Texting and Driving: Is It Just Moral Panic?

Significant public efforts have been mounted to stop the perceived epidemic of texting and driving, especially among younger drivers. However, despite the taken-for-granted nature of these fears, cell phones are reported as a contributing factor in only about 1% of all crashes. This study examines 11 years of crash data from Kentucky to demonstrate that despite the exponential growth of cell phones in American culture, cell phone-related crashes have remained stable over time, and they represent far less of a public health risk than most people are led to believe. The conclusions are presented in the context of moral panic theory.     

Too Busy to Change: High Job Demands Reduce the Beneficial Effects of Information and Participation on Employee Support

Despite the abundant literature on organizational change management, the success of change initiatives in organizations remains low. In this study, we investigate employee support for change in the context of two change management practices (information and participation). We use the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) to examine why these change management practices foster employee support, and the extent to which the efficacy of these practices depends on current job demands. Participants were 106 employees undergoing a building relocation at their place of employment who responded to an initial questionnaire at time 1 (pre-occupancy) and a follow-up questionnaire 2 months later (post-occupancy). We found that the TPB variables mediated the effects of information and participation on employee support (both intentions at time 1 and self-reported behaviors at time 2). The indirect relationships from information and participation to employee support were significant at low and medium, but not at high levels of job demands. The positive effects of information and participation on employee support can be largely attributed to employee attitudes and subjective norms. Thus, consultants should target employee attitudes and norms when garnering employee support, but also be aware of the limitations of these practices when employees are preoccupied with their work. This study demonstrates that the TPB can account for the beneficial effects of change management practices on employee support. It also reports the novel finding that change management practices are less effective at high levels of job demands.     

Nostalgia for America's past can buffer collective guilt

This research examined when, and for whom, American collective nostalgia can relieve feelings of collective guilt. In the Pilot Study, path analyses revealed that national glorification is associated with collective nostalgia, and collective nostalgia is associated with lower collective guilt. Our experimental studies test the role of these variables in determining responses to the elevated salience of past ingroup harm doing. Collective nostalgia was associated with lower collective guilt especially after reminders of America's harm doing in Study 1 . In Study 2 we predicted and showed that reminders of American harm doing would evoke spontaneous collective nostalgia for participants high in national glorification. The remaining studies tested the hypothesis that collective nostalgia serves to buffer collective guilt. Collective guilt was lower after reminders of past harm doing for participants who engaged in collective nostalgia ( Study 3 ), and this was especially pronounced for participants high in national glorification ( Study 4 ).     

Semantic Information and the Syntax of Propositional Attitude Verbs

Propositional attitude verbs, such as think and want, have long held interest for both theoretical linguists and language acquisitionists because their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties display complex interactions that have proven difficult to fully capture from either perspective. This paper explores the granularity with which these verbs’ semantic and pragmatic properties are recoverable from their syntactic distributions, using three behavioral experiments aimed at explicitly quantifying the relationship between these two sets of properties. Experiment 1 gathers a measure of 30 propositional attitude verbs’ syntactic distributions using an acceptability judgment task. Experiments 2a and 2b gather measures of semantic similarity between those same verbs using a generalized semantic discrimination (triad or “odd man out”) task and an ordinal (Likert) scale task, respectively. Two kinds of analyses are conducted on the data from these experiments. The first compares both the acceptability judgments and the semantic similarity judgments to previous classifications derived from the syntax and semantics literature. The second kind compares the acceptability judgments to the semantic similarity judgments directly. Through these comparisons, we show that there is quite fine‐grained information about propositional attitude verbs’ semantics carried in their syntactic distributions—whether one considers the sorts of discrete qualitative classifications that linguists traditionally work with or the sorts of continuous quantitative classifications that can be derived experimentally.     

Investigation of the Use of a Family Health History Application in Genetic Counseling

The paper-based pedigree is the current standard for family health history (FHH) documentation in genetic counseling. Several tools for electronic capture of family health data have been developed to improve re-use and accessibility, data quality and standardization, ease of updating, and integration with electronic medical records. One such tool, the tablet-based Proband application, provides a flexible approach to data capture in dynamic and diverse clinical settings. This study compared Proband FHH collection to paper-based methods and investigated the usability of Proband in a clinical setting. After one use by 23 genetic counselors and students, Proband had 91% accuracy with a FHH audio scenario, which was significantly less (p?<?0.001) than paper’s 96% accuracy. These differences were attributed to incorrect or missing ages of grandparents (p?<?0.001) and great-aunts/uncles (p?=?0.012) and missing documentation of consanguinity (p?<?0.001). Possible explanations for these differences include greater experience with paper FHH documentation and pre-populated prompts for consanguinity on the paper template used. Proband’s perceived usability increased with use, with individual System Usability Scores increasing between first and last use (p?=?0.033). We conclude that tools for dynamic, provider-driven FHH documentation such as Proband show promise for improving risk assessment accuracy and quality patient care.     

The role of shape recognition in figure/ground perception in infancy

In this study we sought to determine whether infants, like adults, utilize previous experience to guide figure/ground processing. After familiarization to a shape, 5-month-olds preferentially attended to the side of an ambiguous figure/ground test stimulus corresponding to that shape, suggesting that they were viewing that portion as the figure. Infants’ failure to exhibit this preference in a control condition in which both sides of the test stimulus were displayed as figures indicated that the results in the experimental condition were not due to a preference between two figure shapes. These findings demonstrate for the first time that figure/ground processing in infancy is sensitive to top-down influence. Thus, a critical aspect of figure/ground processing is functional early in life.     

Incidental learning in a multisensory environment across childhood

Multisensory information has been shown to modulate attention in infants and facilitate learning in adults, by enhancing the amodal properties of a stimulus. However, it remains unclear whether this translates to learning in a multisensory environment across middle childhood, and particularly in the case of incidental learning. One hundred and eighty‐one children aged between 6 and 10 years participated in this study using a novel Multisensory Attention Learning Task (MALT). Participants were asked to respond to the presence of a target stimulus whilst ignoring distractors. Correct target selection resulted in the movement of the target exemplar to either the upper left or right screen quadrant, according to category membership. Category membership was defined either by visual‐only, auditory‐only or multisensory information. As early as 6 years of age, children demonstrated greater performance on the incidental categorization task following exposure to multisensory audiovisual cues compared to unisensory information. These findings provide important insight into the use of multisensory information in learning, and particularly on incidental category learning. Implications for the deployment of multisensory learning tasks within education across development will be discussed.     

Were the “Pioneer” Clinical Ethics Consultants “Outsiders”? For Them,Was “Critical Distance” That Critical?

“Clinical ethics consultants” have been practicing in the United States for about 50 years. Most of the earliest consultants—the “pioneers”—were “outsiders” when they first appeared at patients' bedsides and in the clinic. However, if they were outsiders initially, they acclimated to the clinical setting and became “insiders” very quickly. Moreover, there was some tension between traditional academics and those doing applied ethics about whether there was sufficient “critical distance” for appropriate reflection about the complex medical ethics dilemmas of the day if one were involved in the decision making. Again, the pioneers deflected concerns by identifying and instituting safeguards to assure professional objectivity in clinical ethics consultation services. One might suggest that in moving inside and establishing normative practices, the pioneer clinical ethics consultants anticipated adoption of their routines and professionalization of the field.     

Promoting Strategy Change: Mere Exposure to Alternative Strategies Helps,but Feedback Can Hurt

This study investigated effects of feedback and exposure to alternative strategies on strategy change in children (N = 106, age range = 7;3–10;0) learning about mathematical equivalence. Children’s strategies were evaluated before and after a brief instructional intervention. During the intervention, children either were exposed to a set of 4 alternative strategies (2 correct, 2 incorrect) without information about the validity of the strategies or completed a control task. In addition, some children received feedback about existing strategies, and others did not. Exposure to alternative strategies led to more strategy change and better performance on a problem-solving task. The effect of feedback on strategy change depended on children’s confidence in their existing strategies and on their pretest knowledge.