Construing action abstractly and blurring social distinctions: implications for perceiving homogeneity among,but also empathizing with and helping,others

Most people's actions serve goals that, defined abstractly enough, are quite similar to one another. The authors thus proposed, and found, that construing action in abstract (vs. concrete) terms relates to perceiving greater similarity among persons both within and across different social groups (Studies 1-3). By fostering perspective taking, viewing action abstractly also related to empathizing with and expressing willingness to help nonstigmatized and stigmatized others (e.g., AIDS patients; Studies 3-5) and to donating money to help those in need (Study 6). These findings held when controlling for ideological, motivational, and broad personality variables. Abstract action construals, then, appear to blur social distinctions, fostering perspective taking and empathy on the one hand but also perceptions of group homogeneity on the other.     

Dissociating familiarity from recollection in human recognition memory: Different rates of forgetting over short retention intervals

Two functionally distinct forms of recognition memory have been identified in human and nonhuman species—the ability to recollect qualitative information about previous events, and the ability to differentiate between familiar and novel stimuli. Separate dual-process theories have been developed in the animal and human literatures to account for these findings. However, it is not clear whether these theories describe the same two underlying memory processes. On the basis of animal studies of medial temporal lobe function, familiarity is expected to exhibit disproportionately fast forgetting compared with recollection over short retention intervals. We tested this prediction in healthy human subjects by examining recognition forgetting rates across a range of 8–32 intervening items and found significant forgetting in the accuracy of familiarity-based discriminations and no evidence of forgetting in the accuracy of recollection-based discriminations. In agreement with the results from nonhuman species, the present results indicate that item familiarity decreases more rapidly than recollection over short retention intervals.     

Measuring socioeconomic status: reliability and preliminary validity for different approaches

This study investigated issues related to commonly used socioeconomic status (SES) measures in 140 participants from three cities (Atlanta, Boston, and Toronto) in two countries (United States and Canada). Measures of SES were two from the United States (four-factor Hollingshead scale, Nakao and Treas scale) and one from Canada (Blishen, Carroll, and Moore scale). Reliability was examined both within (interrater agreement) and across (intermeasure agreement) measures. Interrater reliability and classification agreement was high for the total sample (ranger = .86 to .91), as were intermeasure correlations and classification agreement (range r = .81 to .88). The weakest agreement across measures was found when families had one wage earner who was female. Validity data for these SES measures with academic and intellectual measures also were obtained. Some support for a simplified approach to measuring SES was found. Implications of these findings for the use of SES in social and behavioral science research are discussed.     

Contextual insensitivity in schizophrenic language processing: evidence from lexical ambiguity

The authors investigated whether contextual failures in schizophrenia are due to deficits in the detection of context or the inhibition of contextually irrelevant information. Eighteen schizophrenia patients and 24 nonpsychiatric controls were tested via a cross-modal semantic priming task. Participants heard sentences containing homonyms and made lexical decisions about visual targets related to the homonyms' dominant or subordinate meanings. When sentences moderately biased subordinate meanings (e.g., the animal enclosure meaning of pen), schizophrenia patients showed priming of dominant targets (e.g., paper) and subordinate targets (e.g., pig). In contrast, controls showed priming only of subordinate targets. When contexts strongly biased subordinate meanings, both groups showed priming only of subordinate targets. The results suggest that inhibitory deficits rather than context detection deficits underlie contextual failures in schizophrenia.     

The Relation of Perceived Neighborhood Danger to Childhood Aggression: A Test of Mediating Mechanisms

In the current study, two mediational mechanisms, parenting practices and children's beliefs about aggression, were hypothesized to account for the relationship between perceived neighborhood danger and childhood aggression. Using structural equation modeling, data were analyzed from an inner-city school-based sample of 732 predominantly African American 5th graders. Results suggested that perceived neighborhood danger was associated with strong positive beliefs about aggression, which in turn was associated with high levels of aggression. The hypothesized mediating role of parenting practices (restrictive discipline, parental monitoring, and parental involvement) on the relation between perceived neighborhood danger and child aggression was not supported. However, the current findings suggest that children's positive beliefs about aggression mediated the relationship between restrictive discipline and aggression. Directions for future research are discussed.     

The name game: using retrieval practice to improve the learning of names

In medium-sized groups such as classes, it is often desirable that the members become acquainted with one another. Toward this end, various methods of introducing group members are often used, with only anecdotal evidence for their effectiveness. The name game is a method for introducing group members that is based on the principles of retrieval practice. The authors compared 2 versions of the name game with a widely used introductory method--pairwise introductions--and found that the name game participants were much better at remembering one another's name after 30 min, 2 weeks, and 11 months. A second experiment tested the contribution of retrieval practice by comparing 2 versions of the name game with a procedure that was matched for number of repetitions and time spent on the task. Again, the name games were superior.     

Young children's use of functional information to categorize artifacts: three factors that matter

Three experiments addressed factors that might influence whether or not young children take into account function, as opposed to overall appearance or shape, when they extend the names of novel artifacts. Experiment 1 showed that 4-year-olds more often extend a name on the basis of a demonstrated function when that function provides a plausible causal account of perceptible object structure. Experiment 2 showed that they more often extend a name by function when they respond slowly, and hence thoughtfully. Experiment 3 demonstrated that they are more likely to take function into account when they extend names than when they judge similarities. Comparisons of lexical and non-lexical conditions in younger children failed to show any differences. Overall, the findings suggest that by 4 years of age, children may learn names as labels for novel artifact kinds rather than perceptual classes, and that the processes by which they categorize may be mindful and reflective, as in adults.     

Bilingualism affects picture naming but not picture classification

Bilinguals named pictures in their dominant language more slowly (and with more errors) than did monolinguals. In contrast, bilinguals named the same pictures as quickly as did monolinguals on the fifth presentation (in Experiment 2) and classified them (as human made or natural) as quickly and accurately as did monolinguals (in Experiment 1). In addition, bilinguals retrieved English picture names more quickly if they knew the name in both Spanish and English (on the basis of a translation test that bilinguals completed after the timed tasks), and monolingual response times for the same materials suggested that this finding was not obtained simply because names that were easier to translate were easier in general. These findings suggest that bilinguals differ from monolinguals at a postconceptual processing level, that implicit activation of lexical representations in the nontarget language can facilitate retrieval in the target language, and that being bilingual is analogous to having a lexicon full of lower frequency words, relative to monolinguals.