Testing the effects of social anxiety disorder on friendship quality across gender and ethnicity

Previous research suggests that social anxiety disorder (SAD) has a specific relationship with impairment in friendship quality; however, potential moderators of this relationship have not been tested. The current study examines whether the specific effect of SAD on friendship quality is stable or varies across gender and ethnicity in a large epidemiological dataset. Results indicate that the underlying construct of friendship quality differed slightly but significantly between men and women; as a result, effects of SAD were tested in men and women separately. After partially constraining friendship quality across ethnic groups, our results indicated that the relationship between SAD and friendship quality remained robust in all groups. In addition to replicating the finding that SAD specifically relates to perceived friendship quality, the current study highlights the need to test whether underlying constructs such as friendship quality are consistent across the groups that make up heterogeneous samples.     

Abnormal optokinetic and perceptual span parameters in cerebellar-vestibular dysfunction and learning disabilities or dyslexia

To measure the ocular fixation and sequential scanning dysfunction assumed responsible for the visual reading symptoms which characterize dyslexia or learning disabilities, an optokinetically based tracking method was devised. This method quantitatively demonstrated significantly reduced fixation, tracking, and perceptual or visual-span scores as well as "movement illusions" for 70 cerebellar-vestibular dysfunctioning persons with learning disabilities vs 70 controls. Such data tended to validate the hypothesis that cerebellar-vestibular-determined fixation and tracking mechanisms predispose dyslexic or learning disabled individuals to visual reading disorders. Moreover, a newly revised method is presented which may prove useful in rapidly screening and diagnosing cerebellar-vestibular-determined reading and learning disorders from those of other origins. Additional independent studies using significantly larger samples and asymptomatic or "normal" controls are required for further validation and development of the method.     

Six Approaches to the Assessment of Career Maturity

This article discusses the construct of career maturity and briefly reviews research that identifies factors associated with this construct. Brief reviews of 6 instruments designed to measure career maturity are included: The Career Maturity Inventory (Crites, 1978a, 1978b), the Career Development Inventory (Super, Thompson, Lindeman, Jordaan, & Myers, 1988), the Adult Career Concerns Inventory (Super, Thompson, & Lindeman, 1988), the Assessment of Career Decision Making (Harren, 1979; Buck & Daniels, 1985), the Career Beliefs Inventory (Krumboltz, 1994), and the Career Decision Scale (Osipow, Carney, Winer, Yanico, Koschier, 1976). Issues associated with the assessment of career maturity are also discussed.     

Performance boosts in the classroom: Stereotype endorsement and prejudice moderate stereotype lift

The present study (N = 293) examined whether stereotype endorsement and prejudice moderate stereotype lift (i.e., a performance boost caused by the salience of a negative out-group stereotype in the testing situation). The stereotype in the focus of inquiry was the belief that immigrant students have lower intellectual ability than native students. French native high school students performed an intellectual test in a condition of low stereotype salience (the test was presented as assessing individual differences) or in a condition of high stereotype salience (the test was presented as assessing group differences between African immigrants and native students). As expected, results indicated that native students high in stereotype endorsement and those high in prejudice performed better in the high than in the low stereotype salience condition, whereas those low on these constructs did not. By identifying two moderators of stereotype lift, this study sheds new light on the achievement gap between immigrant and native students in educational institutions.     

Leftists’ and rightists’ IQ as a function of stereotype salience

This study examined the intellectual performance of leftists (or liberals) and rightists (or conservatives) when a stereotype about members of a disadvantaged outgroup (immigrants) is salient. Building on system-justification theory (SJT) and the motivated social cognition approach of political conservatism, it was predicted that when the stereotype about immigrant students’ underachievement is salient in academic settings, leftist students would perform worse, whereas rightist students would perform better than in a control condition. In two samples, Swiss native students were first reminded (or not) of the stereotype and then performed a difficult intellectual test. The results yielded support for the predictions. These findings illustrate how different ideological motives (system-challenging vs. system-justifying) might influence performance among leftist and rightist students.     

Preliminary evidence for a fronto‐parietal dysfunction in able‐bodied participants with a desire for limb amputation

Background. Reports of able‐bodied participants with the persisting desire for limb amputation raise legal and ethical questions that are partly due to insufficient empirical knowledge about the condition. Here, we searched for potential neurological mechanisms in participants with desire for limb amputation in order to help develop adequate nosological classifications, diagnosis, and treatment. Methods. Semi‐structured interviews were carried out with 20 participants who self‐identified themselves as able‐bodied individuals desiring amputation of a limb. Results. The results suggest that amputation desire is not unspecific, but in most cases specific for a circumscribed part of the body. Most frequently affected was the leg, mostly on the left, non‐dominant side. Left‐sidedness and limb specificity was associated with elementary and complex somatosensory disturbances of the affected limb akin to those reported by neurological patients. The most frequent neurological co‐morbidity was migraine headache. Conclusions. These results document the existence of an unusual condition in able‐bodied participants characterized by a person's desire for the amputation of one or more particular limbs. Left‐sidedness, limb specificity and somatosensory disturbances of the affected limb are suggestive of abnormal brain mechanisms in right fronto‐parietal cortex. Based on this association we suggest that desire for limb amputation may be conceptualized as asomatognosia due to disturbed integration of multi‐sensory information of the affected body parts into a coherent cerebral representation of the own body. This suggestion has to be regarded with caution as we did not perform any neurological examination.     

The impact of cultural context on Brazilian adolescents' sexual practices

AIDS prevention research has demonstrated that theoretically driven HIV prevention programs can be tailored to specific cultures. Further, condom self-efficacy and contraceptive self-efficacy scales have been tested in the U.S. and been shown to predict condom and contraceptive use. Results of condom and contraceptive self-efficacy studies have been used to suggest ways to educate and counsel young people to avoid unprotected sex. This paper reports the findings from our research in Salvador, Brazil, using Levinson's Condom Self-Efficacy Scale (CDSE). The data are derived from six focus groups totaling 76 teenagers from three high schools. The focus group discussions explored cultural and psychological issues involved in condom use. Here we report on the gender dynamics of condom use as revealed by these urban Brazilian teenagers. Three focal points for behavioral change are identified: (1) issues of masculinity, (2) issues of femininity, and (3) condom use skills.     

Orientation-selective adaptation to crowded illusory lines

Visual adaptation has been successfully used as a psychophysical tool for studying the functional organisation of visual awareness. It has been shown that orientation-selective adaptation to a grating pattern occurs in crowded conditions. In such conditions, simultaneous presentation of flanking distractors pushes the target stimulus out of conscious perception and severely impairs orientation discrimination in the periphery of the visual field. In the present study, orientation-selective adaptation to illusory lines induced by two line gratings abutting each other with a phase shift was examined in crowded and non-crowded conditions. To rule out the effects of lower level adaptations we used an animation paradigm in which the orientations of the two line gratings were altered repeatedly during adaptation phase without any change in the orientation of the resulting illusory line. Although performance of subjects in reporting the orientation of crowded illusory lines was at chance level, orientation-selective adaptation was preserved for crowded as well as non-crowded adapting targets. Two control experiments demonstrated that adaptation to endpoints of real lines at the location of abutting grating lines had minimal effect on the adaptation to illusory lines; and changes in the configuration of endpoints could not be responsible for better performance when adapting and test stimuli were different. We conclude that a crowding effect occurs after illusory lines have been processed in the visual stream. Since illusory lines seem to be represented at relatively early stages of visual processing (e.g. area V2), adaptation to crowded illusory stimuli suggests that neuronal activation in those early stages is not necessarily correlated with conscious perception.     

Suicide attempts in israel: age by gender analysis of a national emergency departments database

An analysis of all emergency department admissions in Israel classified as an attempted suicide in the years 1996-2002 was done to examine attempted suicide rates by age and gender with particular attention to adolescents and young adults. Gender differences in attempted suicide rates were significant only during adolescence and young adulthood, ages 13 to 26. The highest rate for females was 3 years earlier than the highest rate for males. The results lead to the conclusion that women do not attempt suicide more than men, except for 13-26 year olds.