Adolescents' values, sexuality, and contraception in a rural New York county

75 male and 88 female high school students in a rural county of New York completed a questionnaire asking about personal values and sexual experiences. Religiosity was not likely to affect the incidence of intercourse or effectiveness of contraceptive use. Students with more liberal premarital sexual and profeminist standards usually became more sexually intimate with their dates than did conservative students, but these standards did not predict coital frequency or effective contraceptive use. Different groups exhibited remarkably homogeneous sexual and contraceptive behavior. Nonvirgins had coitus sporadically or on the average of only twice a month. In addition, regardless of their values, most nonvirgins were contraceptive risk takers, partly for fear of interfering with pleasure, and partly because sporadic sex was not perceived by the adolescents to be risky. Rejecting the most, reliable methods available (e.g. birth control pills and IUDs), the condom was the most effective contraceptive used by the majority (57%) and 21% of the nonvirgins relied exclusively on such ineffective contraceptives as withdrawal, trusting in luck, and douching. Younger adolescents may be at particular risk, being more impulse motivated and egocentric, and less likely to seek adult-furnished family planning, especially in a rural community where anonymity is more difficult to protect. Given the uniformity of contraceptive behavior among younger adolescents, and the increasing likelihood of contraceptive use with increasing age of 1st coitus, future study will be needed on the impact of cognitive and emotional maturity, as well as that of environment and family planning resources on young adolescents' contraceptive use.     

The independence of endogenous and exogenous temporal attention

Temporal attention is the focusing of perceptual resources at a particular point in time. Valid temporal cue information has the capability to improve performance by reducing reaction times, while invalid information has the possibility of impairing performance. The performance difference between valid and invalid conditions is called a temporal cueing effect (TCE). We explored how different alerting mechanisms interact with a participant’s ability to utilize temporal information cues, using the Kingstone (The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 44(1), 69–104, 1992) temporal cueing paradigm. Extracting the alerting procedure from Lawrence and Klein (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 142(2), 560–572, 2013), one of two different temporally contingent warning signals were presented to participants during a trial. The “hi-intensity” warning signal increases intensity and elicits both exogenous and endogenous alerting mechanisms. The “no-intensity” warning signal is isointense relative to baseline and elicits only endogenous alerting mechanisms. Two experiments conducted previously using a discrimination task showed interference between the signal intensity and task difficulty, where the “no-intensity” signal failed to elicit TCEs. In the present study, we implemented a detection task, reducing the mental effort required for a response. The results showed equal TCEs in both signal conditions. We argue for independence of these alerting mechanisms, by way of Sternberg’s (Acta Psychologica, 30, 276–315, 1969) additive factor method. Arguments contrasting what mechanism is being impacted by this paradigm are further outlined.     

Timing conditions and the magnitude of gender differences on the Mental Rotations Test

In two experiments, we examined the effect of timing conditions on the magnitude of gender differences in performance on the Mental Rotations Test (MRT). In Experiment 1, each of 196 females and 119 males was administered the MRT via a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation in one of five timing conditions (15, 20, 25, 30, and 40 sec). The participants were exposed to each MRT item for the period specified in the assigned timing condition. Experiment 2 was conducted to address flaws found in Experiment 1. Accordingly, each of 105 females and 105 males was individually administered the task in one of three timing conditions (15 sec, 25 sec, or unlimited duration). The results of both experiments showed that the magnitude of gender differences was similar across timing conditions when a conventional scoring method was used. An analysis of guessing behavior generally indicated that men tend to show little effect of timing conditions, whereas women's propensity to guess increases when they are given more time to respond. In general, the results supported an interpretation of gender differences on the MRT that relies on the joint operation of performance factors and level of spatial ability.     

Significance of violence in stories of young children

Stories told by 72 5-yr.-old children were scored for themes of violence and correlated with their mothers' reports of aggressive or fearful behaviors. Values for the entire sample were not significant. However, when data for Hispanic children were removed from the sample the correlation of violent stories to ratings of children's aggression was significant (r = .27) and for a count of violent words r = .30. The correlation of violent words to fearfulness was .28 and for girls only .35. The count of violent words was also correlated with African-American children's ratings of fearfulness (r = .64).     

Predicting the shape of distance functions in curve tracing: Evidence for a zoom lens operator

Jolicoeur, Ullman, and MacKay (1986) showed that the time to confirm that two dots are on the same curve increases monotonically, but nonlinearly, as the curve distance between the two dots increases. These displays contained two curves and two dots. On same trials, the two dots were on the same curve (target curve), while the other curve served as a foil (distractor curve). The monotonically increasing effects of curve distance on response times for same trials suggested that the intervening curve segment was traced. In the present investigation of the source of the nonlinearity in these distance functions, it was hypothesized that differences in the distractor curves may have allowed a curve tracing operator with zoom lens properties to widen its receptive field while tracing parts of certain target curves. The wider receptive field may have allowed faster tracing over certain segments, owing to a reduced number of shifts required by the operator to scan the curve. The consequence of training certain segments of the curve more quickly than other segments of the curve would be a nonlinear effect of distance. A new set of stimuli was created for testing this hypothesis directly. Fairly linear distance effects were found for stimuli that contained a distractor curve that constrained the breadth of the postulated curve tracing operator, whereas stimuli that contained a distractor curve that could allow for a larger receptive field yielded nonlinear distance functions. The results are compared with the predictions of three quantitative models: pixel-by-pixel tracing; Jolicoeur, Ullman, and MacKay's (1991) bipartite operator; and a new zoom lens model, analogous to the zoom lens model of visual attention. The results were fit best by the latter model, in which tracing is accomplished by tracking the curve with a variably sized local operator.     

Who or what is the preembryo?

...The moral status -- and specifically the controversial issue of personhood -- is related to attainment of developmental individuality...This contrasts with the view that holds that personhood occurs earlier, at the point of genetic uniqueness. I believe that an embryo that has developed to the point where it can be one individual and one individual only, differs in moral status from a preembryo that has not, even if in many cases we may choose to treat them similarly...In view of the conviction that the preembryo is not yet a person and that its statistical potential for becoming such is small, it is not clear that nontherapeutic experiments can be excluded in principle. However, because the preembryo does have intrinsic potential...the preembryo should be treated as a person...Any exceptions from the prima facie duty to treat the preembryo as a person should be based on criteria established at the national level....