Fathers’ Dosage in Community-based Programs for Low-income Fathers

Community-based programs for low-income fathers often struggle to get fathers to attend services and activities. This paper reviews the literature examining approaches to measuring dosage in fatherhood programs, rates of dosage, influences on dosage, and the associations between dosage and fathers’ outcomes. Studies were limited to programs that conducted randomized control trials, quasi-experimental studies, and one-group pretest/post-test designs. Although most programs report low or moderate dosage levels, some programs achieve high levels of fathers’ participation in parenting, coparenting, and economic security classes. Few studies examined dosage in relation to father outcomes. All but one of seven studies reporting effects showed that higher dose levels had positive associations with outcomes such as engagement with children, parenting satisfaction and self-efficacy, perception of coparenting quality, payment of child support, and earnings from work. This paper discusses future directions for studying father's dosage in fatherhood programs.     

Borderline personality disorder,complex trauma,and problems with self and identity: A social-communicative approach

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a relatively highly prevalent psychiatric disorder that is associated with very high personal and socioeconomic costs. This paper provides a state-of-the-art review of the relationship between complex trauma and key features of BPD, with a focus on problems with self-coherence and self-continuity. We first review evidence for the high prevalence of complex trauma in BPD patients. This is followed by a discussion of emerging knowledge concerning the biobehavioral mechanisms involved in problems related to self and identity in BPD. We emphasize three biobehavioral systems that are affected by complex trauma and are centrally implicated in identify diffusion in BPD: the attachment system, mentalizing or social cognition, and the capacity for epistemic trust—that is, an openness to the reception of social communication that is personally relevant and of generalizable significance. We formulate a new approach to personality and severe personality disorders, and to problems with self and identity in these disorders, rooted in a social-communicative understanding of the foundations of selfhood. We also discuss how extant evidence-based treatments address the above-mentioned biobehavioral systems involved in identity diffusion in BPD and related disorders, and the supporting evidence. We close the paper with recommendations for future research.     

Correction to: Transformative experience and the shark problem

Philosophical Studies - In the original publication of the article     

EARSHOT: A Minimal Neural Network Model of Incremental Human Speech Recognition

Despite the lack of invariance problem (the many-to-many mapping between acoustics and percepts), human listeners experience phonetic constancy and typically perceive what a speaker intends. Most models of human speech recognition (HSR) have side-stepped this problem, working with abstract, idealized inputs and deferring the challenge of working with real speech. In contrast, carefully engineered deep learning networks allow robust, real-world automatic speech recognition (ASR). However, the complexities of deep learning architectures and training regimens make it difficult to use them to provide direct insights into mechanisms that may support HSR. In this brief article, we report preliminary results from a two-layer network that borrows one element from ASR, long short-term memory nodes, which provide dynamic memory for a range of temporal spans. This allows the model to learn to map real speech from multiple talkers to semantic targets with high accuracy, with human-like timecourse of lexical access and phonological competition. Internal representations emerge that resemble phonetically organized responses in human superior temporal gyrus, suggesting that the model develops a distributed phonological code despite no explicit training on phonetic or phonemic targets. The ability to work with real speech is a major advance for cognitive models of HSR.     

Relationship science and the credibility revolution: An introduction to the first part of the special issue

In the past 10 years, the field of relationship science—like many other fields—has been exposed to dramatic changes in how scientists approach the research process. Relationship science has been at the forefront of many recent changes in the field, whether it be high profile replication attempts or broader discussions about how to increase rigor and reproducibility. A major goal of this special issue was to provide an opportunity for relationship scientists to engage with these issues and reforms. The first four articles in this special issue represent a sampling of different approaches relationship researchers have used to enhance the credibility of their work.     

Taxonomies of aggressive behavior: A preliminary report

It has been widely and regularly suggested that aggression is not a unitary concept but rather an omnibus term concealing important and distinct subclasses of behavior. Psychologists have offered various categorical schemes highlighting motivation and form as distinguishing criteria. Many writers have also noted the social relativity of dermitions of classes of aggression and called for a consideration of lay conceptions of aggressive behavior. The present paper explores the correspondence between psychologists' and laypersons' categorizations of aggressive acts. Ten short scenarios of aggression were generated to embody systematic permutations of form and motive as suggested by the published work of social psychologists. Subjects rated every pairwise combination in terms of perceived similarity. The data were subjected to three-factor, multidimensional scaling. The resulting structure indicated that subjects' ratings were not random and reflected consideration of motive (hostile, normative, instrumental, status) and of direct versus indirect form. The data were thus in close correspondence with the classifications generated by psychologists. The desirability of refining this technique and extending it to other cultural and subcultural groups is discussed.     

Are parents' gender schemas related to their children's gender-related cognitions? A meta-analysis

Meta-analyses were conducted of 43 articles (with 48 different samples) investigating the relationship between parents' gender schemas and their offspring's gender-related cognitions. The parents' offspring ranged in age from infancy to early adulthood. Offspring measures included gender self-concept, gender attitudes toward others, gender-related interests, and occupational attitudes. Overall, a small but meaningful effect size (r = .16) indicated a significant and positive correlation between parent gender schemas and offspring measures. Specifically, parents with more traditional gender schemas were more likely than parents with more nontraditional schemas to have offspring with gender-typed cognitions about themselves or others. In addition, the magnitudes of observed effect sizes were influenced by particular moderator variables, including type of parent gender schema (gender self-concept vs. gender attitudes toward others), type of offspring gender-related cognitions, parent gender, offspring gender, offspring age, and publication characteristics. The results are cautiously interpreted as suggesting a possible influence of parents on the development of their children's gender-related thinking.     

Racial bias in decisions made by mock jurors evaluating a case of sexual harassment

White (N = 161) and Black (N = 152) college students served as mock jurors in a simulated civil case in which a female plaintiff accused a male defendant of sexual harassment. The authors experimentally manipulated the race (Black or White) of the litigants and asked the mock jurors to decide whether the defendant was guilty; to rate the certainty of their belief in the defendant's guilt; and, when they judged the defendant guilty, to recommend an award to the plaintiff. Mock jurors of both races tended to favor litigants of their own race and their own gender. Racial bias was highest among White male jurors and lowest among White female jurors.