Effects of Resolving to Change One's Own Behavior: Expectations vs. Experience

The “false-hope syndrome” suggests that unrealistic expectations are responsible for the cycle of repeated failure and renewed efforts at self-change characterizing many self-changers. Our hypotheses were that: (1) committing to a particular self-change task would inflate initial expectations, (2) participants would be unsuccessful relative to their expectations, and (3) more elevated expectations would lead to more negative outcomes. Participants were randomly assigned to either increase their physical activity or reduce their stress through meditating or were assigned to a no-change control group. In accordance with Hypotheses 1 and 2, exercise participants had more positive expectations about their resolutions immediately after committing to them, and both exercise and meditation participants were unsuccessful relative to their expectations. With respect to Hypothesis 3, however, having more positive expectations about one's resolution did not predict a worse outcome.     

Structural priming of adjective-noun structures in hearing and deaf children

We examined priming of adjective-noun structures in Dutch hearing and deaf children. In three experiments, hearing 7- and 8-year-olds, hearing 11- and 12-year-olds, and deaf 11- and 12-year-olds read a prenominal structure (e.g., the blue ball), a relative clause structure (e.g., the ball that is blue), or a main clause (e.g., the ball is blue). After reading each prime structure, children described a target picture in writing. Half of the target pictures contained the same noun as the prime structure and half contained a different noun. Hearing 7- and 8-year-olds and 11- and 12-year-olds, as well as deaf 11- and 12-year-olds, showed priming effects for all three structures in both the same-noun and different-noun conditions. Structural priming was not boosted by lexical repetition in the hearing and deaf 11- and 12-year-olds; a lexical boost effect was observed only in the 7- and 8-year-olds and only in the relative clause structure. The findings suggest that hearing and deaf children possess abstract representations of adjective-noun structures independent of particular lexical items.     

Delayed versus immediate feedback in children’s and adults’ vocabulary learning

We investigated whether the superior memory performance sometimes seen with delayed rather than immediate feedback was attributable to the shorter retention interval (orlag to test) from the last presentation of the correct information in the delayed condition. Whetherlag to test was controlled or not, delayed feedback produced better final test performance than did immediate feedback, which in turn produced better performance than did no feedback at all, when we tested Grade 6 children learning school-relevant vocabulary. With college students learning GRE-level words, however, delayed feedback produced better performance than did immediate feedback (and both were better than no feedback) when lag to test was uncontrolled, but there was no difference between the delayed and immediate feedback conditions when the lag to test was controlled.     

The Study of Values: Construction of the fourth edition

Some forty years after its initial publication, the Allport-Vernon-Lindzey Study of Values (SOV) was the third most cited non-projective measure of personality in the field of psychology. However, by the early 1980s the measure had fallen into disuse, in large part—we argue—due to its increasingly archaic content, lack of religious inclusiveness, and dated language. We describe the development of an updated version of the SOV that incorporates modifications to 15 out of the 45 original items. One hundred and seventy-nine students completed both the original and updated versions (counter-balanced for order). Psychometric properties of the updated and original scales were comparable and acceptable. Rationales for use of the updated version in research and practice are advanced.     

Effects of Type of Coping Response,Setting, and Social Context on Reactions to Sexual Harassment

Male and female undergraduates from a multicultural university (MU) and an historically Black University (HBU) read a scenario in which a student was sexually harassed either by a professor or a workplace supervisor. The student victim's coping response was also varied. Participants rated the victim's behavior as most effective and appropriate when she confronted the harasser directly or reported the harasser's behavior. HBU students judged the harasser as not guilty significantly more often than MU students, but believed that the harasser was less trustworthy than multicultural students did. Women responded significantly more negatively to the blatant sexual harassment scenario than men did. Implications for prevention and interventions are discussed.     

An Empirical Analysis of Fraternity and Sorority Individual-Environmental Interactions With Alcohol

Hierarchical linear modeling was used to analyze fraternity and sorority individual-environmental interactions for 3,756 Greek undergraduate students at a large public university. Alcohol expectancies were measured with items used to assess the degree to which people believe alcohol has positive effects. For sorority students, expectancies were negatively related to chapter culture emphasizing service and civic responsibility. Expectancies were positively associated with chapter culture emphasizing glorification of alcohol use in both fraternity and sorority chapters. Among sorority students, consumption was predicted by group-level service orientation, holding expectancies constant. The strength of the relationship between alcohol expectancies and consumption level increased among fraternity and sorority members, according to chapters' progressive exaltation of the role of alcohol. The implications of the findings are discussed for observed gender differences, the role of self-selection into these unique student organizations, and current efforts to recalibrate Greek chapters toward greater personal safety and control.     

Infant sensitivity to distributional information can affect phonetic discrimination.

For nearly two decades it has been known that infants' perception of speech sounds is affected by native language input during the first year of life. However, definitive evidence of a mechanism to explain these developmental changes in speech perception has remained elusive. The present study provides the first evidence for such a mechanism, showing that the statistical distribution of phonetic variation in the speech signal influences whether 6- and 8-month-old infants discriminate a pair of speech sounds. We familiarized infants with speech sounds from a phonetic continuum, exhibiting either a bimodal or unimodal frequency distribution. During the test phase, only infants in the bimodal condition discriminated tokens from the endpoints of the continuum. These results demonstrate that infants are sensitive to the statistical distribution of speech sounds in the input language, and that this sensitivity influences speech perception.     

Infants' ability to match dynamic phonetic and gender information in the face and voice.

Six experiments tested young infants' sensitivity to vowel and gender information in dynamic faces and voices. Infants were presented with side-by-side displays of two faces articulating the vowels /a/ or /i/ in synchrony. The heard voice matched the gender of one face in some studies and the vowel of one face in other studies and, in some studies, vowel and gender were placed in conflict. Infants of age 4.5 months showed no evidence of matching face and voice on the basis of gender, but were able to ignore irrelevant gender information and match on the basis of the vowel. Robust evidence of the ability to match on the basis of gender was not evident until 8 months of age. This set of findings suggests that, when identical stimuli are used, gender matching does not emerge until a later age than does phonetic matching. Results are discussed in relation to key theories of intermodal development.     

Research and Action for Bridging Science and Practice in Prevention

There is a well-known gap between science and practice. To address this gap in the areas of Child Maltreatment (CM) and Youth Violence (Y/V), the Division of Violence Prevention (DVP) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) embarked on a Dissemination/Implementation (D/I) planning project. The project was aimed at identifying better ways to connect research and practice through reviews of the literature as well as through discussions with experts on violence prevention and research utilization. This introductory article sets the stage for the rest of the special issue by defining terms, providing a rationale for the planning project, describing the planning process, and summarizing what is to come in the rest of the issue. The findings and conclusions in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.     

The ABCs of depression: integrating affective, biological, and cognitive models to explain the emergence of the gender difference in depression

In adulthood, twice as many women as men are depressed, a pattern that holds in most nations. In childhood, girls are no more depressed than boys, but more girls than boys are depressed by ages 13 to 15. Although many influences on this emergent gender difference in depression have been proposed, a truly integrated, developmental model is lacking. The authors propose a model that integrates affective (emotional reactivity), biological (genetic vulnerability, pubertal hormones, pubertal timing and development) and cognitive (cognitive style, objectified body consciousness, rumination) factors as vulnerabilities to depression that, in interaction with negative life events, heighten girls' rates of depression beginning in adolescence and account for the gender difference in depression.