Evaluation of a High School Peer Group Intervention for At-Risk Youth

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effectiveness of Reconnecting Youth, a prevention program for at-risk high school youth. Data are from a large, independently evaluated effectiveness trial in two diverse urban school districts. A total of 1,218 students participated; 50% were male; average age was 15. We tested whether positive efficacy trial effects could be replicated, and whether any negative behavioral effects occur when clustering high-risk youth. Although mixed program effects were observed at immediate post-intervention, only negative effects were found at 6-month follow-up. These effects included less optimal scores on measures of GPA, Anger, School Connectedness, Conventional Peer Bonding, and Peer High-Risk Behaviors. Overall, we found little support for the use of this social-influence—model intervention aimed at increasing school connectedness for high-risk youth. Further, this study provides evidence that clustering high-risk youth in preventive interventions has the potential for iatrogenic effects.     

The perception of second language sounds in early bilinguals: new evidence from an implicit measure

Previous studies have suggested that nonnative (L2) linguistic sounds are accommodated to native language (L1) phonemic categories. However, this conclusion may be compromised by the use of explicit discrimination tests. The present study provides an implicit measure of L2 phoneme discrimination in early bilinguals (Catalan and Spanish). Participants classified the 1st syllable of disyllabic stimuli embedded in lists where the 2nd, task-irrelevant, syllable could contain a Catalan contrastive variation (/epsilon/-/e/) or no variation. Catalan dominants responded more slowly in lists where the 2nd syllable could vary from trial to trial, suggesting an indirect effect of the /epsilon/-/e/ discrimination. Spanish dominants did not suffer this interference, performing indistinguishably from Spanish monolinguals. The present findings provide implicit evidence that even proficient bilinguals categorize L2 sounds according to their L1 representations.     

Reversibility of the other-race effect in face recognition during childhood

Early experience with faces of a given racial type facilitates visual recognition for this type of face relative to others. To assess whether this so-called other-race effect can be reversed by subsequent experience with new types of faces, we tested adults of Korean origin who were adopted by European Caucasian families when they were between the ages of 3 to 9. The adoptees performed a face recognition task with photographs of Caucasian and Asian faces. They performed exactly like a control group of French participants, identifying the Caucasian faces better than the Asiatic ones. In contrast, a control group of Koreans showed the reverse pattern. This result indicates that the face recognition system remains plastic enough during childhood to reverse the other-race effect.     

Word frequency of irrelevant speech distractors affects serial recall

In this study, participants memorized frequent or rare target words in silence or while ignoring frequent or rare distractor words. Distractor words impaired recall performance, but low-frequency distractor words caused more impairment than did high-frequency distractor words. We demonstrate how to solve the identifiability problem for Schweickert's (1993) multinomial processing tree model of immediate recall, and then use this model to show that irrelevant speech affected both the probability with which intact target word representations were available for serial recall and the probability of successful reconstruction of item identities based on degraded short-term memory traces. However, the type of irrelevant speech--low-versus high-frequency words--selectively affected the probability of intact target word representations. These results are consistent with an explanation of the irrelevant speech effect within the framework proposed by Cowan (1995), and they pose problems for other explanations of the irrelevant speech effect. The analyses also confirm the validity of Schweickert's process model.     

On the speed of intuition: Intuitive judgments of semantic coherence under different response deadlines

Intuition is the ability to judge stimulus properties on the basis of information that is activated in memory but not consciously retrieved. We investigated one central feature of intuitive judgments--namely, their speed. Participants judged whether or not three clue words were coherent in the sense that they were weakly associated with a common fourth concept. To restrict the time available for conscious deliberation of possible solution words, participants had to synchronize their judgments with a response signal appearing at different lags after the clue words. In two experiments, participants discriminated coherent and incoherent triads reliably better than chance, even when they did not consciously retrieve the solution word and the lag between clue words and response signal was as short as 1.5 sec. Results indicate that intuitive judgments can indeed be made very fast and without extended conscious deliberation. Possible mechanisms underlying intuitive judgments are discussed.     

Effects of backward speech and speaker variability in language discrimination by rats

Human infants use prosodic cues present in speech to extract language regularities, and it has been suggested that this capacity is anchored in more general mechanisms that are shared across mammals. This study explores the extent to which rats can generalize prosodic cues that have been extracted from a training corpus to new sentences and how this discrimination process is affected by the normalization of the sentences when multiple speakers are introduced. Conditions 1 and 2 show rats' abilities to use prosodic cues present in speech, allowing them to discriminate between sentences not previously heard. But this discrimination is not possible when sentences are played backward. Conditions 3 and 4 show that language discrimination by rats is also taxed by the process of speaker normalization. These findings have remarkable parallels with data from human adults, human newborns, and cotton-top tamarins. Implications for speech perception by humans are discussed.     

Human listeners are able to classify dog (Canis familiaris) barks recorded in different situations

The authors investigated whether human listeners could categorize played-back dog (Canis familiaris) barks recorded in various situations and associate them with emotional ratings. Prerecorded barks of a Hungarian herding dog breed (Mudi) provided the sample. Human listeners were asked to rate emotionality of the vocalization and to categorize the situations on the basis of alternative situations provided on a questionnaire. The authors found almost no effect of previous experience with the given dog breed or of owning a dog. Listeners were able to categorize bark situations high above chance level. Emotionality ratings for particular bark samples correlated with peak and fundamental frequency and interbark intervals. The authors did not find a significant effect of tonality (harmonic-to-noise ratio) on either the emotionality rating or situation categorization of the human listeners. Humans' ability to recognize meaning suggests that barks could serve as an effective means of communication between dog and human.     

Summoning White Bears or Letting Them Free: The Influence of the Content of Control Instructions on Target Thought Frequency

In the clinical literature, thought suppression is considered to play a role in the development of intrusion-related psychiatric syndromes, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, acute or posttraumatic stress disorder, phobias, and addiction. This assumption goes back to a study by D. M. Wegner, D. J. Schneider, S. R. Carter, and T. L. White (1987) in which participants were asked to suppress thoughts of a white bear, an assignment that proved to be nearly impossible to complete. The present two studies sought to explore the influence of the content of control instructions on intrusion frequency in thought suppression experiments. Notably, during nonsuppression (i.e., control) periods, participants can either be instructed to think about white bears (i.e., expression instruction), or to think of anything including white bears (i.e., liberal instruction). Results indicated that expression instructions resulted in an increased number of target thoughts, while liberal instructions did not. Implications for the interpretation of thought suppression findings are discussed.