Same-Sex and Other-Sex Peer Reports: Unique Contributors to Understanding Children’s School Adjustment

The present study proposed to understand how same-sex and other-sex peer nominations relate differently to teacher reports of children’s behaviors and measures of children’s friendships. Students provided peer nominations, mutual friend data, and social network data. Teachers rated students’ antisocial behavior and social competence. As expected, other-sex peer social preference scores predicted teacher ratings of antisocial behavior, while same-sex peer social preference scores predicted data on friendships and social groups. Unexpectedly, both same and other sex peer nominations predicted children’s teacher-rated social competence. Findings suggest that other-sex peers offer a unique perspective on children’s social behavior that is neither superfluous nor unimportant to understanding children’s psychosocial adjustment.     

EXPRESSIVISM AND MORAL CERTITUDE

Michael Smith has recently argued that non-cognitivists are unable to accommodate crucial structural features of moral belief, and in particular that non-cognitivists have trouble accounting for subjects' certitude with respect to their moral beliefs. James Lenman and Michael Ridge have independently constructed 'ecumenical' versions of non-cognitivism, intended to block this objection. We argue that these responses do not work. If ecumenical non-cognitivism, a hybrid view which incorporates both non-cognitivist and cognitivist elements, fails to meet Smith's challenge, it is unlikely that 'purer' and more familiar versions of non-cognitivism will succeed.     

Antecedents of Gender Harassment: An Analysis of Person and Situation Factors

Two laboratory studies examined the impact of person and situation factors in the prediction of gender harassment. Male undergraduates from a mid-sized Midwestern university in the U.S. were recruited based on an assessment of sexist attitudes. It was predicted that, across two studies, characteristics of one’s personality (sexist attitudes) and situational characteristics (sexual priming and masculine identity threat) would produce unique and interactive effects in the prediction of gender harassment, defined behaviorally as the number of sexist questions asked of women during a mock job interview, and cognitively as negative evaluations of the female interviewee. Across both studies, results support the predictions that both person and situation factors are important to understanding gender harassment.     

Some surprising findings on the involvement of the parietal lobe in human memory

The posterior parietal lobe is known to play some role in a far-flung list of mental processes: linking vision to action (saccadic eye movements, reaching, grasping), attending to visual space, numerical calculation, and mental rotation. Here, we review findings from humans and monkeys that illuminate an untraditional function of this region: memory. Our review draws on neuroimaging findings that have repeatedly identified parietal lobe activations associated with short-term or working memory and episodic memory. We also discuss recent neuropsychological findings showing that individuals with parietal lobe damage exhibit both working memory and long-term memory deficits. These deficits are not ubiquitous; they are only evident under certain retrieval demands. Our review elaborates on these findings and evaluates various theories about the mechanistic role of the posterior parietal lobe in memory. The available data point towards the conclusion that the posterior parietal lobe plays an important role in memory retrieval irrespective of elapsed time. However, the available data do not support simple dichotomies such as recall versus recognition, working versus long-term memory. We conclude by formalizing several open questions that are intended to encourage future research in this rapidly developing area of memory research.     

Reading instruction and remediation with the aid of computer speech

In this paper, we describe the application of new computer and speech synthesis technologies for reading instruction. Stories are presented on the computer screen, and readers may designate words or parts of words that they cannot read for immediate speech feedback. The important contingency between speech sounds and their corresponding letter patterns is emphasized by displaying the letter patterns in reverse video as they are spoken. Speech feedback is provided by an advanced text-to-speech synthesizer (DECtalk). Intelligibility data are presented, showing that DECtalk can be understood almost as well as natural human speech by both normal adults and reading disabled children. Preliminary data from 26 disabled readers indicate that there are significant benefits of speech feedback for reading comprehension and word recognition, and that children enjoy reading with the system.     

Farm stressors

The first section of this paper examines stressors in farm environments. The literature discussed concerns questionnaire surveys of general farm stressors, familial stressors in farm environments, such as role incongruence and conflict, and extrafamilial farm stressors. The discussion of extrafamilial stressors emphasizes financial stressors and the current farm financial crisis. Based on the implications of the farm stressor literature, the second section of the paper considers directions that community psychologists and others might take in working in farm areas. These directions are considered in terms of different types of programs aimed at preventing or alleviating farm financial stress.     

Implementing a long-term computerized remedial reading program with synthetic speech feedback: Hardware,software, and real-world issues

This paper discusses hardware choices, software developments, implementation issues, and preliminary results from an ongoing long-term remedial reading study. Reading-disabled children read books on microcomputers linked to speech synthesizers, obtaining speech feedback on difficult words at whole-word, syllable, or subsyllable levels of segmentation. Word-recognition ability and attitude about reading improved for children using the system. In addition, segmented feedback especially benefited phonological word-decoding skills for most of the children.