Sexual orientation and childhood gender nonconformity: evidence from home videos

Homosexual adults tend to be more gender nonconforming than heterosexual adults in some of their behaviors, feelings, and interests. Retrospective studies have also shown large differences in childhood gender nonconformity, but these studies have been criticized for possible memory biases. The authors studied an indicator of childhood gender nonconformity not subject to such biases: childhood home videos. They recruited homosexual and heterosexual men and women (targets) with videos from their childhood and subsequently asked heterosexual and homosexual raters to judge the gender nonconformity of the targets from both the childhood videos and adult videos made for the study. Prehomosexual children were judged more gender nonconforming, on average, than preheterosexual children, and this pattern obtained for both men and women. This difference emerged early, carried into adulthood, and was consistent with self-report. In addition, targets who were more gender nonconforming tended to recall more childhood rejection.     

Attitudes of African Americans Toward Participation in Medical Research

The underrepresentation of African Americans in medical research is problematic for several reasons, including disparities in health outcomes, differences in metabolism of pharmacological agents, and accurate assessment of health needs and costs. This paper investigates factors contributing to African Americans' lower likelihood of consenting to participation in medical research. In Study 1, three focus groups were conducted to assess concerns about research participation and to generate further hypotheses for questionnaire development. Study 2 presented a hypothetical clinical trial and collected questionnaire data on attitudes about participation. Both studies revealed a greater likelihood to mistrust the medical establishment among African American students. However, suspicion did not contribute to a decreased likelihood of participation. Several recommendations are offered regarding the recruitment of African Americans in research.     

A content analysis of involuntary autobiographical memories: examining the positivity effect in old age

Although research on autobiographical memory is growing steadily, very little is known about involuntary autobiographical memories that are spontaneously recalled in everyday life. In addition, very few studies have examined the actual content of autobiographical memories and how the content might change as a function of age. The present study carried out a content analysis of involuntary autobiographical memories recorded by young (N = 11) and old (N = 10) volunteers over a period of 1 week. A total of 224 memories were classified into 17 categories according to the type of content recalled (e.g., births, holidays, school). The results support the socioemotional theory of ageing (Carstensen, Isaacowitz & Charles, 1999) by showing that although young and old adults recalled a similar number of memories with a typically positive content (e.g., holidays, special occasions), older adults recalled very few memories with a typically negative content (e.g., accidents, stressful events). Moreover, even when such negative memories were recalled, they were rated by older adults as neutral or even positive. This so-called positivity effect in old age could not be entirely explained by participants' ratings of mood at the time of recall. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings for ageing and autobiographical memory research are discussed.     

An experimental investigation of physical education teachers’ and coaches’ reactions to weight-based victimization in youth

Objectives

Overweight youth are frequent targets of weight-based victimization during Physical Education (PE) and sports. In addition, previous research indicates that teachers’ perceptions and expectations may influence their likelihood of intervening during victimization, and physical educators may endorse biased perceptions and expectations of overweight youth. Despite this evidence, no research has examined how physical educators respond to weight-based victimization of their students. Thus, the current study examined PE teachers’ and coaches’ responses to different types of victimization involving average weight and overweight students.

Design

This study utilized an experimental design that assessed participants’ reactions to situations of weight-related victimization using hypothetical scenarios accompanied by photographs of youth.

Methods

PE teachers and sport coaches (N = 162) were randomly presented with a scenario and follow-up questions about an average weight or an overweight student. Each participant completed two conditions: one with a male target, and one with a female target.

Results

Participants were more likely to take action when overweight female students were victims of bullying, specifically in situations of verbal and relational victimization. Male participants were less likely to respond to victimization than female participants.

Conclusions

Findings suggest the importance of increasing awareness about weight-based victimization and its consequences, especially among male physical educators. Implications for the psychological, social, and physical development of overweight youth are discussed.     

Using scissors to bisect a line: A perception–action dissociation in complex tool use

Previous research has shown that unilateral visual neglect is improved when patients are required to actively grasp an object at its center, rather than only pointing to its center. A similar dissociation between pointing and grasping responses has been reported for pseudoneglect, a spatial bias toward the left side of space that is normally exhibited by healthy participants. Among other theories, the two-visual-streams hypothesis has been offered as an explanation for these dissociations. According to this hypothesis, highly practiced actions that are performed under easily available visual input (e.g., grasping an object) are controlled by the dorsal stream and can resist perceptual judgment biases. We investigated whether, in pseudoneglect, dissociations between perceptual judgments and motor–manipulative responses occur when participants have to respond with complex tools that are highly practiced but that have been shown to rely on both ventral- and dorsal-stream processing. In a standard line bisection task, participants had to either mark the center of a line with a pencil or cut the line in two halves using a pair of scissors. The results indicated the typical leftward bias (pseudoneglect) in the pencil task, whereas performance was much more accurate in the scissors task. These results show that actions featuring complex tool use can resist perceptual judgment biases, and the findings are discussed with reference to existing accounts of perception–action dissociations.     

Conditionals are material: the positive arguments

A number of papers have argued in favour of the material account of indicative conditionals, but typically they either concentrate on defending the account from the charge that it has counterintuitive consequences, or else focus on some particular positive argument in favour of the theory. In this paper, I survey the various positive arguments that can be given, presenting simple versions where possible and showing the connections between them. I conclude with some methodological considerations.     

Flexible cortical gamma-band correlations suggest neural principles of visual processing

We summarize recent studies of our group from the primary visual cortex V1 of behaving monkeys referring to the hypothesis of spatial feature binding by γ-synchronization (30-90 Hz). In agreement with this hypothesis the data demonstrates decoupling of γ-activities among neural groups representing figure and ground. As γ-synchronization in V1 is restricted to cortical ranges of few millimeters, feature binding may equivalently be restricted in visual space. Closer inspection shows that the restriction in synchrony is due to far-reaching travelling γ-waves with changing phase coupling. Based on this observation we extend the initial binding-by-synchronization hypothesis and suggest object continuity to be coded by phase continuity. It is further argued that the spatial phase changes of the V1 γ-waves in general will also limit lateral phase coupling to higher levels of processing. Instead of phase-locked γ-coupling, corticocortical cooperation among γ-processes may be mediated by mutual amplitude modulations that are more reliable than phase synchrony over larger distances. The relevance of this concept of corticocortical binding is demonstrated with subdural recordings from human subjects performing cognitive tasks. The experimental results are discussed on the basis of network models with spiking neurons.     

Speed limits: orientation and semantic context interactions constrain natural scene discrimination dynamics

The visual system rapidly extracts information about objects from the cluttered natural environment. In 5 experiments, the authors quantified the influence of orientation and semantics on the classification speed of objects in natural scenes, particularly with regard to object-context interactions. Natural scene photographs were presented in an object-discrimination task and pattern masked with various scene-to-mask stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs). Full psychometric functions and reaction times (RTs) were measured. The authors found that (a) rotating the full scenes increased threshold SOA at intermediate rotation angles but not for inversion; (b) rotating object or context degraded classification performance in a similar manner; (c) semantically congruent contexts had negligible facilitatory effects on object classification compared with meaningless baseline contexts with a matching contrast structure, but incongruent contexts severely degraded performance; (d) any object-context incongruence (orientation or semantic) increased RTs at longer SOAs, indicating dependent processing of object and context; and (e) facilitatory effects of context emerged only when the context shortly preceded the object. The authors conclude that the effects of natural scene context on object classification are primarily inhibitory and discuss possible reasons.     

Constructing Gender in Chat Groups

We investigated the construction of gender in chat groups. Four unacquainted persons chatted in two gender-anonymous conditions and a non-anonymous control condition. In one anonymous condition, the gender focus was made salient. The other groups did not know about the gender focus. All participants had to guess the gender of the others and give reasons for their decisions. Results suggest that (a) overall, 2/3 of gender guesses fit the sex category of the targets, (b) gender anonymity was more comfortable for women, (c) participants used mostly gender-stereotypic cues to infer gender, however, men and women used syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic cues (with different predictive value) to different degrees, (d) conversational behavior varied depending on gender anonymity, and (e) degree of gender salience was irrelevant for the use of gender as an organizing category.     

A sex difference in the specificity of sexual arousal

Sexual arousal is category-specific in men; heterosexual men are more aroused by female than by male sexual stimuli, whereas homosexual men show the opposite pattern. There is reason to believe that female sexual arousal is organized differently. We assessed genital and subjective sexual arousal to male and female sexual stimuli in women, men, and postoperative male-to-female transsexuals. In contrast to men, women showed little category specificity on either the genital or the subjective measure. Both heterosexual and homosexual women experienced strong genital arousal to both male and female sexual stimuli. Transsexuals showed a category-specific pattern, demonstrating that category specificity can be detected in the neovagina using a photoplethysmographic measure of female genital sexual arousal. In a second study, we showed that our results for females are unlikely to be explained by ascertainment biases. These findings suggest that sexual arousal patterns play fundamentally different roles in male and female sexuality.