Comprehending pronouns: a role for word-specific gender stereotype information

The research investigated how word-specific gender stereotype information can be used during language comprehension. In a rating study, the gender stereotypes for 405 noun and noun compounds were assessed. From these norms, 32 words strongly stereotyped to refer mostly to males and 32 words strongly stereotyped to refer mostly to females were selected and used in a reading experiment. Comprehenders read pairs of sentences. The subject of the first sentence was a gender stereotyped word (e.g., executive or secretary). The subject of the second sentence was either the pronoun he or she. Reading time was significantly longer when gender of the pronoun mismatched the gender stereotype of the antecedent than when the genders of pronoun and antecedent matched. This gender mismatch effect occurred on the two regions immediately following the region containing the pronoun. The results indicated that word-specific gender stereotypes can influence coreference resolution of pronouns.     

Beyond Ramps and Rails

Architectural accessibility does not always adequately represent the disability inclusiveness of a Christian community. Oftentimes, what is needed for appreciable inclusion is something as basic as friendship. Friendship that is based on unconditional love, acceptance, and mutual interdependency can facilitate inclusion, especially disability inclusion. This article draws on a study on Mary Slessor Memorial Presbyterian Cathedral, Port Harcourt, Rivers State, Nigeria. It examines its disability inclusion efforts. It demonstrates that disability inclusion must go beyond ramps and rails toward enabling friendship that is affirming of individual personhood through respectful interpersonal relationships. In highlighting the challenges to friendship as a relationship that is given freely, this article wrestles with the complexities of friendship and how this basic concept can bring about acceptable inclusive community within the Cathedral and indeed the global church.     

Effects of varying stimulus size on object recognition in pigeons

The authors investigated the pigeon's ability to generalize object discrimination performance to smaller and larger versions of trained objects. In Experiment 1, they taught pigeons with line drawings of multipart objects and later tested the birds with both larger and smaller drawings. The pigeons exhibited significant generalization to new sizes, although they did show systematic performance decrements as the new size deviated from the original. In Experiment 2, the authors tested both linear and exponential size changes of computer-rendered basic shapes to determine which size transformation produced equivalent performance for size increases and decreases. Performance was more consistent with logarithmic than with linear scaling of size. This finding was supported in Experiment 3. Overall, the experiments suggest that the pigeon encodes size as a feature of objects and that the representation of size is most likely logarithmic.     

Innocence Lost: A Gender-Based Study of Parricide Offender,Victim, and Incident Characteristics in a National Sample, 1976–2003

ABSTRACT

The act of parricide is one of the least understood and most underresearched acts of family violence. Work to date suggests adolescent parricide is often an extreme response to intolerable abuse. Drawing on Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR) from 1976 to 2003, this work examines a large national sample of reported parricide incidents (N?=?2,599) with an offender 21 years of age or younger. A gender-based study of offender, victim, and incident characteristics was undertaken using bivariate and multivariate techniques. Results suggest that incidents of parricide are decreasing over time. Offenses are predominantly intraracial with white male offenders peaking in late adolescence and white females peaking in mid-adolescence. White biological fathers are at greatest risk of victimization with girls significantly more likely than boys to kill a stepfather. Results both corroborate and contrast extant works, providing new baseline data and insight into this complex and dynamic crime.     

Memory and comprehension for health information among older adults: Distinguishing the effects of domain-general and domain-specific knowledge

While there is evidence that knowledge influences understanding of health information, less is known about the processing mechanisms underlying this effect and its impact on memory. We used the moving window paradigm to examine how older adults varying in domain-general crystallised ability (verbal ability) and health knowledge allocate attention to understand health and domain-general texts. Participants (n = 107, age: 60–88 years) read and recalled single sentences about hypertension and about non-health topics. Mixed-effects modelling of word-by-word reading times suggested that domain-general crystallised ability increased conceptual integration regardless of text domain, while health knowledge selectively increased resource allocation to conceptual integration at clause boundaries in health texts. These patterns of attentional allocation were related to subsequent recall performance. Although older adults with lower levels of crystallised ability were less likely to engage in integrative processing, when they did, this strategy had a compensatory effect in improving recall. These findings suggest that semantic integration during reading is an important comprehension process that supports the construction of the memory representation and is engendered by knowledge. Implications of the findings for theories of text processing and memory as well as for designing patient education materials are discussed.     

Past and Future Episodic Thinking in Middle Childhood

The abilities of past and future episodic thinking develop hand in hand across the preschool years and are intimately connected in adults. Little is known, however, about the development of episodic thinking in middle childhood and how it is influenced by sociocultural factors. In the present study, one hundred sixty-seven 7- to 10-year-old children from European American and Chinese cultural backgrounds were interviewed individually about temporally near and distant past and future events. The child data were further contrasted with adult data in Wang, Hou, Tang, and Wiprovnick (2011 Wang , Q. , Hou , Y. , Tang , H. , &; Wiprovnick , A. ( 2011 ). Traveling backward and forward in time: Culture and gender in the episodic specificity of past and future events . Memory , 19 , 103 – 109 . doi: 10.1080/09658211.2010.537279 [Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). European American children generated more specific details than did Chinese children in both past and future events. Children of the two cultures relied similarly on general knowledge in their episodic thinking, and yet, they did so to a greater extent when compared with adults. In addition, similar to adults, children exhibited consistency in episodic specificity between past- and future-event construction, and they generated more specific details in past events compared with future events and in near events compared with distant events. The findings provide important insights for the development of episodic thinking in middle childhood and beyond.     

Meaning in Life in Emerging Adulthood: A Person‐Oriented Approach

The present study investigated naturally occurring profiles based on two dimensions of meaning in life: Presence of Meaning and Search for Meaning. Cluster analysis was used to examine meaning‐in‐life profiles, and subsequent analyses identified different patterns in psychosocial functioning for each profile. A sample of 8,492 American emerging adults (72.5% women) from 30 colleges and universities completed measures on meaning in life, and positive and negative psychosocial functioning. Results provided support for five meaningful yet distinguishable profiles. A strong generalizability of the cluster solution was found across age, and partial generalizability was found across gender and ethnicity. Furthermore, the five profiles showed specific patterns in relation to positive and negative psychosocial functioning. Specifically, respondents with profiles high on Presence of Meaning showed the most adaptive psychosocial functioning, whereas respondents with profiles where meaning was largely absent showed maladaptive psychosocial functioning. The present study provided additional evidence for prior research concerning the complex relationship between Presence of Meaning and Search for Meaning, and their relation with psychosocial functioning. Our results offer a partial clarification of the nature of the Search for Meaning process by distinguishing between adaptive and maladaptive searching for meaning in life.