Television Use,Sexual Behavior,and Relationship Status at Last Oral Sex and Vaginal Intercourse

The current longitudinal study explores the relationship between adolescent television use at time 1 and sexual experience and relationship status (i.e., committed/romantic versus casual) 1 year later. The sample (N = 824) comprised youth aged 14–18. Multinomial logistic regressions predicting group membership from television exposure variables were conducted controlling for socio-demographic characteristics and prior sexual behavior. Results indicate that sexually inexperienced youth watched more television overall than sexually experienced youth, but less adult, premium and music television on cable networks. Premium cable exposure predicted group membership among sexually active youth. Youth who watched more premium cable at time 1 were more likely to be in casual relationship at last intercourse than a committed one. A more complete understanding of media effects on adolescent sexual relationships can help guide policy development, media education/literacy efforts, and contribute to the design of interventions to reduce the negative consequences associated with adolescent sexual behavior.     

Are driving simulators effective tools for evaluating novice drivers’ hazard anticipation,speed management,and attention maintenance skills?

Novice drivers (teen drivers with their solo license for 6 months or less) are at a greatly inflated risk of crashing. Post hoc analyses of police accident reports indicate that novice drivers fail to anticipate hazards, manage their speed, and maintain attention. These skills are much too broadly defined to be of much help in training. Recently, however, driving simulators have been used to identify those skills which differentiate the novice drivers from older, more experienced drivers in the areas of hazard anticipation and speed management. Below, we report an experiment on a driving simulator which compares novice and experienced drivers’ performance in the third area believed to contribute especially heavily to crashes among novice drivers: attention to the forward roadway. The results indicate that novice drivers are much more willing to glance for long periods of time inside the vehicle than are experienced drivers. Interestingly, the results also indicate that both novice and experienced drivers spend equal amounts of time glancing at tasks external to the vehicle and in the periphery. Moreover, just as a program has been designed to train the scanning skills that clearly differentiate novice from experienced drivers, one might hope that a training program could be designed to improve the attention maintenance skills of novice drivers. We report on the initial piloting of just such a training program. Finally, we address a question that has long been debated in the literature: Do the results from driving simulators generalize to the real world? We argue that in the case of hazard anticipation, speed management, and attention maintenance the answer is yes.     

Feminist phenomenological voices

A feminist phenomenological analysis of voice, rooted in both the feminist understanding of the role of voice in identity, agency, and the creation of meaning, and the phenomenological thematization and theorization of phenomenal, lived experience, leads to a deeper understanding of the importance of the materiality of the voices with which we speak, and their role in both subjective and intersubjective experience. Starting from an analysis of the intertwined associations and imageries of the feminine, voice, and embodiment, I discuss the denaturalization and abstraction of voice in standard narratives of voice and voice metaphorization, and the corresponding forgetting of the living, bodily voice. In looking to recall a re-naturalized and immanent corporeality and retrieve the material voice through an account of embodied vocality, I consider examples of the power and immediacy of the corporeal voice in the female operatic voice, and in contrast, the compromised agency and attenuated (inter)subjectivity which attends the impaired or lost physical voice. These vocal counterpoints of presence and absence are often separated by corporeal disturbance or limitation, underscoring the importance of corporeality and the material voice as intermediary between the individual and the social world. This sets the contours of a phenomenology of embodied voice and vocality, holding implications for accounts of identity and intersubjectivity, gendered vocality and expressive agency, and an intercorporeality mediated by the living material voice.     

Can an agent's false belief be corrected by an appropriate communication? Psychological reasoning in 18-month-old infants

Do 18-month-olds understand that an agent's false belief can be corrected by an appropriate, though not an inappropriate, communication? In Experiment 1, infants watched a series of events involving two agents, a ball, and two containers: a box and a cup. To start, agent1 played with the ball and then hid it in the box, while agent2 looked on. Next, in agent1's absence, agent2 moved the ball from the box to the cup. When agent1 returned, agent2 told her "The ball is in the cup!" (informative-intervention condition) or "I like the cup!" (uninformative-intervention condition). During test, agent1 reached for either the box (box event) or the cup (cup event). In the informative-intervention condition, infants who saw the box event looked reliably longer than those who saw the cup event; in the uninformative-intervention condition, the reverse pattern was found. These results suggest that infants expected agent1's false belief about the ball's location to be corrected when she was told "The ball is in the cup!", but not "I like the cup!". In Experiment 2, agent2 simply pointed to the ball's new location, and infants again expected agent1's false belief to be corrected. These and control results provide additional evidence that infants in the second year of life can attribute false beliefs to agents. In addition, the results suggest that by 18 months of age infants expect agents' false beliefs to be corrected by relevant communications involving words or gestures.     

The time of the crime: cognitively induced tonic arousal suppression when lying in a free recall context

Previous research has shown that suspects in real-life interviews do not display stereotypical signs of nervous behaviours, even though they may be experiencing high detection anxiety. We hypothesised that these suspects may have experienced cognitive load when lying and that this cognitive load reduced their tonic arousal, which suppressed signs of nervousness. We conducted two experiments to test this hypothesis. Tonic electrodermal arousal and blink rate were examined during task-induced (Experiment 1) and deception-induced cognitive load (Experiment 2). Both increased cognitive difficulty and deception resulted in decreased tonic arousal and blinking. This demonstrated for the first time that when lying results in heightened levels of cognitive load, signs of nervousness are decreased. We discuss implications for detecting deception and more wide-ranging phenomena related to emotional behaviour.     

Protecting confidentiality rights: the need for an ethical practice model

All psychologists must uphold the same ethical standards about confidentiality even though each state imposes different legal limits on their ability to protect clients' confidences. The resulting ethical-legal confusion is exacerbated by legally based confidentiality training that treats legal exceptions as if they were the rule and fosters the impression that attorneys are now the only real experts about this aspect of practice. This article provides an ethics-based confidentiality practice model that clarifies the ethical rule and puts its legal exceptions into ethical perspective. Like the Confidentiality section of the American Psychological Association's (2002) Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct, this outline would apply to all psychologists regardless of state laws, but the details of its implementation would vary according to role and setting. It can be used as a universal training outline, a consultation and supervision tool, a guide to professional practice, and a basis for clearer ongoing conversation about the ethics of "conditional confidentiality." Psychologists can use this practice model to regain their status as experts about the confidentiality ethics of their own profession.     

Evaluation of an efficient method for training staff to implement stimulus preference assessments

We used a brief training procedure that incorporated feedback and role-play practice to train staff members to conduct stimulus preference assessments, and we used group-comparison methods to evaluate the effects of training. Staff members were trained to implement the multiple-stimulus-without-replacement assessment in a single session and the paired-stimulus method in another single session. In all 16 cases (2 assessments for 8 trainees), correct responding increased to over 80% accuracy; in 14 of those 16 cases, it increased to over 90% accuracy. Thus, training produced mastery-level performance in a single training session in almost all cases.     

Family sessions as part of child psychological assessment: goals, techniques, clinical utility, and therapeutic value

Including a family session in a child assessment can significantly advance the assessor's and parents' understanding of the child's problems and enhance the likelihood that parents will follow through on recommendations after the assessment. A family session allows the assessor to observe the child in the family context, test systemic hypotheses, better understand the meaning of individual test results, and try out possible interventions. A family session may also help parents see systemic aspects of their child's problems, help the child feel less blamed, foster positive experiences among family members, and offer the family a glimpse of family therapy. We describe methods and techniques for structuring family sessions and offer guidance on preparing for and conducting such sessions depending on one's case conceptualization. Detailed case examples illustrate each technique and demonstrate the immediate and subsequent impact of family sessions as well as their therapeutic value. We also address common clinical and pragmatic issues.     

Preservation of long-term memory and synaptic plasticity despite short-term impairments in the Tc1 mouse model of Down syndrome

Down syndrome (DS) is a genetic disorder arising from the presence of a third copy of the human chromosome 21 (Hsa21). Recently, O’Doherty and colleagues in an earlier study generated a new genetic mouse model of DS (Tc1) that carries an almost complete Hsa21. Since DS is the most common genetic cause of mental retardation, we have undertaken a detailed analysis of cognitive function and synaptic plasticity in Tc1 mice. Here we show that Tc1 mice have impaired spatial working memory (WM) but spared long-term spatial reference memory (RM) in the Morris watermaze. Similarly, Tc1 mice are selectively impaired in short-term memory (STM) but have intact long-term memory (LTM) in the novel object recognition task. The pattern of impaired STM and normal LTM is paralleled by a corresponding phenotype in long-term potentiation (LTP). Freely-moving Tc1 mice exhibit reduced LTP 1 h after induction but normal maintenance over days in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampal formation. Biochemical analysis revealed a reduction in membrane surface expression of the AMPAR (α-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4-propionic acid receptor) subunit GluR1 in the hippocampus of Tc1 mice, suggesting a potential mechanism for the impairment in early LTP. Our observations also provide further evidence that STM and LTM for hippocampus-dependent tasks are subserved by parallel processing streams.     

Internet access and use among homeless and indigent drug users in Long Beach, California.

There has been a growing interest in using the Internet to access a variety of populations for prevention education and health care. It is not clear that this is viable for homeless and other marginalized populations. The purpose of this study was to describe Internet access and use among a sample of homeless and indigent drug users. A brief questionnaire was developed to assess computer ownership, use, email, and Internet access and use. Participants were recruited through a community-based human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevention program. 265 participants completed the questionnaire. While 55% had ever used a computer in their lifetime, only 25% had ever owned a computer, 24% had ever had their own email account, 33% had access to a working computer in the last 30 days, 10% had sent or received email in the last 30 days, and 19% had surfed or accessed information on the Internet in the last 30 days. Logistic regression predicting lifetime use of a computer showed predictive factors of having completed high school (Odds Ratio [OR] = 4.5; 95% Confidence Interval [CI] = 2.41, 8.38) and number of days used amphetamines in the last 30 days, per 5 days of use (OR = 1.64; 95% CI = 1.18, 2.27). Inversely related were age, per 5 years of age (OR = 0.78; 95% CI = 0.65, 0.93) and number of days used marijuana in the last 30 days, per 5 days of use (OR = 0.97; 95% CI = 0.76, 0.99). Very low access and usage suggest that Internet-based public health education models be reexamined for this population. The association with amphetamine use may indicate a facilitating effect of amphetamine by heightening awareness and increasing wakefulness.