Suicide Attempts in Preadolescent Child Psychiatry Inpatients

This paper describes a preliminary study examining the relative power of measures of perceived family support, hopelessness, and depression for the classification of suicide attempters and nonattempters in a series of 8- to 13-year-old psychiatric inpatients. Results of a stepwise discriminant-function analysis indicated that a measure of a child's perceived family support discriminated between suicide attempters and nonattempters with an 88% accuracy rate. The addition of measures of hopelessness and depression at later steps did not lead to improved classification. The results are interpreted as providing strong support for a link between suicide attempts in children and perceptions of low family support.     

Eye movements of young and older adults while reading with distraction

The authors used eye-tracking technology to examine young and older adults' online performance in the reading in distraction paradigm. Participants read target sentences and answered comprehension questions following each sentence. In some sentences, single-word distracters were presented in either italic or red font. Distracters could be related or unrelated to the target text. Online measures, including probability of fixation, fixation duration, and number of fixations to distracting text, revealed no age differences in text processing. However, young adults did have an advantage over older adults in overall reading time and text comprehension. These results provide no support for an inhibition deficit account of age differences in the reading in distraction paradigm, but are consistent with J. Dywan and W. E. Murphy's (1996) suggestion that older adults are less able than the young to distinguish target and distracter information held in working memory.     

Asymmetric cultural effects on perceptual expertise underlie an own-race bias for voices

The own-race bias in memory for faces has been a rich source of empirical work on the mechanisms of person perception. This effect is thought to arise because the face-perception system differentially encodes the relevant structural dimensions of features and their configuration based on experiences with different groups of faces. However, the effects of sociocultural experiences on person perception abilities in other identity-conveying modalities like audition have not been explored. Investigating an own-race bias in the auditory domain provides a unique opportunity for studying whether person identification is a modality-independent construct and how it is sensitive to asymmetric cultural experiences. Here we show that an own-race bias in talker identification arises from asymmetric experience with different spoken dialects. When listeners categorized voices by race (White or Black), a subset of the Black voices were categorized as sounding White, while the opposite case was unattested. Acoustic analyses indicated listeners’ perceptions about race were consistent with differences in specific phonetic and phonological features. In a subsequent person-identification experiment, the Black voices initially categorized as sounding White elicited an own-race bias from White listeners, but not from Black listeners. These effects are inconsistent with person-perception models that strictly analogize faces and voices based on recognition from only structural features. Our results demonstrate that asymmetric exposure to spoken dialect, independent from talkers’ physical characteristics, affects auditory perceptual expertise for talker identification. Person perception thus additionally relies on socioculturally-acquired dynamic information, which may be represented by different mechanisms in different sensory modalities.     

Cocaine addiction and personality: A mathematical model

The existence of a close relation between personality and drug consumption is recognized, but the corresponding causal connection is not well known. Neither is it well known whether personality exercises an influence predominantly at the beginning and development of addiction, nor whether drug consumption produces changes in personality. This paper presents a dynamic mathematical model of personality and addiction based on the unique personality trait theory (UPTT) and the general modelling methodology. This model attempts to integrate personality, the acute effect of drugs, and addiction. The UPTT states the existence of a unique trait of personality called extraversion, understood as a dimension that ranges from impulsive behaviour and sensation‐seeking (extravert pole) to fearful and anxious behaviour (introvert pole). As a consequence of drug consumption, the model provides the main patterns of extraversion dynamics through a system of five coupled differential equations. It combines genetic extraversion, as a steady state, and dynamic extraversion in a unique variable measured on the hedonic scale. The dynamics of this variable describes the effects of stimulant drugs on a short‐term time scale (typical of the acute effect); while its mean time value describes the effects of stimulant drugs on a long‐term time scale (typical of the addiction effect). This understanding may help to develop programmes of prevention and intervention in drug misuse.     

The UK Hybrid Embryo Controversy: Delegitimising Counterpublics

The UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act of 1990 was revised in 2008 in response to legal challenges, societal changes and clinical advances since 1990. A provision permitting the creation of animal–human hybrid embryos was the subject of an extremely effective public relations (PR) campaign by embryo scientists and other supporters of such experimentation. In response, science correspondents of the ‘serious’ or ‘quality’ press commented favourably on these PR activities; this validation supplemented key messages in their press releases. The approval conferred on attempts to shape public opinion was explicitly contrasted with the public consultation exercise conducted by the UK Department of Health in 2005. Press coverage of the campaign demonstrated asymmetrical framings of the representativeness of public opinion and scientists' accounts of their proposed research. Scientists' views were represented as objective and therefore a legitimate basis for policymaking, in contrast with subjective views of putatively uninformed or opposed publics. Such opponents were cast as a counterpublic. The public interest was limited to evaluating the science on its own terms, thus pre-empting consideration of the possibility that public interests and scientists' interests may not coincide.     

Motivation for Physical Activity among Hawaiian,Japanese, and Filipino University Students in Hawaii

The purpose is to identify the motivations and barriers to physical activity (PA) among the three largest ethnic groups in Hawaii (Hawaiians/part-Hawaiians, Japanese, and Filipinos). University of Hawai'i students (N = 32, aged 18+) self-identified as one of those ethnicities participated in focus groups. There are more common themes than ethnic-specific variations in factors influencing PA. PA is understood as exercise among all groups; leisure time PA like running and surfing are common activities. Results were more similar among Hawaiian and Japanese than with Filipino participants. The findings offer an opportunity for improving cross-cultural and culture-specific PA interventions for those ethnicities.