Teaching minority high school students to recruit helpers to attain personal and educational goals

Recruiting help from mentors and other potential helpers is a promising strategy for helping disadvantaged and minority youths meet their personal and educational goals. Three African-American high school seniors participated in a project designed to evaluate the effectiveness of training procedures that would allow them to ask for help in attaining educational and other personal goals. A behavioral training procedure that included instructional materials, role-play practice, praise, and feedback was used. Targeted skills included goal setting and 30 responses involved in the process of meeting with a potential helper. Role-play situations were used to evaluate participants' help-recruiting skills before and after training. Participants increased their help-recruiting skills from an average of 38% during baseline, to an average of 75% after training. Self-reported measures of goal attainment suggested that the students benefited from the training. Implications for mentoring programs designed to increase minority students' opportunities to reach educational goals were discussed.     

Lexical ambiguity, semantic context, and visual word recognition.

Some alternative hypotheses about the recognition of ambiguous words are considered. According to the selective-access hypothesis, prior semantic context biases people to access one meaning of an ambiguous word rather than another in lexical memory during recognition. In contrast, the nonselectiveaccess hypothesis states that all meanings of the word are accessed regardless of the context. We tested certain versions of these hypotheses by having students decide whether selected strings of letters were English words. The stimuli included test sequnces of three words in which the second word had two distinct possible meanings, whereas the first and third words were related to these meanings in various ways. When the first and third words were related to the same meaning of the ambiguous second word (e.g., SAVE-BANK-MONEY), the reaction time to recognize the third word decreased. But when the first and third words were related to different meanings of the second word (e.g., RIVER-BANK-MONEY), the reaction time for the third word was not reliably different from a control sequence with unrelated words. These and other data favor the selective-access hypothesis. Selective access to lexical memory is discussed in relation to models of word recognition.     

Cardiac autonomic reactivity and recovery in predicting carotid atherosclerosis: the cardiovascular risk in young Finns study.

The present study examined the association of cardiac autonomic task-induced reactivity and recovery to preclinical atherosclerosis. Thirty-three men and 33 women aged 24-39 years participated in the ongoing epidemiological Cardiovascular Risk in Young Finns study. The authors measured heart rate (HR), respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), and preejection period (PEP) during the mental arithmetic and speech tasks in 1999. Carotid atherosclerosis was assessed by measuring the thickness of the common carotid artery intima-media complex (IMT) with ultrasound in 2001. Higher HR, RSA, and PEP reactivity were associated with lower IMT values even after adjusting for cardiovascular risk factors (lipid levels, obesity, and blood pressure). In addition, better HR recovery after the mental arithmetic task was associated with lower IMT values, and this association persisted after all adjustments. Thus, higher task-induced cardiac autonomic reactivity and better HR recovery were related to less preclinical atherosclerosis. The authors concluded that cardiac pattern of reactivity and quick recovery may be associated with better cardiovascular health, and therefore all reactivity occurring in challenging situations should not automatically be considered as potentially pathological.