Eating together apart: patterns of segregation in a multi‐ethnic cafeteria

Research on segregation has tended to focus on relations located at a macro‐spatial level of analysis and unfolding in contexts where boundaries to interaction are formally established. This research, by contrast, investigated segregation as a micro‐ecological process by observing patterns of seating in a multi‐ethnic cafeteria. A total of 3114 seating positions were coded over a 2‐week period and the resulting data were analysed using both adapted segregation indices (P and D) and loglinear and logistic regression techniques. The results suggested that ethnic segregation existed both at the level of interactional groups and in the form of broader patterns of racial clustering and dispersal in the cafeteria. Moreover, the magnitude of segregation was predicted by the gender composition of seating groups and by variations in the density of the cafeteria's population over time. Some implications of these results for social psychological research on contact and desegregation are considered. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mothers' part-time employment: associations with mother and family well-being

The associations between mothers' part-time employment and mother well-being, parenting, and family functioning were examined using seven waves of the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development data (N = 1,364), infancy through middle childhood. Concurrent comparisons were made between families in which mothers were employed part time and both those in which mothers were not employed and those in which mothers were employed full time. Using multivariate analysis of covariance with extensive controls, results indicated that mothers employed part time had fewer depressive symptoms during the infancy and preschool years and better self-reported health at most time points than did nonemployed mothers. Across the time span studied, mothers working part time tended to report less conflict between work and family than those working full time. During their children's preschool years, mothers employed part time exhibited more sensitive parenting than did other mothers, and at school age were more involved in school and provided more learning opportunities than mothers employed full time. Mothers employed part time reported doing a higher proportion of child care and housework than mothers employed full time. Part-time employment appears to have some benefits for mothers and families throughout the child rearing years.     

Helping military families through the deployment process: Strategies to support parenting

Recent studies have highlighted the impact of deployment on military families and children and the corresponding need for interventions to support them. Historically, however, little emphasis has been placed on family-based interventions in general, and parenting interventions in particular, with returning service members. This paper provides an overview of research on the associations between combat deployment, parental adjustment of service members and spouses, parenting impairments, and children's adjustment problems, and provides a social interaction learning framework for research and practice to support parenting among military families affected by a parent's deployment. We then describe the Parent Management Training-Oregon model (PMTO(?)), a family of interventions that improves parenting practices and child adjustment in highly stressed families, and briefly present work on an adaptation of PMTO for use in military families (After Deployment: Adaptive Parenting Tools, or ADAPT). The article concludes with PMTO-based recommendations for clinicians providing parenting support to military families.     

The intention interference effect

Intentions have been shown to be more accessible (e.g., more quickly and accurately recalled) compared to other sorts of to-be-remembered information; a result termed an intention superiority effect (Goschke & Kuhl, 1993). In the current study, we demonstrate an intention interference effect (IIE) in which color-naming performance in a Stroop task was slower for words belonging to an intention that participants had to remember to carry out (Do-the-Task condition) versus an intention that did not have to be executed (Ignore-the-Task condition). In previous work (e.g., Cohen et al., 2005), having a prospective intention in mind was confounded with carrying a memory load. In Experiment 1, we added a digit-retention task to control for effects of cognitive load. In Experiment 2, we eliminated the memory confound in a new way, by comparing intention-related and control words within each trial. Results from both Experiments 1 and 2 revealed an IIE suggesting that interference is very specific to the intention, not just to a memory load.     

The automaticity of vantage point shifts within a synaesthetes' spatial calendar

Time-space synaesthetes report that time units (e.g., months, days, hours) occupy idiosyncratic spatial locations. For the synaesthete (L), the months of the year are projected out in external space in the shape of a 'scoreboard 7', where January to July extend across the top from left to right and August to December make up the vertical segment from top to bottom. Interestingly, L can change the mental vantage point (MVP) from where she views her month-space depending on whether she sees or hears the month name. We used a spatial cueing task to demonstrate that L's attention could be directed to locations within her time-space and change vantage points automatically - from trial to trial. We also sought to eliminate any influence of strategy on L's performance by shortening the interval between the cue and target onset to only 150 ms, and have the targets fall in synaesthetically cued locations on only 15% of trials. If L's performance was attributable to intentionally using the cue to predict target location, these manipulations should eliminate any cueing effects. In two separate experiments, we found that L still showed an attentional bias consistent with her synaesthesia. Thus, we attribute L's rapid and resilient cueing effects to the automaticity of her spatial forms.     

Coronary Intervention Improves Disease Specific Health-Related Quality of Life but Not Individualised Quality of Life: A Potential Response Shift Effect?

To explore potential response shift effects with different quality of life (QoL) instruments in cardiac patients undergoing coronary intervention. Study Design and Setting: Recalibration was assessed with the disease specific health-related quality of life (HRQL) instrument MacNew in combination with a then-test approach. Reconceptualisation and reprioritisation were assessed with the individualised QoL instrument SEIQoL-DW. Significant treatment effects were seen on the MacNew (global Δ: 0.6 ± 1.1, p = 0.004) but not on the SEIQoL-DW (Δ: 3.3 ± 16, p = 0.37) 6 months after coronary intervention. No recalibration effect was found on the MacNew then-test, while with the SEIQOL-DW potential response shift effects of reconceptualisation and reprioritisation were seen. For the first time response shift effects were explored in cardiac patients undergoing coronary intervention. This study confirmed that there is a clinically significant improvement in disease specific HRQL over time following successful coronary interventions. However, no treatment effect was seen for individualised QoL with the SEIQoL-DW. This might be due to reconceptualisation and reprioritisation response effects. Future studies need to focus on exploring response shift effects, and the interrelationship between its different components, captured by different patient reported outcome instruments in larger patient groups undergoing coronary interventions.     

"I feel fat": an experimental induction of body displacement in disordered eating

Body displacement, the theory that predicts that individuals with eating disorders will displace negative feelings about themselves onto their body, was tested experimentally in this study. Unrestrained eaters (n = 61), restrained eaters (n = 33), and individuals with eating disorders (n = 26) were randomly assigned to a control condition or an ineffectiveness induction. In the ineffectiveness condition participants were asked to recall and reflect on a past experience when they felt useless or incapable (i.e., ineffective). Results showed that individuals with eating disorders who were made to feel ineffective reported more implicit appearance/body concern than those in the control condition. Unrestrained and restrained eaters did not show this effect. This is the first experimental study to support body displacement theory. These data can be used clinically to educate and encourage patients with eating disorders to address thoughts and feelings related to ineffectiveness directly, instead of displacing this distress onto their body and potentially perpetuating their eating disorder.     

Moral judgment in adults with autism spectrum disorders

The ability of a group of adults with high functioning autism (HFA) or Asperger Syndrome (AS) to distinguish moral, conventional and disgust transgressions was investigated using a set of six transgression scenarios, each of which was followed by questions about permissibility, seriousness, authority contingency and justification. The results showed that although individuals with HFA or AS (HFA/AS) were able to distinguish affect-backed norms from conventional affect-neutral norms along the dimensions of permissibility, seriousness and authority-dependence, they failed to distinguish moral and disgust transgressions along the seriousness dimension and were unable to provide appropriate welfare-based moral justifications. Moreover, they judged conventional and disgust transgressions to be more serious than did the comparison group, and the correlation analysis revealed that the seriousness rating was related to their ToM impairment. We concluded that difficulties providing appropriate moral justifications and evaluating the seriousness of transgressions in individuals with HFA/AS may be explained by an impaired cognitive appraisal system that, while responsive to rule violations, fails to use relevant information about the agent’s intentions and the affective impact of the action outcome in conscious moral reasoning.     

Challenging the Stubborn Core of Opposition to Equality: Racial Contact and Policy Attitudes

A Random Digit Dialing survey (n = 794) examined the interracial contact experiences and racial attitudes of White South Africans. The survey measured racial attitudes not only in terms of individuals' prejudice, but also in terms of their perceptions of group threat, perceived injustice, and support for various government policies designed to rectify the legacy of apartheid. The results indicated that the frequency and quality of interracial contact predicted Whites' support for both race compensatory and race preferential policies of redress, and these effects were partly mediated by perceived threat, sense of fairness, and racial prejudice. The research points to a potential rapprochement between the social psychological theories of intergroup contact and group positioning theories derived from the work of Blumer. It also highlights the value of adopting a more expansive and politically nuanced conception of the “consequences” of contact and desegregation.     

Evidence for intact memory-guided attention in school-aged children

Visual scenes contain many statistical regularities such as the likely identity and location of objects that are present; with experience, such regularities can be encoded and can ultimately facilitate the deployment of spatial attention to important locations. Memory-guided attention has been extensively examined in adults with the 'contextual cueing' paradigm and has been linked to specific neural substrates – a medial temporal lobe (MTL)-frontoparietal network. However, it currently remains unknown when this ability comes 'online' during development. Thus, we examined the performance of school-aged children on an age-appropriate version of the contextual cueing paradigm. Children searched for a target fish among distractor fish in new displays and in 'old' displays on a touchscreen computer. Old displays repeated across blocks of trials and thus provided an opportunity for prior experience with the invariant configuration of the stimuli to guide attentional deployment. We found that over time children searched old displays significantly faster than new displays, thus revealing intact memory-guided attention and presumed function of an MTL-frontoparietal network in 5- to 9-year-olds. More generally, our findings suggest that children are remarkably sensitive to the inherent structure of their visual environment and this enables attentional deployment to become more efficient with experience.