Dancing is belonging! How social networks mediate the effect of a dance intervention on students' sense of belonging to their classroom

What does it take to feel you belong? Using a sample of 606 students in 30 classrooms, with 15 classrooms participating in a school‐based dance intervention, we examined intrapsychic and extrapsychic sources of social belonging using social network analysis. Whereas outdegree (the number of outgoing liking nominations to classmates) served as a proxy variable for students' active acceptance of others, indegree (the number of ingoing liking nominations from other peers) served as a proxy variable for the passive acceptance by others. Both measures should account for changes in students' sense of belonging to their classroom. Multilevel longitudinal mediation analyses supported our predictions—increased belonging related to increasing acceptance by others and of others, which were experienced by students participating in the dance intervention for a year (vs. a non‐treated control group). We discuss our findings within the current debate on the use of distal variables to explain intrapsychic constructs.     

The Moral Problem of Risk Impositions: A Survey of the Literature

This paper surveys the current philosophical discussion of the ethics of risk imposition, placing it in the context of relevant work in psychology, economics and social theory. The central philosophical problem starts from the observation that it is not practically possible to assign people individual rights not to be exposed to risk, as virtually all activity imposes some risk on others. This is the ‘problem of paralysis’. However, the obvious alternative theory that exposure to risk is justified when its total benefits exceed its total costs faces the standard distributional challenges of consequentialism. Forms of contractualism have been proposed as a solution, but how exactly such theories can be formulated remains problematic, especially when confronted with the difficult cases of mass, novel, risk such as climate change.     

The Cambridge Car Memory Test: A task matched in format to the Cambridge Face Memory Test, with norms, reliability, sex differences, dissociations from face memory, and expertise effects

Many research questions require a within-class object recognition task matched for general cognitive requirements with a face recognition task. If the object task also has high internal reliability, it can improve accuracy and power in group analyses (e.g., mean inversion effects for faces vs. objects), individual-difference studies (e.g., correlations between certain perceptual abilities and face/object recognition), and case studies in neuropsychology (e.g., whether a prosopagnosic shows a face-specific or object-general deficit). Here, we present such a task. Our Cambridge Car Memory Test (CCMT) was matched in format to the established Cambridge Face Memory Test, requiring recognition of exemplars across view and lighting change. We tested 153 young adults (93 female). Results showed high reliability (Cronbach's alpha = .84) and a range of scores suitable both for normal-range individual-difference studies and, potentially, for diagnosis of impairment. The mean for males was much higher than the mean for females. We demonstrate independence between face memory and car memory (dissociation based on sex, plus a modest correlation between the two), including where participants have high relative expertise with cars. We also show that expertise with real car makes and models of the era used in the test significantly predicts CCMT performance. Surprisingly, however, regression analyses imply that there is an effect of sex per se on the CCMT that is not attributable to a stereotypical male advantage in car expertise.     

Children and Adolescents with Medically Unexplained Symptoms: A Systematic Review of the Literature

Abstract

Medically unexplained symptoms (MUS) in children and adolescents are confounding and concerning for patients, parents, and health care practitioners. Our goal was to review and summarize the literature for family therapists working with a diverse, challenging patient population coping with MUS. A search of multiple databases from 1994 to 2018 was conducted using MUS and related terms. The literature was then organized into subcategories based on its relevance to family therapists, particularly medical family therapists collaborating with primary care physicians. We conclude with a discussion about gaps in the literature and suggestions for clinical management.     

Patently controversial: markets,morals, and the President's proposal for embryonic stem cell research

This essay considers the implications of President George W. Bush's proposal for human embryonic stem cell research. Through the perspective of patent law, privacy, and informed consent, we elucidate the ongoing controversy about the moral standing of human embryonic stem cells and their derivatives and consider how the inconsistencies in the president's proposal will affect clinical practice and research.     

Are the times changing? An analysis of sex-role prejudice

Sex bias was studied through evaluation of articles, in a technique modeled upon Goldberg's. Goldberg (1968) indicated that college women evaluated an article more positively when it was ascribed to a male rather than to a female author. The primary purpose of the present research was to examine a diverse sample, including subjects of both sexes and varying ages, and to determine whether sex-role attitudes have changed over time. Therefore, 64 students at the University of California, Santa Cruz, 64 students from San Jose State University, and 96 nonstudents from the San Francisco—Monterey Bay areas each evaluated six articles on several dimensions. Packets were counterbalanced for ascribed sex of author and sex of topic (male, female, or neutral). An analysis of variance yielded significant main effects for sex of subject and sex of topic. Further analyses yielded complex interactions which appeared to be primarily due to the responses of young nonstudents. The absence of an overall sex of author effect and the general pattern of data are interpreted in terms of the generalizability of research findings.Some of the results reported in this paper were presented in a symposium on sex-role research methodology at the annual meeting of the Western Psychological Association, Los Angeles, April 1976.     

The Other Accent Effect in Talker Recognition: Now You See It,Now You Don't

The existence of the Language Familiarity Effect (LFE), where talkers of a familiar language are easier to identify than talkers of an unfamiliar language, is well-documented and uncontroversial. However, a closely related phenomenon known as the Other Accent Effect (OAE), where accented talkers are more difficult to recognize, is less well understood. There are several possible explanations for why the OAE exists, but to date, little data exist to adjudicate differences between them. Here, we begin to address this issue by directly comparing listeners’ recognition of talkers who speak in different types of accents, and by examining both the LFE and OAE in the same set of listeners. Specifically, Canadian English listeners were tested on their ability to recognize talkers within four types of voice line-ups: Canadian English talkers, Australian English talkers, Mandarin-accented English talkers, and Mandarin talkers. We predicted that the OAE would be present for talkers of Mandarin-accented English but not for talkers of Australian English—which is precisely what we observed. We also observed a disconnect between listeners’ confidence and performance across different types of accents; that is, listeners performed equally poorly with Mandarin and Mandarin-accented talkers, but they were more confident with their performance with the latter group of talkers. The present findings set the stage for further investigation into the nature of the OAE by exploring a range of potential explanations for the effect, and introducing important implications for forensic scientists’ evaluation of ear witness testimony.