Does Bullying Victimization Suppress IQ? The Effects of Bullying Victimization on IQ in Iraqi and African American Adolescents: A Traumatology Perspective

This study explored the effects of bullying victimization (BV), as a Type II traumatic stressor, on intelligence quotient (IQ), posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and complex PTSD symptoms. Participants were 390 African American and Iraqi refugee adolescents. Measures of BV, cumulative life trauma, PTSD, discrimination, and IQ were administered. Correlational, multilevel regression, and path analyses were conducted. BV, independent of cumulative trauma, and discrimination were found to have significant direct effects on increased PTSD symptoms and significant direct and indirect negative effects on perceptual reasoning, processing speed, and working memory. BV was also associated with increases in the discrepancy between perceptual reasoning and verbal comprehension. The implications of these results for the prevention and treatment of bullying victims are discussed.     

Engineering Ethics: Looking Back, Looking Forward

The eight pieces constituting this Meeting Report are summaries of presentations made during a panel session at the 2011 Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE) annual meeting held between March 3rd and 6th in Cincinnati. Lisa Newton organized the session and served as chair. The panel of eight consisted both of pioneers in the field and more recent arrivals. It covered a range of topics from how the field has developed to where it should be going, from identification of issues needing further study to problems of training the next generation of engineers and engineering-ethics scholars.     

Alcohol use among partner violent adults: Reviewing recent literature to inform intervention

Intimate partner violence is widely recognized as a public health problem. Although intervention programs exist for partner violent persons, there are discrepancies in the literature regarding the effectiveness of such programs. Current standards of treatment have been depicted as “one-size-fits-all,” lending credence to the notion that program goals are admirable, but incongruent with the heterogeneous needs, such as substance abuse treatment, of their clientele. This review of recent literature describes the role of alcohol in adult IPV commission. The author used two databases (Web of Science and PsycInfo), which retrieved 50 unduplicated articles published between January 2009 and April 2012. Eight articles were ultimately identified for further examination. The prevalence of alcohol within partner violence commission is presented in detail as well as future research and practice implications.     

Impression making by résumé layout: Its impact on the probability of being shortlisted

This study examines the effect of the graphical layout of résumés on the shortlisting of applicants for employment interviews. Previous research has investigated the effect of bad printing quality, but this research has explored the impact of a creative layout of résumés of equal quality. A sample of 90 respondents (half professional recruiters, half students) was asked to rank 12 candidates applying for one vacancy. All 12 candidates were presented an equal number of times in three different layout formats—formal on white paper, coloured, and “creative” design. Results suggest that the graphical design may have a substantial impact on the likelihood of being shortlisted, where formal designs were preferred over the “creative” layouts. Professional recruiters were only slightly less influenced by the layout than nonprofessionals. Implications for employers and jobseekers are discussed.     

Infants hierarchically organize memory representations

Throughout development, working memory is subject to capacity limits that severely constrain short‐term storage. However, adults can massively expand the total amount of remembered information by grouping items into chunks. Although infants also have been shown to chunk objects in memory, little is known regarding the limits of this ability. In particular, it remains unknown whether infants can create more complex memory hierarchies, binding representations of chunks into still larger chunks in recursive fashion. Here we tested the limits of early chunking, first measuring the number of items infants can bind into a single chunk and the number of chunks infants can maintain concurrently, and then, critically, whether infants can embed chunked representations into larger units. We tested 14‐month‐old infants' memory for hidden objects using a manual search task in which we manipulated memory load (the number of objects infants saw hidden) and the chunking cues provided. We found that infants are limited in the number of items they can chunk and in the number of chunks they can remember. However, we also found that infants can bind representations of chunks into ‘superchunks’. These results suggest that hierarchically organizing information strongly affects working memory, starting in infancy.     

The Relation of Lifetime Cognitive Activity and Lifetime Access to Resources to Late-life Cognitive Function in Older African Americans

ABSTRACT

Research in older Caucasians has demonstrated that cognitive activity is related to cognitive function in late adulthood. Knowledge of this association is limited in older minority populations. We examined the relation of cognitive activity and access to cognitive resources, with cognitive function in a group of 108 older African Americans. We constructed two scales to measure the frequency of cognitive activity and the presence of resources that promote cognitive activity during early and late life. Both measures had high internal consistency and the cognitive activity scale had adequate temporal stability over a 4-week interval. In analyses that controlled for age and education, more frequent lifetime cognitive activity was related to current cognitive function, but lifetime cognitive resources only approached significance. The results suggest that both measures are psychometrically sound in a minority population and that lifetime cognitive activity may contribute to current cognitive function in African Americans.     

Causal attributions from adolescence through adulthood

Attributional reasoning for events varying on level of informational ambiguity and context (relationship, achievement) were examined from adolescence through older adulthood. Participants rated the degree to which a cause of an event was a function of the primary character, situation, or a combination of these; wrote essays assessing underlying reasons for attributions; and responded to ego level, attributional style, and intolerance for ambiguity questionnaires. Older age groups made more interactive (relativistic) attributional ratings than did younger age groups for ambiguous events. Compared to adult and middle-aged adults, older women demonstrated a drop in dialectical attributional reasoning as assessed by the essays. Ego level, tolerance for ambiguity, and verbal ability predicted more dialectical attributional reasoning above and beyond the effects of age.     

Does working memory change with age? The interactions of concurrent articulation with the effects of word length and acoustic confusion

ABSTRACT

The effects of acoustic confusion (phonological similarity), word length, and concurrent articulation (articulatory suppression) are cited as support for Working Memory's phonological loop component (e.g., Baddeley, 2000 Baddeley, A. D. 2000. The phonological loop and irrelevant speech effect: Some comments on Neath. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 7: 544–549. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 7, 544). Research has focused on younger adults, with no studies examining whether concurrent articulation reduces the word length and acoustic confusion effects among older adults. In the current study, younger and older adults were given lists of similar and dissimilar letters (Experiment 1) or long and short words (Experiment 2) for immediate serial reconstruction of order. Items were presented visually or auditorily, with or without concurrent articulation. As expected, younger and older adults demonstrated effects of acoustic confusion, word length, and concurrent articulation. Further, concurrent articulation reduced the effects of acoustic confusion and word length equally for younger and older adults. This suggests that age-related differences occur in overall performance, but do not reflect an age-related deficiency in the functioning of the phonological loop component of working memory.     

Do lesbian women have a better body image? Comparisons with heterosexual women and model of lesbian-specific factors

Body dissatisfaction is prevalent among women but may be less common among lesbian women. Although research trends toward this conclusion when samples are well-matched and body mass index (BMI) is controlled for, many studies do not exhibit these characteristics. Furthermore, few studies have examined sociocultural contributors to group differences. I addressed limitations of past research with a large community sample of lesbian (n = 479) and heterosexual (n = 400) women. I contrasted the two sexual identity groups on several body dissatisfaction measures, and tested theoretically derived relationships between lesbian-specific cultural factors and body dissatisfaction. As predicted, lesbian women reported lower body dissatisfaction than did heterosexual women on three of four measures, and expressed a larger ideal body size. A structural equation model of lesbian-specific risk and protective factors for body dissatisfaction did not reveal significant relationships. This study represents a first attempt to model culturally specific influences on lesbian body image.