Gender,Affiliation, and Control in Physician–Patient Encounters

This study investigates the effects of physician gender and communication styles on participant responses to physicians. Participants were 146 mostly low-income students (50% Caucasian, 50% African-American) who each viewed one of four videotapes of physicians varying in communication style (affiliative, controlling) and gender (male, female). The affiliative communication style evoked the greatest levels of participant satisfaction, trust, self-disclosure, and compliance. Physician gender did not significantly affect these variables. Participants' recall of medical information showed an interaction: When the physician was male, participants recalled more when he was controlling than when he was affiliative; when the physician was female, communication style did not affect participant recall. Results suggest that physician communication style is more important than gender in determining patient response.     

"United We Stand, Divided We Fall"! The Protective Function of Self-Stereotyping for Stigmatised Members' Psychological Well-Being

Self-stereotyping is a process by which people who belong to a stigmatised social group tend to describe themselves more with both positive and negative stereotypical personality traits compared to traits that are irrelevant to the ingroup stereotype. A study is presented that shows how self-stereotyping serves to maintain psychological well-being among Southern Italian participants who suffer from an historical social stigma. Following the rejection-identification model ( Branscombe, Schmitt, & Harvey, 1999 ), perceptions of prejudice are directly negatively linked with well-being, but are compensated for via increased identification with the minority group that has a positive impact on psychological well-being. In the present study we propose that the compensatory role of ingroup identification on well-being is completely mediated by minority members' tendency to self-stereotype. A structural equation analysis provided support for this hypothesis. The present results highlight the importance of the self-stereotyping process in maintaining psychological well-being for members of low-status groups.     

Synergistic effects of pain and alcohol use in relation to depressive and anxiety symptoms among Latinos in primary care

Although past work has shown that alcohol use co-occurs with anxiety/depression among Latinos, little work has examined the variables that qualify such associations. The present investigation sought to address whether pain severity (i.e. pain intensity and/or pain-related disability, respectively) moderated relations between hazardous drinking and depressive/anxious arousal symptoms among an economically disadvantaged Latino sample recruited from a primary care medical setting. Participants included 253 adult Latinos (M_age = 38.5 years, SD = 10.8; 86.6% female) who attended a community-based primary care clinic. There was a significant interaction of hazardous drinking with pain intensity in relation to depressive symptoms and significant interactions of hazardous drinking and pain-related disability in relation to depressive and anxious arousal symptoms. Hazardous drinking was associated with more severe depressive/anxious arousal symptoms only when pain intensity/disability was high. This is the first study to demonstrate the moderating role of pain intensity and disability in associations between hazardous drinking and anxiety/depression among Latinos in a primary care medical setting.     

Disentangling Linguistic Modality Effects in Semantic Processing

Sensory systems are essential for perceiving and conceptualizing our semantic knowledge about the world and the way we interact with it. Despite studies reporting neural changes to compensate for the absence of a given sensory modality, studies focusing on the assessment of semantic processing reveal poor performances by deaf individuals when compared with hearing individuals. However, the majority of those studies were not performed in the linguistic modality considered the most adequate to their sensory capabilities (i.e., sign language). Therefore, this exploratory study was developed focusing on linguistic modality effects during semantic retrieval in deaf individuals in comparison with their hearing peers through a category fluency task. Results show a difference in performance between the two linguistic modalities by deaf individuals as well as in the type of linguistic clusters most chosen by participants, suggesting a complex clustering tendency by deaf individuals.     

Acquiring Foreign Language Vocabulary Through Meaningful Linguistic Context: Where is the Limit to Vocabulary Learning?

The present studies examined the effects of varying degrees of unfamiliar vocabulary within written discourse on individuals’ abilities to use linguistic context for the purposes of translation and comprehension (i.e., lexical inferencing). Prose varied in the number of foreign words introduced into each sentence (e.g., 0 through 7 content words per sentence). Furthermore, Krashen’s Input Hypothesis and the Evaluation component of the Involvement Load Hypothesis were tested to determine the degree at which non-comprehensible input hinders the ability of a learner to successfully use linguistic context for translation and comprehension. Results indicated that, as the number of foreign words per sentence, i.e., non-comprehensible input, increased the ability to successfully translate foreign words and create situational models for comprehension begins to decrease especially beyond five unfamiliar words per sentence. This result suggests that there is an optimal level of effectiveness in the use of a linguistic context strategy for learning foreign language vocabulary, but also that there is a limit to the strategy’s effectiveness. Implications and applications to the field of foreign language learning are discussed.     

“Accept Me,or Else…”: Disputed Overestimation of Social Competence Predicts Increases in Proactive Aggression

It has been proposed that aggressive behavior may result from unrealistically positive self-evaluations that are disputed by others (Baumeister, Smart, & Boden, 1996). The present three studies tested this proposition concurrently and longitudinally for the domain of self-perceived social competence (SPSC) in 3-6th grade children on two continents. Each study tested whether aggressive behavior is related to general overestimation of SPSC compared to competence as perceived by peers, or to disputed overestimation, that is, overestimation disputed through rejection by peers. Specificity of relations with reactively or proactively aggressive behavior patterns was assessed and the predictive value of overestimation to the development of these types of aggressive behavior was investigated. Concurrently, disputed overestimation explained more variance in aggressive behavior than general overestimation, and was uniquely related to proactive aggression. Longitudinally, disputed overestimation also uniquely predicted changes in proactive, not reactive aggression.     

Sociocultural assumptions of federally sponsored Follow Through programs

Time and money have been invested in the implementation and evaluation of the national Follow Through Project in the United States. Although the project has been successful in many respects and has generated a fairly extensive literature within psychology, education, and the other social sciences, relatively little theoretical attention has been directed toward sociocultural factors. The present article provides a critical retrospective analysis of the sociocultural assumptions, dynamics, and implications of Project Follow Through within a psychological framework.