Adolescent gambling and drug use

In this study, 4516 adolescents (aged 11–16 years) completed a questionnaire examining the relationship between underage National Lottery gambling, underage scratchcard gambling, cigarette smoking, drinking alcohol and drug use. It was found that these behaviours were closely linked. Adolescent gamblers reported that they were significantly more likely to drink alcohol (particularly ‘alcopops’), smoke tobacco and take drugs compared to non-gamblers. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Adult social behavioral effects of heavy adolescent marijuana use among African Americans

The authors examined the effects of heavy adolescent marijuana use on employment, marriage, and family formation and tested both dropping out of high school and adult marijuana use as potential mediators of these associations among a community sample of African Americans followed longitudinally from age 6 to age 32-33. They used propensity score matching to reduce selection bias when estimating the effects of heavy adolescent marijuana use. Logistic regression results on the sample matched on sex, and early demographic and behavioral variables showed that adolescent marijuana use has adult social behavioral consequences: Use of marijuana 20 times or more during adolescence was associated with being unemployed and unmarried in young adulthood and having children outside of marriage for both males and females. Dropping out of high school and more frequent adult marijuana use seem to be important parts of the pathway from adolescent marijuana use to negative life outcomes.     

Is this happiness I see? Biases in the identification of emotional facial expressions in depression and social phobia

The present study was designed to examine the operation of depression-specific biases in the identification or labeling of facial expression of emotions. Participants diagnosed with major depression and social phobia and control participants were presented with faces that expressed increasing degrees of emotional intensity, slowly changing from a neutral to a full-intensity happy, sad, or angry expression. The authors assessed individual differences in the intensity of facial expression of emotion that was required for the participants to accurately identify the emotion being expressed. The depressed participants required significantly greater intensity of emotion than did the social phobic and the control participants to correctly identify happy expressions and less intensity to identify sad than angry expressions. In contrast, social phobic participants needed less intensity to correctly identify the angry expressions than did the depressed and control participants and less intensity to identify angry than sad expressions. Implications of these results for interpersonal functioning in depression and social phobia are discussed.     

The phenomenology of fit: linking the person and environment to the subjective experience of person-environment fit

The authors distinguished 3 approaches to the study of perceived person-environment fit (P-E fit): (a) atomistic, which examines perceptions of the person and environment as separate entities; (b) molecular, which concerns the perceived comparison between the person and environment; and (c) molar, which focuses on the perceived similarity, match, or fit between the person and environment. Distinctions among these approaches have fundamental implications for theory, measurement, and the subjective experience of P-E fit, yet research has treated these approaches as interchangeable. This study investigated the meaning and relationships among the atomistic, molecular, and molar approaches to fit and examined factors that influence the strength of these relationships. Results showed that the relationships among the approaches deviate markedly from the theoretical logic that links them together. Supplemental analyses indicated that molar fit overlaps with affect and molecular fit gives different weight to atomistic person and environment information depending on how the comparison is framed. These findings challenge fundamental assumptions underlying P-E fit theories and have important implications for future research.     

Neighborhood Poverty, Social Capital, and the Cognitive Development of African American Preschoolers

In this investigation, we examine the impact of the ecological context of the residential neighborhood on the cognitive development of children by considering social processes not only at the family-level but also at the neighborhood-level. In a socioeconomically diverse sample of 200 African American children living in 39 neighborhoods in Baltimore, we found that neighborhood poverty was associated with poorer problem-solving skills over and above the influence of family economic resources and level of positive parent involvement. Sampson has theorized that neighborhood poverty affects child well-being by altering levels of neighborhood social capital as well as family social capital. Although we found that indicators of neighborhood and family social capital were associated with cognitive skills, these factors did not explain the association between neighborhood poverty and problem-solving ability. Implications for future research in the area of neighborhoods and child development are discussed.     

When phonology fails: orthographic neighbourhood effects in dyslexia

Both cerebral hemispheres contain phonological, orthographic and semantic representations of words, however there are between-hemisphere differences in the relative engagement and specialization of the different representations. Taking orthographic processing for example, previous studies suggest that orthographic neighbourhood size (N) has facilitatory effects in the right but not the left hemispheres. To pursue the nature of this asymmetric N effect, in particular whether there are individual differences in such specialisation, we examined N in a case of developmental dyslexia, FM. We first describe the nature of his difficulties, which are mainly severe phonological deficits. Employing the divided visual field paradigm with FM revealed a greater sensitivity in the right than in the left hemisphere to orthographic variables, with a significant inhibitory N effect in the left, but not right hemisphere. Such inhibition, to a lesser degree, was found among a group of adults with dyslexia but not among age-matched normal readers. We argue that enhanced sensitivity to orthographic cues is developed in some cases of dyslexia when a normal, phonology-based left hemisphere word recognition processing is not achieved. The interpretation presented here is cast in terms of differences between people with dyslexia and typical readers that originate in the atypical way in which orthographic representations are initially set up.     

Trait aggressiveness and situational provocation: a test of the traits as situational sensitivities (TASS) model

In this article, the authors propose and test an interactionist model of personality functioning. The model maintains that many traits function in a threshold-like manner, such that less situational strength is needed to evoke a trait-relevant response in people who are high on the trait than in those who are low on the trait. Because of these different sensitivities, people who are high on a trait are more reactive to moderate provocation than are those who are low on a trait, but the opposite is true when strong provocation is compared to moderate provocation. Three studies are reported showing how the model can be used to understand the nature of aggression.     

Thinking and caring about cognitive inconsistency: when and for whom does attitudinal ambivalence feel uncomfortable?

The relation between conflicting evaluations of attitude objects (potential ambivalence) and associated unpleasant feelings (felt ambivalence) was investigated. Participants indicated their potential and felt ambivalence about capital punishment (Studies 1 and 2) and abortion (Studies 1-3). The simultaneous accessibility (J. N. Bassili, 1996) of participants' potential ambivalence (i.e., how quickly and equally quickly conflicting evaluations came to mind) was measured using response latency (Studies 1-3) and manipulated by repeated expression (Study 3). The relation between potential ambivalence and felt ambivalence was strongest when potential ambivalence was high in simultaneous accessibility (Studies 1-3). This pattern was most pronounced for participants who were high in preference for consistency (Study 3; R. B. Cialdini, M. R. Trost, & T. J. Newsom, 1995). Similarities of ambivalence and cognitive dissonance constructs are discussed.     

A matching advantage for dynamic human faces

In a series of three experiments, we used a sequential matching task to explore the impact of non-rigid facial motion on the perception of human faces. Dynamic prime images, in the form of short video sequences, facilitated matching responses relative to a single static prime image. This advantage was observed whenever the prime and target showed the same face but an identity match was required across expression (experiment 1) or view (experiment 2). No facilitation was observed for identical dynamic prime sequences when the matching dimension was shifted from identity to expression (experiment 3). We suggest that the observed dynamic advantage, the first reported for non-degraded facial images, arises because the matching task places more emphasis on visual working memory than typical face recognition tasks. More specifically, we believe that representational mechanisms optimised for the processing of motion and/or change-over-time are established and maintained in working memory and that such 'dynamic representations' (Freyd, 1987 Psychological Review 94 427-438) capitalise on the increased information content of the dynamic primes to enhance performance.