Ensuring PhD Development of Responsible Conduct of Research Behaviors: Who’s Responsible?

The importance of public confidence in scientific findings and trust in scientists cannot be overstated. Thus, it becomes critical for the scientific community to focus on enhancing the strategies used to educate future scientists on ethical research behaviors. What we are lacking is knowledge on how faculty members shape and develop ethical research standards with their students. We are presenting the results of a survey with 3,500 research faculty members. We believe this is the first report on how faculty work with and educate their PhD students on basic research standards. Specifically, we wanted to determine whether individual faculty members, who are advisors or mentors, differ in how they implemented components of responsible conduct of research (RCR) with their PhD students. Mentors were more likely than advisors or supervisors to report working with all of their PhDs, who graduated in the last 5 years, on the 17 recognized critical components of RCR training and research skill development. We also found about half of the faculty members believe RCR is an institutional responsibility versus a faculty responsibility. Less than a quarter have had opportunities to participate in faculty training to be a better mentor, advisor, or research teacher, and about one third of faculty did not or could not remember whether they had guidelines related to their responsibilities to PhD students. We discuss the implications of our findings and focus on ways that PhD research mentoring can be enhanced.     

The Significance of Strategic Community Engagement in Recruiting African American Youth & Families for Clinical Research

We present baseline data and describe the utility of a community engaged, culturally relevant approach to recruiting African American youth and families for phase I of The AAKOMA Project. The AAKOMA Project is a two phase treatment development study to improve mental health service use among depressed African American youth. We completed capacity building activities using a community engaged framework and Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) methods. Replicating the (Alvarez et al. in West J Nurs Res 28:541–560, 2006) model of systematic community outreach enhanced our ability to effectively recruit partners and evaluate outreach efforts as demonstrated by our Recruitment Success Factor (RSF—i.e. ‘an adjusted ratio of eligible participant yield to contacts made’). Using the chi-square goodness-of-fit statistic; we compared the RSFs of the various modes of participant study entry to determine which was most effective. Our target enrollment was 56 persons. We recruited 130 and enrolled 57. Our baseline data is drawn from a gender balanced and socioeconomically diverse sample who participated in youth focus groups and individual interviews and adult focus groups. We identified 3 study participant referral modes (self-referral, provider referral and participant-to-participant referral) with multiple sources per mode and an overall RSF of 0.41. Study findings support the effectiveness of assiduous and systematic community interaction, reflective review of recruitment efforts and the importance of disseminating information on strategic recruitment processes for engaging diverse populations in clinical research.     

Exploratory study of Machiavellianism and bases of social power in bankers

This study focused on relationships between Machiavellianism in subordinates and perceived social power bases of supervisors in a sample of 168 bank officers in the western United States. Regression analyses showed no significant relationships between subordinates' Machiavellianism scores and four supervisory power bases subscales. The association between scores on Machiavellianism and coercive power reached p < .06.     

Reanalysis and perspective in the heat--aggression debate

B. J. Bushman, M. C. Wang, and C. A. Anderson argued that a reanalysis of E. G. Cohn and J. Rotton's Minneapolis data shows no inverted-U curvilinear relationship between temperature and aggression. Although B. J. Bushman et al.'s claim of no general inverted-U trend in the data might well be supported statistically, more careful examination of the subset of the data most likely to include the hottest temperatures in the study may offer at least some support for the inverted-U relationship. Aggregating data to describe a general trend minimizes the influence of outliers that may reflect alternative relationships, and such alternatives may be important practically and theoretically.     

The ups and downs of face perception: evidence for holistic encoding of upright and inverted faces

A visual-search task was used to investigate the influence of facial organisation on discrimination of an internal facial feature. Participants searched for a downturned mouth in arrays of one to six faces that differed only in the target feature, with distractor faces containing an upturned mouth. Feature search was tested in four different face contexts: upright unaltered faces, inverted unaltered faces, upright faces in which the internal features were scrambled, or inverted scrambled faces. Normal face organisation facilitated feature search in upright faces, but slowed it in inverted faces. These findings demonstrate an interdependence of features and their configuration in the perceptual analysis of both upright and inverted faces.     

"I want to read stuff on boys": white,Latina, and black girls reading seventeen magazine and encountering adolescence

This study is based on interviews with four focus groups consisting of fourteen white, Latina, and black girls, ages 13 to 16 years, from diverse backgrounds. The objectives of the study are to gain insight into what forum girls use to learn about the adolescent experience and to examine teenage girls' views of their sexuality and femininity. The girls' discussion of their lives and perceptions of the teen magazine Seventeen reveal a displacement of female sexuality. The magazine's message to teenage girls of gaining self-worth through emphasized femininity seems to resonate with these girls regardless of class and race. We conclude that responsible adults need to challenge the distorted media images of adolescent development and teenage girls' sexuality.     

Symmetry training in pigeons can produce functional equivalences

Functional stimulus equivalence has been demonstrated using a transfer of training design with matching-to-sample training in which two sample stimuli are associated with the same comparison stimulus (A-B, C-B; many-to-one matching). Equivalence is shown by training a new association (A-D) and demonstrating the presence of an emergent relation (C-D). In the present experiment, we show that symmetry training, in which a bidirectional association is trained between two stimuli (A-B, B-A, using successive stimulus presentations followed by reinforcement), can also produce functional equivalence using a transfer of training design (i.e., train B-C, test A-C). The results suggest that training pigeons in the substitutability of two stimuli may be sufficient to produce functional stimulus equivalence between them. The results also have implications for the development of an emergent transitive relation, because training on A-B and B-C relations results in the emergence of an untrained A-C relation, if B-A training also is provided.