Media ratings for violence and sex. Implications for policymakers and parents

This article reviews research on the implementation of media-rating systems, parents' use and evaluation of them, and the impact of ratings on children. Although half or more of parents report using media-rating systems, understanding of various components of the systems is low, particularly for television ratings. A meta-analysis of national polls shows that parents overwhelmingly prefer that ratings specify content, rather than giving age recommendations. A second meta-analysis, of experiments testing the effects of ratings on children's interest in programs, shows that ratings indicating restricted or controversial content have a deterrent effect for children under age 8 but that, by age 11 and especially for boys, the ratings show a small enticement effect. This effect occurs for both age-based and content-based ratings. Implications for policymakers and parents are discussed.     

Informed consent: An overview

Over the past 25 years, obtaining informed consent for the performance of many medical procedures has become part of the practice of medicine. As opposed to the “duty to warn” that is enforced by the law, informed consent should be a cornerstone of a fully collaborative decision-making process, the elements of which are presented in this paper. The responsibility for this process rests upon health care institutions and financing arrangements, as well as upon physicians and courts. In response to emergencies, patient preferences, and public interests, the consent process is justifiably abbreviated. However, as presently articulated, the consent process treats communication too simplistically, is distorted by the way it is enforced in litigation, is inattentive to social justice issues, and is not integrated into the moral commitment of physicians.     

Sex is a Minor Thing: Parents of Gay Sons Negotiating the Social Influences of Coming Out

Social influences emanating from cultural and religious factors confront gay young people in their coming out process and often play a part in determining how their parents react to the ‘news’. This article focuses on the ways that social influences revolving around culture, religion and homosexuality interact in ways that shape the perceptions and experiences of Maltese parents in relation to the coming out of their children, as described by them. The study locates the parents as active and passive social agents caught between religious and cultural factors, in ways which involve resistance and complacency, through the production of ‘entanglements’.     

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory: self-esteem differences in the experience and anticipation of success

Successes--defined broadly as meeting important standards or receiving positive evaluations--are widely assumed to be enjoyed equally by people with high self-esteem (HSEs) and low self-esteem (LSEs). Three studies examined the contradictory hypothesis that HSEs react more favorably to success than do LSEs and that success brings about certain unfavorable consequences for LSEs. Undergraduate participants reacted to a laboratory-manipulated success (Studies 1 and 2) or imagined highly positive events in the future (Study 3). Self-esteem differences emerged in anxiety, thoughts about the self, and (in Study 3) thoughts about non-self-related aspects of the event. LSEs were more anxious than HSEs after succeeding, success improved HSEs' self-relevant thoughts but not LSEs', and LSEs focused more on success's negative aspects.     

Threat as a Motivator of Political Activism: A Field Experiment

The research reported here examined the effects of two potential motivators of political activism—policy change threat and policy change opportunity—in a field experiment. Different versions of a letter were sent by a political lobbying organization to potential contributors. One version highlighted threats of undesirable policy changes, another version highlighted opportunities for desirable policy changes, and the third version did neither. Policy change threat increased the number of financial contributions made to the interest group, but policy change opportunity did not. Policy change opportunity increased the number of signed postcards returned to be sent to President Clinton, but policy change threat did not. These findings highlight the impact of interest group recruitment strategies on citizen responsiveness and demonstrate the need to account for sources of motivation in order to more fully understand when, why, and how citizens choose to become politically active.     

Enthusiastic Improvement: Mary Astell and Damaris Masham on Sociability

Many commentators have contrasted the way that sociability is theorized in the writings of Mary Astell and Damaris Masham, emphasizing the extent to which Masham is more interested in embodied, worldly existence. I argue, by contrast, that Astell's own interest in imagining a constitutively relational individual emerges once we pay attention to her use of religious texts and tropes. To explore the relevance of Astell's Christianity, I emphasize both how Astell's Christianity shapes her view of the individual's relation to society and how Masham's contrasting views can be analyzed through the lens of her charge that Astell is an “enthusiast.” In late seventeenth‐century England, “enthusiasm” was a term of abuse that, commentators have recently argued, could function polemically to dismiss those deemed either excessively social or antisocial. By accusing Astell of enthusiasm, I claim, Masham seeks to marginalize the relational self that Astell imagines and to promote a more instrumental view of social ties. I suggest some aspects of Astell's thought that may have struck contemporaries as “enthusiastic” and contrast her vision of the self with Masham's more hedonistic subject. I conclude that, although each woman differently configures the relation between self and society, they share a desire to imagine autonomy within a relational framework.     

Do dogs (Canis familiaris) understand invisible displacement?

Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) perform above chance on invisible displacement tasks despite showing few other signs of possessing the necessary representational abilities. Four experiments investigated how dogs find an object that has been hidden in 1 of 3 opaque boxes. Dogs passed the task under a variety of control conditions, but only if the device used to displace the object ended up adjacent to the target box after the displacement. These results suggest that the search behavior of dogs was guided by simple associative rules rather than mental representation of the object's past trajectory. In contrast, Experiment 5 found that on the same task, 18- and 24-month-old children showed no disparity between trials in which the displacement device was adjacent or nonadjacent to the target box.     

Sulcal morphology and volume of Broca's area linked to handedness and sex

We investigated the effect of handedness and sex on: (i) sulcal contours defining PO and PTR and (ii) volume estimates of PO and PTR subfields in 40 left- and 42 right-handers. Results show an effect of handedness on discontinuity of the inferior frontal sulcus (IFS: P < 0.01). Discontinuity of IFS was observed in: 43% left- and 62% right hemispheres in right-handers and in 65% left- and 48% right-hemispheres in left-handers. PO volume asymmetry was rightward in left-handed males (P = 0.007) and females (P = 0.02), showed a leftward trend in right-handed males (P = 0.06), and was non-asymmetrical in right-handed females (P = 0.96, i.e. left- and right-hemisphere PO volumes did not differ significantly). PO volume asymmetry in males differed significantly between handedness groups (P = 0.001). Findings indicate a high degree of variability in the sulcal contours of PO and PTR and volume asymmetry of PO: the factors sex and handedness can explain some of this variability.