The predictive power of first-grade peer and teacher ratings of behavior: Sex differences in antisocial behavior and personality at adolescence

Peer and teacher assessments of aggression, social withdrawal, and likability using the Pupil Evaluation Inventory were recorded for 104 French Canadian girls and boys in grade 1. Self-reported delinquency and personality measures were administered to these children when they were in junior high school 7 years later. Linear regression analyses revealed significant predictive differences between the grade 1 assessment of girls and boys: For antisocial behavior, teacher and peer assessments of boys were equally good predictors, and the combination of the two assessments did not improve prediction; for girls, peer and teacher assessments taken separately were weak predictors, but, taken together, they were better predictors for girls than for boys; for personality, peers were better predictors than teachers both for girls and for boys. When categorical analyses were used to predict extreme antisocial behavior, peer and teacher assessments were equally good predictors for girls and boys. The use of peer and teacher ratings together, however, decreased the number of false positives. The implications of these findings for research and clinical work are discussed.     

National security games

Issues that arise in using game theory to model national security problems are discussed, including positing nation-states as players, assuming that their decision makers act rationally and possess complete information, and modeling certain conflicts as two-person games. A generic two-person game called the Conflict Game, which captures strategic features of such variable-sum games as Chicken and Prisoners' Dilemma, is then analyzed. Unlike these classical games, however, the Conflict Game is a two-stage game in which each player can threaten to retaliate — and carry out this threat in the second stage — if its opponent chose noncooperation in the first stage.Conditions for the existence of different pure-strategy Nash equilibria, or stable outcomes, are found, and these results are extended to situations in which the players can select mixed strategies (i.e., make probabilistic threats or choices). Although the Conflict Game sheds light on the rational foundations underlying arms races, nuclear deterrence, and other strategic situations, more detailed assumptions are required to tie this generic game to specific conflicts.Steven J. Brams gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the National Science Foundation under Grant No. SES85-20154, the Sloan Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation.D. Marc Kilgour gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada under Grant No. A8974.     

Visual habituation in human infants: development and rearing circumstances

Summary Habituation is a type of learning that reflects changing responsiveness to repeated information. In two longitudinal studies, we examined individual differences, stability, and developmental change in the ontogeny of visual habituation in human infants across the middle of the first year of life. To study this phenomenon in breadth, we tested infants from two social classes within the same culture and infants from two different cultures. Infants demonstrated significant, but comparable, individual differences in habituation across socioeconomic and cultural variations in rearing circumstances; they showed significant, if moderate, stability in habituation; and they habituated significantly more quickly with age. These results are interpreted in terms of developing human beings' increasing efficiency in processing visual information near the beginning of extrauterine life.     

Heat and Violence in the Dallas Field Data: Linearity,Curvilinearity, and Heteroscedasticity1

Harries and Stadler (1988) observed only a positive linear trend, with no curvilinear relationship, between heat and violence in their 1980–81 Dallas field data. When Cotton (1986) observed similar trends in his data, we noted that in fact the variance in violence increases with temperature (Bell & Fusco, 1986). We report here similar statistically significant heteroscedasticity in the Harries and Stadler data. We propose that both aggressive and escape tendencies increase with high ambient temperatures, such that in some circumstances aggression will decline under very hot and uncomfortable conditions. We conclude that the negative affect escape model of the temperature-aggression relationship is neither dead cold nor hot and bothered.     

Habituation at home

Habituation to mother's face in naturally occurring en face social interactions and to a single object in naturally occurring solitary play was studied in American and Japanese infants. Habituation was observed in both conditions in both samples, and home habituation data paralleled analogous laboratory habituation data both quantitatively and qualitatively.     

Infant sensitivity to audiovisually coherent events

Summary We examined 5-month-old infants' sensitivity to audiovisually coherent and incoherent events. A person speaking and an automobile with engine running were filmed approaching and receding with corresponding (coherent) soundtracks. Infants were tested with a habituation paradigm in which they observed coherent or incoherent films, involving, respectively, acoustical radial motion in the direction seen or opposite to the direction seen. Infants habituated to both person and car films, but coherent events uniformly yielded more rapid habituation than did incoherent ones. In addition, infants treated silent events more like audiovisual coherence than like incoherence. Infants habituated more to cars than to people, suggesting that a speaking person may especially maintain infant attention.     

Some Effects of Role Conflict Source on the Experience of Role Conflict

A group of 176 undergraduates participated in a role-playing laboratory experiment that explored the effects of intersender and intrasender role conflict on experienced role stress. Each role sender's power (control over valued resources and outcomes) and importance (desire to meet the sender's expectations) were measured. For intrasender conflict only, role sender power was positively associated with upset over the conflict, whereas role sender importance was negatively associated with upset.     

Reading isolated words: No evidence for automatic incorporation of the phonetic code

Summary Backward masking with a homophonic mask induces better target recognition than backward masking with a graphemic mask that shares the same letters with the target as the homophonic mask. From this, the existence of automatic prelexical phonological recoding in silent word reading has been inferred. The present experiments, however, show that the advantage of homophonic masks in a backward-masking task only arises if a considerable proportion of the masks are phonologically related to the targets (at least for Dutch). The results are in line with findings of lexical-decision tasks and number-processing tasks, and constitute a further argument for the dominance of the orthographic route over the phonological route in processing isolated written words.     

The development of a measure of enculturation for Native American youth

Enculturation is the process by which individuals learn about and identify with their ethnic minority culture. It is distinguished from acculturation which refers to the process by which an ethnic minority individual is assimilated into the majority culture. Three studies with Native American youths are reported that describe the development of a measure of enculturation for Native American youths. Development of a measure of enculturation provides a foundation upon which to build a body of literature that focuses on strengths in a youth's life rather than on deficits. Results of the first study (n=120), a confirmatory factor analysis, indicated that cultural affinity, Native American identity, and family involvement in traditional activities adequately represent the construct of enculturation. The study also provides some convergent validity for this interpretation. The second study examines factor invariance for enculturation among youths with data from over 2 years (n=69). The factor structure was similar across time. The third study replicates the factor structure and validity analyses with a new sample (n=42). Usefulness of the measure for assessing protective factors and stressing ethnicity over simple assessment of race categories is discussed. We would like to thank the Tribe that participated in this study and especially the youth and their parents who agreed to participate. We would also like to thank the Tribal staff youth workers who helped us on many aspects of the study. This research was supported by the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, Grant No. 1 H86 SPO1835-01A1 to the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa/Chippewa Indians. Benjamin Walter and Kathleen Washienko were research assistants on the project during data collection at Time 1. Sandra Dyer was the Director for the project upon which this study is based at the time of data collection.     

Experimenter effects on responses to explicitly sexual stimuli

Experimenter effects on responses to explicitly sexual stimuli were investigated in 63 single undergraduate males and 89 single undergraduate females. A completely factorial design with sex of subject, sex of experimenter, and experimenter's style of interacting (informal vs formal) as the independent factors was employed. While the variables under investigation did not have an overriding effect on the outcome measures, at least one experimenter attribute was discovered to significantly influence a large percentage of the variables assessed: The data suggest that informal experimenters permit less socially desirable responses and more generalized arousal than formal experimenters. In addition to replicating earlier work on experimenter effects, the present study serves to delineate a possible set of cues by which experimenters may influence their subjects' arousal to explicitly sexual stimuli.