PERCEIVING PERVASIVE DISCRIMINATION OVER TIME: IMPLICATIONS FOR COPING

This study provides evidence that the effects of perceived pervasive discrimination may be dynamic over time. It was expected that participants who perceived discrimination to be highly pervasive would initially be more likely to engage in inactive coping strategies than those who perceived low pervasiveness; however, those who continued to perceive high pervasiveness over time were expected ultimately to engage in more active strategies than those perceiving low pervasiveness. Using a 28-day diary, women and ethnic minorities described their daily experiences of discrimination and indicated their appraisals of its pervasiveness as well as their coping strategies. Results showed that participants who initially perceived low pervasiveness reported more active coping and religion use as well as less behavioral disengagement than those initially perceiving high pervasiveness. However, this pattern was reversed by the end of the study. Implications for integrating time into the assessment of coping with discrimination are discussed.     

Children and adults both see ‘pirates’ in ‘parties’: letter‐position effects for developing readers and skilled adult readers

Developing readers often make anagrammatical errors (e.g. misreading pirates as parties), suggesting they use letter position flexibly during word recognition. However, while it is widely assumed that the occurrence of these errors decreases with increases in reading skill, empirical evidence to support this distinction is lacking. Accordingly, we compared the performance of developing child readers (aged 8–10 years) against the end‐state performance of skilled adult readers in a timed naming task, employing anagrams used previously in this area of research. Moreover, to explore the use of letter position by developing readers and skilled adult readers more fully, we used anagrams which, to form another word, required letter transpositions over only interior letter positions, or both interior and exterior letter positions. The patterns of effects across these two anagram types for the two groups of readers were very similar. In particular, both groups showed similarly slowed response times (and developing readers increased errors) for anagrams requiring only interior letter transpositions but not for anagrams that required exterior letter transpositions. This similarity in the naming performance of developing readers and skilled adult readers suggests that the end‐state skilled use of letter position is established earlier during reading development than is widely assumed.