adulthood and old age. However, a growing body of empirical research suggests that the emotion domain is largely spared from deleterious processes associated with aging and points instead to developmental gains in later life. By applying tenets from socioemotional selectivity theory, we attempt to explain the observed gains in terms of motivation. We argue that age is associated with increasing motivation to derive emotional meaning from life and decreasing motivation to expand one's horizons. These changes lead to age differences in social and environmental choices (consistent with antecedent emotion regulation), coping (consistent with response-focused regulation), and cognitive processing of positive and negative information (consistent with goal-directed attention and memory). Broader implications for life-span development are discussed.     

The Role of Group Experiences in the Healing Process of Massive Childhood Holocaust Trauma

This paper proposes that Holocaust child survivors profoundly benefit from participating in a variety of group modalities. From participant observation and interviews we demonstrate that affiliation in organizations, social events, commemorations, rituals, and particular therapeutic groups each contributes to the well-being of Holocaust child survivors. Mourning is enhanced by joining forces with others from a historical event that left many children orphans, bereft of a home, a community, a country, and an identity. Group participants achieve individuation and ego integration, and gain clarity about the complex psychological consequences of surviving the Holocaust. A fragmented identity is restored through the opportunity of interacting with others whose identity has been ruptured by similar cataclysmic events.Senior Research Fellow, Graduate Center of CUNY. Codirector, Psychotherapy with Generations of the Holocaust and Related Traumas, Training Institute for Mental Health. Codirector, Child Development ResearchSenior Member and Faculty, National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis. Codirector, Child Development Research     

Does graduation give rise to increased poignancy? Moderation roles of university identity and emotion regulation

Cross-sectional (Study 1) and longitudinal (Study 2) designs were used to examine the relationship between graduation and poignancy (i.e. feeling both happy and sad at the same time). Participants included college students who completed a short emotion checklist, and measures of university identity and emotion regulation strategies. Students who were about to graduate, experienced a higher level of poignancy than those who were further away from graduation. Yet, university identity and emotion regulation moderated this relationship. Students with a higher level of university identity and those with a lower level of emotional suppression experienced a higher level of poignancy when approaching graduation. These findings not only provide support for the postulate of socioemotional selectivity theory that anticipated endings increase poignancy, but also qualify it in terms of the moderators.     

Ethics of field research: Do journals set the standard?

To determine whether ethical issues concerned with field research are addressed in the peer-review process, instructions to authors and reviewers of 141 (mainly natural science) journals were examined to ascertain how often ethical issues were mentioned. Only one-third (n=41) of responding journals addressed ethical issues in their instructions to authors or reviewers. When ethical issues were considered, most of the journals limited their concerns to ethical issues associated with animal and general human experimentation. No journal mentioned ethical practices in working with indigenous peoples or on traditional lands. Only two journals addressed the ethics of research in sensitive areas in their instructions to authors, only one in its instructions to reviewers. We suggest that peer-reviewed journals respond to an emerging issue in ecological research by formally incorporating research ethics into their instructions to authors and reviewers. Furthermore, these instructions should address the ethical issues associated with field research and in working with indigenous peoples and on traditional lands.     

Wide-angle memories of close-up scenes: A demonstration of boundary extension

Boundary extension refers to a tendency to remember seeing a greater expanse of a scene than was shown in a photograph. It is hypothesized that the view shown in the stimulus activates expectations about the scene’s layout just outside the picture’s borders. Following presentation, the viewer remembers having seen this expected information, and this yields boundary extension. We provide photographs and instructions for conducting two brief demonstrations of the phenomenon and provide materials for a related class experiment on the journal’s World-Wide Web site. These demonstrations of boundary extension provide graphic illustrations of the role of schematic expectancies in the representation of scenes and help to illustrate the role of real-world knowledge in cognition.     

Popular peers as change agents for the socially neglected child in the classroom

The present study investigated the use of popular students in promoting the acceptance of socially neglected children. A sociometric questionnaire was administered to 573 fifth- and sixth-grade students. Ninety-five socially neglected children were identified and randomly assigned to experimental or control groups. Four to eight popular students were also selected as student peer facilitators from each class included in the study. These students were instructed weekly in social skills and assigned to work with a target child within their own classroom. Assessment after treatment indicated that students in the experimental group increased significantly in peer acceptance, whereas no significant change occured in the control group.     

Metalexical Awareness: Development, Methodology or Written Language? A Cross-linguistic Comparison

This study explores the ability to access word boundaries of pre-school children, using an on-line methodology (Karmiloff-Smith, Grant, Sims, Jones, & Cockle (1996). Cognition, 58, 197–219.), which has hardly been used outside English-speaking countries. In a cross-linguistic study in the Netherlands and Norway, four and five-year-old children were asked to repeat the last word every time a narrator stopped reading a story. In total 32 target-words were used, both closed and open class words, and both monosyllabic and disyllabic words. The outcomes in both countries were different from those of the original English study (Karmiloff-Smith et al., 1996): four- and five-year-olds were successful in only about 26% of the cases, whereas the success rate in the former English experiment was 75% for the younger and 96% for the older children. No differences were found between age groups and between open and closed class words. This methodology does reveal the ability to access word boundaries, but probably not because of the ease of the on-line methodology in itself, but rather because literacy introduces new representations of language, even in on-line processing. The outcomes implicate that the ability to mark word boundaries does not seem to be a valid indication of who is ready for reading.     

More than meets the eye: the effect of planned fixations on scene representation

Scene memory frequently includes a swath of unseen layout beyond a photograph's boundaries (boundary extension [BE]; Intraub and Richardson, 1989). Might it be affected by the viewer's plan to shift fixation near a view boundary? When photographs were centrally fixated (500 msec), BE occurred following a 2-sec masked interval (Experiment 1). In Experiments 2-4, a cue during the first fixation signaled viewers to fixate an object near the left or right boundary. The picture was masked before the eyes landed. BE occurred on the cued side and on the top and bottom, but not on the uncued side. This relatively accurate performance on the uncued side suggests that inhibition of a movement to one side (in a competitive task) may also inhibit extrapolation of layout. BE on the to-be-fixated side, however, supports the idea that anticipatory representation of layout is an adaptive error that may aid the spatial integration of successive views.     

Visual dissociation of digitized photographs

Visual dissociation occurs when a visual marker from one display in a rapidly presented sequence (e.g., 9 item/sec) is perceived as having occurred in a temporally adjacent display. Three experiments that evaluated the application of computer graphics technology to study this phenomenon with digitized color photographs are reported. The primary concern was that visible phosphor persistence might artificially increase the frequency of integration errors. In Experiment 1, visible phosphor persistence was assessed using a multiple-repetition shutter test to determine which stimulus conditions did not yield reportable persistence. On the basis of these results, visual dissociation performance when the same color photographs were presented using mechanical 16-mm projection (as in previous research) and when they were presented on a computer monitor were compared in Experiments 2 and 3. The results supported computer application, in that computer presentation yielded the same pattern of errors and accuracy levels as did research using mechanical projection.