Implicit Attitudes Toward Arab-Muslims and the Moderating Effects of Social Information

Three studies examined the relative valence and strength of implicit attitudes toward Arab-Muslims using the Implicit Association Test (IAT) while exploring the moderation of such implicit effects. Studies have suggested that repeated exposure to information associating members of a social group (e.g., Arab-Muslims) with evaluative attributes (e.g., terrorism) might create automatic attitudes toward them. Consistent with this notion, the IAT results indicated strong implicit preference for White over Arab-Muslim, whereas the magnitude of such a bias was substantially diminished when assessed by explicit measures (Study 1). It is also interesting to note that participants exhibited implicit preference for Black over Arab-Muslim when measured by the IAT, whereas no difference was found between the 2 groups in stimulus familiarity and in explicit attitudes (Studies 2 and 3). However, such implicit effects were moderated when participants were exposed to positive information about Arab-Muslims (Study 3). Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are further discussed.     

Book Reviews

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to identify what I take to be the main conceptual problem in Lewis’ semantics for counterfactuals when the Limit Assumption (LA) is not satisfied, what I call the Discrimination Problem (DP), and to present and discuss a modification of Lewis’ semantics that aims at solving DP. First, I outline Lewis’ semantics, highlighting the aspects that will be relevant for our discussion. Second, I present DP and discuss it with a heuristic example. Third, I present the new proposal and comment some formal consequences and the objections they give rise to. Fourth, I present an allegedly equivalent version of the proposal and discuss the difference between counterfactuals and strict conditionals. Finally, I defend that the two proposals are different and argue for the first one as the best way of capturing two intuitions that seem in conflict when the LA is not satisfied. I conclude with a dilemma: either the proposal here defended works or LA is inescapable. Thus, if the proposal doesn’t work, the paper must then be considered as an indirect defense of the Limit Assumption.     

Establishing a relational field that fosters learning processes: Some tentative propositions derived from trainee experiences

In this article, we look at the recent introduction of more relational-oriented learning principles and how they translate into practice by documenting the experiences of both trainees and instructors. It became clear that actors held different opinions and viewpoints on learning objectives and process ingredients for achieving these objectives. This divergence in opinions resulted in an “impoverished” learning trajectory. We suggest that remedying this situation implies introducing reflexivity regarding learning processes or, stated otherwise, addressing “meta-cognitions” that participants inevitably bring to the process as they affect the way in which people engage in the relational field that encompasses the learning trajectory. Despite some recent arguments in favour of a distinction between cognitive and meta-cognitive mediation, we argue for a similar approach with respect to both types of mediation. We end this article by suggesting that designing learning trajectories with this dual concern in mind might open the road to “learning to learn”.     

A Factor Analysis of Six Commonly Used Instruments Associated With Suicide Using College Students

Determined whether six commonly used inventories which are associated with suicide (Hopelessness Scale, Zung Self-Rating Depression Scale, Scale for Suicide Ideation, Reasons for Living Inventory, Suicide Probability Scale, and the Suicide Ideation Questionnaire) overlap; all six were given to 308 undergraduates. A principal components factor analysis yielded four factors with Eigenvalues greater than 1.00. These four factors were labeled Suicidal/Negative Ideas, Reasons for Living, Self-Doubt, and Suicide Desire. Each scale or subscale had a factor loading of .4 or greater on one factor. Only the Survival and Coping Beliefs subscale of the Reasons for Living Inventory and the Suicide Ideation Questionnaire loaded on two factors. Thus, each of these six instruments accounts for unique variance in suicidality. A suicide screening battery that includes all six inventories would take approximately 20 min for college students to complete, and would be valuable in identifying different aspects of suicidality.     

A Systematic Review of Propensity Score Methods in the Social Sciences

The use of propensity scores in psychological and educational research has been steadily increasing in the last 2 to 3 years. However, there are some common misconceptions about the use of different estimation techniques and conditioning choices in the context of propensity score analysis. In addition, reporting practices for propensity score analyses often lack important details that allow other researchers to confidently judge the appropriateness of reported analyses and potentially to replicate published findings. In this article we conduct a systematic literature review of a large number of published articles in major areas of social science that used propensity scores up until the fall of 2009. We identify common errors in estimation, conditioning, and reporting of propensity score analyses and suggest possible solutions.     

Occupational stereotypes: activation of male bias in a gender‐neutral world

The goal of the present study was to determine whether gender‐neutral language, used to replace male‐biased language, carries an implicit male bias. Participants read passages in which a target occupation was introduced using either male‐biased or gender‐neutral nouns. A target sentence followed defining the gender of the occupational character. In Experiment 1, participants read target sentences defining the character as a woman more slowly following passages that contained male‐biased nouns and gender‐neutral nouns. In Experiment 2, an additional sentence was added that defined the occupational character as a woman. This information eliminated the reading disruption in Experiment 1 demonstrating that gender‐neutral language can moderate against activation of gender stereotypes when combined with an explicit mention that the occupational character is female.     

Family Influences on the Long Term Post-Disaster Recovery of Puerto Rican Youth

This study focused on characteristics of the family environment that may mediate the relationship between disaster exposure and the presence of symptoms that met DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for symptom count and duration for an internalizing disorder in children and youth. We also explored how parental history of mental health problems may moderate this mediational model. Approximately 18 months after Hurricane Georges hit Puerto Rico in 1998, participants were randomly selected based on a probability household sample using 1990 US Census block groups. Caregivers and children (N?=?1,886 dyads) were interviewed with the Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children and other questionnaires in Spanish. Areas of the family environment assessed include parent-child relationship quality, parent-child involvement, parental monitoring, discipline, parents’ relationship quality and parental mental health. SEM models were estimated for parents and children, and by age group. For children (4–10 years old), parenting variables were related to internalizing psychopathology, but did not mediate the exposure-psychopathology relationship. Exposure had a direct relationship to internalizing psychopathology. For youth (11–17 years old), some parenting variables attenuated the relation between exposure and internalizing psychopathology. Family environment factors may play a mediational role in psychopathology post-disaster among youth, compared to an additive role for children. Hurricane exposure had a significant relation to family environment for families without parental history of mental health problems, but no influence for families with a parental history of mental health problems.     

Subspace K-means clustering

To achieve an insightful clustering of multivariate data, we propose subspace K-means. Its central idea is to model the centroids and cluster residuals in reduced spaces, which allows for dealing with a wide range of cluster types and yields rich interpretations of the clusters. We review the existing related clustering methods, including deterministic, stochastic, and unsupervised learning approaches. To evaluate subspace K-means, we performed a comparative simulation study, in which we manipulated the overlap of subspaces, the between-cluster variance, and the error variance. The study shows that the subspace K-means algorithm is sensitive to local minima but that the problem can be reasonably dealt with by using partitions of various cluster procedures as a starting point for the algorithm. Subspace K-means performs very well in recovering the true clustering across all conditions considered and appears to be superior to its competitor methods: K-means, reduced K-means, factorial K-means, mixtures of factor analyzers (MFA), and MCLUST. The best competitor method, MFA, showed a performance similar to that of subspace K-means in easy conditions but deteriorated in more difficult ones. Using data from a study on parental behavior, we show that subspace K-means analysis provides a rich insight into the cluster characteristics, in terms of both the relative positions of the clusters (via the centroids) and the shape of the clusters (via the within-cluster residuals).