The Prediction of Family Interaction from a Battery of Projective Techniques

This study first explored the adequacy of items on the Rorschach Rating Scale (RRS), which measures Rorschach constructs from a variety of scoring systems. Analyses determined that all items had an adequate capacity to differentiate people and none were clearly redundant. At the same time, the current version of the RRS requires good reading comprehension skills for accurate completion (13th grade level). Next, we developed two sets of RRS scales. Factor analysis of observer ratings (N = 234) indicated the RRS contained six broad, empirically derived factors. In addition, 19 conceptually derived scales were developed from the RRS item pool. Both sets of scales were evaluated for reliability and then compared to the Big Five model (B5M) of personality through a series of factor and regression analyses. Results indicated that RRS scales do not provide adequate definition of all B5M dimensions and B5M scales do not provide adequate definition of all RRS dimensions. We discuss the place of psychotic processes within a comprehensive model of personality and other implications from these findings.     

The impact of college‐level sex education on sexual knowledge,attitudes, and practices: The knowledge/sexual experimentation myth revisited

In recent years, many persons have opposed sex education believing that such courses will lead to increased participation in sexual intercourse by young people, but their fears are not supported by most previous research. The influence of sex education material integrated into functional marriage and family courses, however, has not been the subject of in‐depth, scientific investigations.

An anonymous questionnaire was administered to never‐married undergraduate students enrolled in a college‐level marriage and family course at a state university. A pretest and post‐test design was utilized with experimental groups of 50 women and 26 men and comparison groups of 60 women and 28 men.

The findings indicate that the sex education content had a significant impact on the experimental groups, especially for women. Substantial increases in knowledge regarding abortion and contraception, more favorable attitudes toward masturbation, and frequency of masturbation were reported by experimental group women as contrasted with comparison group women. Experimental group men indicated increased knowledge about female hygiene and contraception in contrast to comparison group men. From these findings, sex educators should be able to better meet the criticisms of sex education opponents given this greater understanding of the impact of sex education material on the sex lives of their students.     

Women–Focused Treatment Agencies and Process Improvement: Strategies to Increase Client Engagement

Behavioral health treatment agencies often struggle to keep clients engaged in treatment. Women clients often have additional factors such as family responsibilities, financial difficulties, or abuse histories that provide extra challenges to remaining in care. As part of a national initiative, four women-focused drug treatment agencies used process improvement to address treatment engagement. Interviews and focus groups with staff assessed the nature and extent of interventions. Women-focused drug treatment agencies selected relational-based interventions to engage clients in treatment and improved four-week treatment retention from 66% to 76%. Process improvement interventions in women-focused treatment may be useful to improve engagement.     

Deriving Training Strategies for Spatial Knowledge Acquisition From Behavioral,Cognitive, and Neural Foundations

While much has been made of the potential uses for virtual environment (VE) technologies as training aids, there are few guidelines and strategies to inform system development from the user’s perspective. Assumptions are that a human factors-based evaluation will ensure optimal performance, transferring training from virtual to real worlds; however, there are complex, yet unexplored, issues surrounding system optimization and employment. A comprehensive investigation into the foundations of training, traversing levels of performance analysis, from overt behavioral responses to the less explicit neuronal patterns, is proposed from which optimal training strategies can be inferred and system development guidelines deduced.     

Empirical and historical perspectives on the growth of Pentecostal-style churches in Malaysia,Singapore and Hong Kong

This article considers the growth of Pentecostal-style churches in Southeast Asia, and specifically in Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. It outlines four reasons for the growth that occurred and then, using qualitative and quantitative data in a mixed mode, seeks to test the hypotheses it derives. It concludes that each of the hypotheses remains plausible but notes that contextual factors or major social disruptions undermine any deterministic account.     

Desert,fairness, and resentment

Responsibility, blameworthiness in particular, has been characterized in a number of ways in a literature in which participants appear to be talking about the same thing much of the time. More specifically, blameworthiness has been characterized in terms of what sorts of responses are fair, appropriate, and deserved in a basic way, where the responses in question range over blame, sanctions, alterations to interpersonal relationships, and the reactive attitudes, such as resentment and indignation. In this paper, I explore the relationships between three particular theses: (i) the claim that one is blameworthy to the extent that it is fair to impose sanctions, (ii) the claim that one is blameworthy to the extent that one deserves sanctions, and (iii) the claim that one is blameworthy to the extent that it is appropriate to respond with reactive attitudes. Appealing to the way in which luck in the outcome of an action can justifiably affect the degree of sanctions received, I argue that (i) is false and that fairness and desert come apart. I then argue that the relationship between the reactive attitudes and sanction is not as straightforward as has sometimes been assumed, but that (ii) and (iii) might both be true and closely linked. I conclude by exploring various claims about desert, including ones that link it to the intrinsic goodness of receiving what is deserved and to the permissibility or rightness of inflicting suffering.     

Adaptive memory: fitness relevant stimuli show a memory advantage in a game of pelmanism

A pelmanism (matched-pairs) game was used in order to test the hypothesis that survival-relevant stimuli that are likely to have been present during human evolution (e.g., a snake in attack position) enjoy a memory advantage over other survival-relevant (but “modern”) stimuli (e.g., a threatening image of a gunman). Survival-relevant stimuli were matched for arousal and presented in one of two 5 x 4 grids, along with filler items. Participants were asked to match the pairs in the grids by clicking on successive squares to reveal stimuli. Participants made significantly fewer errors when matching evolutionarily relevant survival stimuli than when matching the other stimuli. Additionally, on incorrect trials, the attempted matches were significantly closer to the actual locations of evolutionarily relevant targets than to those of other stimuli. The results suggest that objects that likely posed a consistent threat throughout human evolutionary history are better remembered than other, equally arousing and survival-relevant, stimuli. [corrected]     

Evidence that gendered wording in job advertisements exists and sustains gender inequality

Social dominance theory (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999) contends that institutional-level mechanisms exist that reinforce and perpetuate existing group-based inequalities, but very few such mechanisms have been empirically demonstrated. We propose that gendered wording (i.e., masculine- and feminine-themed words, such as those associated with gender stereotypes) may be a heretofore unacknowledged, institutional-level mechanism of inequality maintenance. Employing both archival and experimental analyses, the present research demonstrates that gendered wording commonly employed in job recruitment materials can maintain gender inequality in traditionally male-dominated occupations. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrated the existence of subtle but systematic wording differences within a randomly sampled set of job advertisements. Results indicated that job advertisements for male-dominated areas employed greater masculine wording (i.e., words associated with male stereotypes, such as leader, competitive, dominant) than advertisements within female-dominated areas. No difference in the presence of feminine wording (i.e., words associated with female stereotypes, such as support, understand, interpersonal) emerged across male- and female-dominated areas. Next, the consequences of highly masculine wording were tested across 3 experimental studies. When job advertisements were constructed to include more masculine than feminine wording, participants perceived more men within these occupations (Study 3), and importantly, women found these jobs less appealing (Studies 4 and 5). Results confirmed that perceptions of belongingness (but not perceived skills) mediated the effect of gendered wording on job appeal (Study 5). The function of gendered wording in maintaining traditional gender divisions, implications for gender parity, and theoretical models of inequality are discussed.