Like a Virgin…Again?: Secondary Virginity as an Ongoing Gendered Social Construction

Secondary virginity—a sexually-initiated person’s deliberate decision to refrain from intimate encounters for a set period of time and to refer to that decision as a kind of virginity (rather than “mere” abstinence)—has largely eluded sociological scrutiny, despite its increasing popularity as a concept and practice among American youth. This study explores beliefs and experiences regarding secondary virginity, drawing on qualitative interviews with 61 socially diverse women and men, of whom four were avowed secondary virgins, five likened their experiences to a second virginity/virginity loss, and 16 had phenomenologically similar experiences which they did not frame in terms of virginity. Respondents who endorsed the concept of secondary virginity were disproportionately White conservative Christian women born after 1972. Secondary virginity reveals the social construction of gendered sexuality and the heterosexual imaginary as it reinforces privilege along gender, racial, religious, and sexual dimensions.     

Peer-facilitated cognitive dissonance versus healthy weight eating disorders prevention: A randomized comparison

Research supports the efficacy of both cognitive dissonance (CD) and healthy weight (HW) eating disorders prevention, and indicates that CD can be delivered by peer-facilitators, which facilitates dissemination. This study investigated if peer-facilitators can deliver HW when it is modified for their use and extended follow-up of peer-facilitated CD as compared to previous trials. Based on pilot data, we modified HW (MHW) to facilitate peer delivery, elaborate benefits of the healthy-ideal, and place greater emphasis on consuming nutrient dense foods. Female sorority members (N = 106) were randomized to either two 2-h sessions of CD or MHW. Participants completed assessment pre- and post-intervention, and at 8-week, 8-month, and 14-month follow-up. Consistent with hypotheses, CD decreased negative affect, thin-ideal internalization, and bulimic pathology to a greater degree post-intervention. Both CD and MHW reduced negative affect, internalization, body dissatisfaction, dietary restraint, and bulimic pathology at 14 months.     

Experiencing Body Worlds: Voyeurism, Education, or Enlightenment?

Until the advent of plastinated cadavers, few outside the medical professions have had firsthand experience with human corpses. Such opportunities are now available at the Body Worlds exhibits of Gunther von Hagens. After an overview of these exhibits, we explore visitor responses as revealed in comment books available upon exiting the exhibit. Cultural, philosophical, and religious issues raised in the comments serve as a microcosm of society at large. The conclusion considers the challenge of such exhibits in introducing the public to science education, notes the image of the body as machine-so prevalent in the West-reflected in visitor comments, and finds hope that the exhibits promote, for many visitors, a sense of community among all humankind.     

Testing beyond words: Using tests to enhance visuospatial map learning

Psychological research shows that learning can be powerfully enhanced through testing, but this finding has so far been confined to memory tasks requiring verbal responses. We explored whether testing can enhance learning of visuospatial information in maps. Fifty subjects each studied two maps, one through conventional study, and the other through computer-prompted tests. For the tests, the subjects were repeatedly presented with the same map with one feature deleted (e.g., a road or a river), and they tried to covertly recall the missing feature and its location. Subjects’ map drawings after 30 min were significantly better for maps learned through tests in comparison with maps learned through the same amount of time devoted to conventional study. These results suggest that the testing effect is not limited to the types of memory that require discrete, verbal responses, and that utilizing covert retrievals may allow the effect to be extended to a variety of complex, nonverbal learning tasks.     

Enhancing learning and retarding forgetting: Choices and consequences

Our research on learning enhancement has been focusing on the consequences for learning and forgetting of some of the more obvious and concrete choices that arise in instruction, including questions such as these: How does spacing of practice affect retention of information over significant retention intervals (up to 1 year)? Do spacing effects generalize beyond recall of verbal materials? Is feedback needed to promote learning, and must it be immediate? Although retrieval practice has been found to enhance learning in comparison with additional study, does it actually reduce the rate of forgetting? Can retrieval practice effects be extended to nonverbal materials? We suggest that as we begin to find answers to these questions, it should become possible for cognitive psychology to offer nonobvious advice that can be applied in a variety of instructional contexts to facilitate learning and reduce forgetting.     

Enculturated chimpanzees imitate rationally

Human infants imitate others' actions 'rationally': they copy a demonstrator's action when that action is freely chosen, but less when it is forced by some constraint (Gergely, Bekkering & Király, 2002). We investigated whether enculturated chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) also imitate rationally. Using Gergely and colleagues' (2002) basic procedure, a human demonstrator operated each of six apparatuses using an unusual body part (he pressed it with his forehead or foot, or sat on it). In the Hands Free condition he used this unusual means even though his hands were free, suggesting a free choice. In the Hands Occupied condition he used the unusual means only because his hands were occupied, suggesting a constrained or forced choice. Like human infants, chimpanzees imitated the modeled action more often in the Hands Free than in the Hands Occupied condition. Enculturated chimpanzees thus have some understanding of the rationality of others' intentional actions, and use this understanding when imitating others.     

Stimulus exposure and gaze bias: A further test of the gaze cascade model

We tested predictions derived from the gaze cascade model of preference decision making (Shimojo, Simion, Shimojo, & Scheier, 2003; Simion & Shimojo, 2006, 2007). In each trial, participants’ eye movements were monitored while they performed an eight-alternative decision task in which four of the items in the array were preexposed prior to the trial. Replicating previous findings, we found a gaze bias toward the chosen item prior to the response. However, contrary to the prediction of the gaze cascade model, preexposure of stimuli decreased, rather than increased, the magnitude of the gaze bias in preference decisions. Furthermore, unlike the prediction of the model, preexposure did not affect the likelihood of an item being chosen, and the pattern of looking behavior in preference decisions and on a nonpreference control task was remarkably similar. Implications of the present findings in multistage models of decision making are discussed.     

Infants use shared experience to interpret pointing gestures

We investigated whether 1‐year‐old infants use their shared experience with an adult to determine the meaning of a pointing gesture. In the first study, after two adults had each shared a different activity with the infant, one of the adults pointed to a target object. Eighteen‐ but not 14‐month‐olds responded appropriately to the pointing gesture based on the particular activity they had previously shared with that particular adult. In the second study, 14‐month‐olds were successful in a simpler procedure in which the pointing adult either had or had not shared a relevant activity with the infant prior to the pointing. Infants just beginning to learn language thus already show a complex understanding of the pragmatics of cooperative communication in which shared experience with particular individuals plays a crucial role.     

Working memory constraints on the processing of syntactic ambiguity.

We propose a model that explains how the working-memory capacity of a comprehender can constrain syntactic parsing and thereby affect the processing of syntactic ambiguities. The model's predictions are examined in four experiments that measure the reading times for two constructions that contain a temporary syntactic ambiguity. An example of the syntactic ambiguity is The soldiers warned about the dangers . . . ; the verb warned may either be the main verb, in which case soldiers is the agent; or the verb warned may introduce a relative clause, in which case soldiers is the patient of warned rather than the agent, as in The soldiers warned about the dangers conducted the midnight raid. The model proposes that both alternative interpretations of warned are initially activated. However, the duration for which both interpretations are maintained depends, in part, on the reader's working-memory capacity, which can be assessed by the Reading Span task (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980). The word-by-word reading times indicate that all subjects do additional processing after encountering an ambiguity, suggesting that they generate both representations. Furthermore, readers with larger working-memory capacities maintain both representations for some period of time (several words), whereas readers with smaller working-memory capacities revert to maintaining only the more likely representation.