SEXUAL HARASSMENT AND ASSAULT

An extensive body of literature has documented the widespread and damaging nature of sexual harassment and assault on college campuses, yet little research has investigated the impact of such victimization on the academic climate. This study examined experiences of sexual harassment and assault among 1,037 female undergraduate and graduate students, with a particular focus on educational outcomes. Multivariate analyses of variance revealed significant negative effects of harassment and assault on perceptions of academic climate. We also investigated the extent and effects of double victimization (i.e., experiences of both harassment and assault), as well as the relationships among sexual harassment types, incidence rates, and frequencies. Issues of sexual orientation and race/ethnicity are explored throughout the article, with membership in different groups affecting victimization incidence rates as well as harassment labeling.     

Physically Transcendent Awareness: A Comparison of the Phenomenology of Consciousness Before Birth and After Death

Veridical evidence of a physically transcendent source of consciousness comes from both extremes of the life span when central nervous system functioning is compromised, suggesting that some form of personhood can exist independently of known cellular processes associated with the body. In pre- and perinatal accounts, veridical memories have surfaced of events in the first two trimesters, long before the central nervous system is fully functional, continuing through the third trimester, when measurable brain activity begins, until just after birth. In the empirically verifiable out-of-body phase of near-death experience (NDE) accounts, a source of consciousness has been shown to record events when measurable metabolic processes, including brain activity, have ceased altogether. These two states have similar phenomenologies, suggesting that a physically transcendent source representing individual consciousness predates physical life at the moment of conception and survives it after death, and that its maturity and functioning do not directly reflect the level of central nervous system functioning in the body.     

Surprise! An Unexpected Color Singleton Does Not Capture Attention in Visual Search

The existence of a pure form of stimulus-driven attentional control has been aligned exclusively with the existence of attentional capture. Unfortunately, there has been little evidence provided in support of attentional capture. The present study investigated whether the repeated failure to observe attentional capture might be due to the way in which attentional capture has been measured. A new visual search procedure was used to investigate whether attention would be captured by an initial and unexpected encounter with a color singleton. Despite this important change in procedure, the color singleton still did not capture attention. Further evidence showed that visual search for the color singleton could be highly efficient, but only after its relevance became established, and that the failure to observe capture in the present experiment was not due to other potentially detrimental effects of surprise. The present results suggest that new conceptions of stimulus-driven attentional control are required.     

Effects of Labelled Gender on Vocal Communication of Young Women with 4-month-old Infants

Most of the previous studies analyzing the effect of gender label on adults' interactive behaviours with infants concluded that gender stereotypes affect adults' behaviours more than the actual behaviours or characteristics of the infants. These stereotypes and their ensuing behaviours would contribute to the differential socialization experiences of infants according to their gender. The objective of the present study was to investigate further the effect of gender label on adults' vocal communication with infants. Therefore, the prosodic and content features of the language addressed by young women to infants presented as girls and as boys were examined. Sixteen women were observed during two 5-minute sessions of face-to-face interaction with 3-to-4-month-old infants, one introduced as a girl, the other as a boy, in a counterbalanced order. Six girls and four boys served as stimuli. The number of utterances addressed to the infants, their duration and fundamental frequency, as well as the prosodic contour and the content of each vocalization were measured. Results indicated only one significant gender label effect: Women referred more frequently to infant's global motor activity when the infant was presented as a boy. This observation is congruent with other data. However, our results do not demonstrate a consistent pattern of gender label effect when women are talking to unfamiliar infants in such a context.     

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The impact of the activation of positive and negative components of an ethnic stereotype on judgments of responsibility for both positive and negative stereotypic behaviors was considered. Overall, stereotype activation biased judgments in a stereotype-consistent manner, across both positive and negative scenarios. Generalization of these judgments to more global trait perceptions of the target was limited to the negative scenario. Results are discussed in terms of both the use of stereotypes as inferential shortcuts and in-group favoritism mechanisms.     

Correlates of Youths' Fears of Victimization1

This study investigated the role that depression, deviant behaviors, and exposure to violence may play in youths' fears of victimization. In-school youth (ages 11 to 20 years) completed an anonymous, self-administered health behavior questionnaire that measured a variety of psychosocial variables. Included in the questionnaire were items concerning fears of personal victimization, demographics, depression, deviant behaviors, and previous exposure to violence. Logistic regressions revealed that gender, grade, ethnicity, depression, and previous exposure to violence were significantly associated with high fears of victimization. The implications of this study for future research into children's fears and for prevention programs are discussed.     

Constraints on sentence comprehension

The process of comprehending sentences involves the integration of a variety of different information sources, constrained by the available computational resources. This paper surveys the evidence for four types of constraints on sentence comprehension: (1) lexical constraints, (2) contextual constraints, (3) locality-based computational resource constraints, and (4) phrase-level contingent frequency constraints. These four constraints, in combination with grammatical phrase-formation information and prosody, are sufficient to explain how interpretations are constructed for sentences as they are encountered, including complexity effects in unambiguous sentences and interpretation preferences in ambiguous sentences.     

Talking about subject choice at secondary school and career aspirations: conversations with students of Chinese background

Interviews with 15 boys and 12 girls from Chinese backgrounds are reported. The interviews, which centred on option/subject choices and career aspirations, were based on the results of a survey of 794 secondary-school students. This survey had indicated that the Chinese students included were more similar in their responses to ethnic-majority than to other ethnic-minority students. Conversation analysis of the interviews revealed three themes: students attributed their choices to (i) their liking for the subject/teacher; (ii) the link between school subjects and careers; and (iii) institutional frameworks. There was a marked omission of reference to issues related to ethnicity or gender. These findings are discussed in the context of other studies of Chinese ethnicity.     

Open field investigation of enhancing children's social skills

This study evaluated two approaches directed towards enhancing social skills in groups of first and third grade children. In the behavioral intervention, following collection of baseline data, triads of first and third grade children were taught one of four social skills—either touching, asking questions, sharing or praising. The behavioral intervention consisted of instructions, modeling, behavioral rehearsal, feedback and reinforcement. While increases in social behaviors were noted, follow-up indicated substantial erosion in gains. In the ecological intervention, dramatic increases in sharing were noted for an isolate child after being placed in a group whose members displayed high levels of sharing. The differential effectiveness of behavioral versus ecological approaches in establishing and maintaining behaviors are discussed.     

Morita therapy and behaviour therapy

The work of Morita is briefly described against the background of the development of psychology and psychiatry in Japan. It is shown that Morita had a theory of personality remarkably like that which Eysenck was later to develop, although more limited in scope. The therapy which Morita devised for neurotic disorders of a dysthymic kind is described and compared with similar forms of behaviour therapy which are now used in the West. Morita therapy is shown not to be dependent on Zen philosophy, as is sometimes supposed, and its radical difference from psychoanalytic therapy is demonstrated. It is suggested that behaviour therapists and Morita therapists have much to gain by cooperation.