Links Between Early Personal Characteristics,Longitudinal Profiles of Peer Victimization in School and Victimization in College or at Work

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - This study used a longitudinal design from age six through age 19 (N?=?1206 (603 girls)) to examine the associations between...     

Judicial gatekeeping and the social construction of the admissibility of expert testimony

Content analysis of 192 U.S. District Court cases was conducted to investigate judges' evaluations of expert characteristics and evidence characteristics for toxicology, psychological/psychiatric, and damages testimony. Judges evaluated more expert characteristics, but not more evidence characteristics, as the number of months post-Daubert increased (Hypotheses 1 and 2). More evidence characteristics were evaluated when evidence was quantitatively rather than qualitatively based (Hypothesis 3). The greatest number of evidence characteristics examined was for toxicology evidence (Hypothesis 4). Fewer expert characteristics were evaluated for admissible evidence, but more evidence characteristics were evaluated for inadmissible evidence (Hypothesis 5). All analyses were significant at .05. Implications for judges, attorneys, and experts are discussed.     

Counselor perceptions of students who vary in gender and socioeconomic status

The present study experimentally examined how counselor perceptions of hypothetical students are affected by student gender and socioeconomic status (SES). Results showed that counselors perceive students from low SES backgrounds as having less promising futures and lower math abilities. Counselors also rated female students as lower in math abilities than male students. Our results indicate that institutions should consider providing more school counselor training to reduce bias based on gender and SES.

The Effects of Viewing R-rated Movie Scenes That Objectify Women on Perceptions of Date Rape

The contribution of sexualized images of women in the media to rape and beliefs that support rape has been the subject of considerable research. The present study tested the effects of viewing scenes from R-rated popular films on perceptions of female responsibility for and enjoyment of either a date rape or a stranger rape, using a sample of participants that was both ethnically and socioeconomically diverse. Participants viewed either nonviolent scenes that objectified and degraded women sexually or scenes from an animation festival. In a supposedly unrelated second experiment, participants then read a fictitious magazine account of a date rape or a stranger rape. Results indicated a significant three-way interaction among gender, video condition, and rape scenario on perceptions of the rape, such that males who viewed the sexually objectifying video felt that the victim in the date-rape condition experienced pleasure and “got what she wanted.”     

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.     

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.     

“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.