Reproductive Vocabularies: Interrogating Intersections of Reproduction,Sexualities, and Religion among U.S. Cisgender College Women

Although feminists often examine the ways reproduction shapes women’s lives, such research typically only focuses on the effects of reproduction after the fact while leaving reproductive decision-making beforehand unexplored. In the present article, we flip this pattern by outlining the “vocabularies of motive” (Mills 1940) cisgender women offer for wanting to engage in or abstain from reproduction. Based on in-depth interviews with 20 class-privileged, cisgender U.S. women in college who possess the resources to forego reproduction, we analyze how they define their reproductive intentions as (a) conforming to social expectations, (b) seeking fulfillment, (c) replicating past experience, and/or (d) rejecting reproduction and parenting. Further, we compare and contrast the reproductive vocabularies of motive offered by heterosexual and bisexual as well as religious and nonreligious cisgender women in our sample. In conclusion, we draw out implications for understanding women’s reproductive decision-making and the social construction of reproductive norms.     

Sharing memories and telling stories: American and Chinese mothers and their 3-year-olds

American and Chinese mothers were asked to talk with their 3-year-old children at home about two shared past events and a story (41 mother-child dyads). Results revealed between-culture variation in the content and style of mother–child conversations when sharing memories and telling stories. American mothers and children showed a high-elaborative, independently oriented conversational style in which they co-constructed their memories and stories by elaborating on each other’s responses and focusing on the child’s personal predilections and opinions. In contrast, Chinese Mother–child dyads employed a lowelaborative, interdependently oriented conversational style where mothers frequently posed and repeated factual questions and showed great concern with moral rules and behavioural standards with their children. Findings suggest that children’s early social-linguistic environments shape autobiographical remembering and contribute to cultural differences in the age and content of earliest childhood memories.     

Object specificity and personal relevance in long-term visual remembering

The personal relevance of an object is multi-faceted, each facet being capable of contributing to the effects on object memory attributed to personal relevance. An object's status as an individual object (object specificity), rather than just a category of object, is one such facet and its impact on the long-term visual remembering of everyday objects is assessed in two experiments. Images and drawings were produced under generic (e.g., “Please draw a bed”) and personal exemplar (e.g., “Please draw your bed”) instructions, and participants indicated the degree to which the image on which their drawing was based was of a specific object or a generic object. Object specificity induced a sense of time and place for a remembered object, the most recent encounter with the object being most salient. Other aspects of personal relevance collectively facilitated the retrieval of an object's category-irrelevant features (thereby increasing the vividness of the object image), the other objects with which it was seen, and a more general episodic sense of place. Against a broader theoretical perspective, it is proposed that visual episodic memory and visual knowledge are primary sources of information for specific personally relevant objects and generic objects, respectively.     

Parents May Hold the Keys to Success in Immersion Treatment of Adolescent Obesity

This study examined the potential impact of parents on the long-term results of an immersion program for the treatment of adolescent obesity. Teenagers participated in a 4- to 8-week therapeutic camp. Those who continued losing weight 8- to 12-months postcamp were identified as “Losers”; those who regained weight were considered “Gainers.” Parents from both groups were interviewed about their own current lifestyle habits 1 to 1.5 years after camp ended. Results indicate that more of the initially overweight parents from the Loser group lost weight during the follow-up period than the overweight parents of Gainers. Losers' parents also reported better implementation of several aspects of the weight control program. The present results suggest that helping parents adopt lifestyle changes for themselves, even within the context of relatively short immersion treatments, may maximize outcomes for obese teenagers.     

The dynamic relationships of affective synchrony to perceptions of situations

Most theories of affect predict that affects of opposite valence should be negatively correlated (de-synchronous) or independent (asynchronous) within individuals. Such theories were challenged by the finding that the association between energetic arousal and tense arousal ranged from de-synchrony to synchrony (Rafaeli, Rogers, &; Revelle, 2007). In this paper, we report two experience-sampling studies employing cell-phone text-messaging aimed at further exploring individual differences in affective experience. Results showed that within-person relationships between energetic arousal and tense arousal ranged from de-synchrony to synchrony, but that within-person relationships between Pleasant and Unpleasant affect varied from strong de-synchrony to weak de-synchrony. Individual differences in within-person EA-TA associations were related to perceiving threatening situations as incentives and to interactions between affective traits.     

What drives the organization of object knowledge in the brain?

Various forms of category-specificity have been described at both the cognitive and neural levels, inviting the inference that different semantic domains are processed by distinct, dedicated mechanisms. In this paper, we argue for an extension of a domain-specific interpretation to these phenomena that is based on network-level analyses of functional coupling among brain regions. On this view, domain-specificity in one region of the brain emerges because of innate connectivity with a network of regions that also process information about that domain. Recent findings are reviewed that converge with this framework, and a new direction is outlined for understanding the neural principles that shape the organization of conceptual knowledge.     

Procedural injustice,police legitimacy,and officer gender: A vignette‐based test of the invariance thesis

Role congruity theory suggests that gender‐based stereotypes can result in female police officers paying a higher price (i.e., viewed as less legitimate) relative to male officers for mistreating people. The invariance thesis posits that the effect of (un)fair treatment by legal authorities on legal attitudes and beliefs is stable across situations, time, and space. This study tested the invariance thesis by assessing whether the effect of procedural injustice on police legitimacy differed across officer gender. A factorial vignette survey that consisted of two types of citizen‐initiated police encounters was administered to a university‐based sample (N = 525). The results showed that the effect of procedural injustice had a powerful and significant influence on participants' legitimacy perceptions. These effects were consistent regardless of whether the treatment was doled out by a male or a female police officer. The findings provide support for the invariance thesis.     

Noncontingent reinforcement and competing stimuli in the treatment of pseudoseizures and destructive behaviors

Individuals diagnosed with epilepsy have sometimes also been observed to display ‘pseudoseizures’, or clinical events that mimic those observed during epileptic seizures, but are not associated with abnormal cortical electrical discharges. Several investigators have hypothesized that pseudoseizures, in some proportion of those individuals that display them, may be maintained through operant contingencies. In the present study, this sort of hypothesis was tested in a 10‐year‐old boy with severe mental retardation and a seizure disorder. Informal observations, and later, response‐reinforcer contingencies, revealed that the pseudoseizures, as well as other destructive behaviors, occurred at high rates when they resulted in attention from caregivers. Subsequently, a treatment package consisting of noncontingent reinforcement (NCR) and competing stimuli was used to decrease levels of seizure‐like activity and other problem behaviors. This study adds to the literature that suggests that seizure‐like activity may come under operant control and extends the use of NCR and competing stimuli to a novel target behavior. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.