Alcohol and Male Acceptance of Sexual Aggression: The Role of Perceptual Ambiguity1

The present study assessed the effects of drinking and behavioral ambiguity on perceptions of sexual aggression. Male participants, randomly assigned to 1 of 4 alcohol conditions (low, moderate, placebo, or control) viewed a videotaped interaction involving a couple meeting before a blind date. In the receptive condition, the female was friendly and excited. In the nonreceptive condition, she showed rigid posture and lacked enthusiasm. Participants then judged the acceptability of sexual aggression against the female and the attribution of the female's responsibility. Findings indicated a significant interaction such that in the receptive condition, higher alcohol doses elicited both greater acceptance of sexual aggression and greater attribution of female responsibility. There was no impact of alcohol dosage in the nonreceptive condition.     

Self-relevance enhances susceptibility to false memory

Eyewitness testimony serves as important evidence in the legal system. Eyewitnesses of a crime can be either the victims themselves—for whom the experience is highly self-referential—or can be bystanders who witness and thus encode the crime in relation to others. There is a gap in past research investigating whether processing information in relation to oneself versus others would later impact people's suggestibility to misleading information. In two experiments (Ns = 68 and 122) with Dutch and Chinese samples, we assessed whether self-reference of a crime event (i.e., victim vs. bystander) affected their susceptibility to false memory creation. Using a misinformation procedure, we photoshopped half of the participants' photographs into a crime slideshow so that they saw themselves as victims of a nonviolent crime, while others watched the slideshow as mock bystander witnesses. In both experiments, participants displayed a self-enhanced suggestibility effect: Participants who viewed themselves as victims created more false memories after receiving misinformation than those who witnessed the same crime as bystanders. These findings suggest that self-reference might constitute a hitherto new risk factor in the formation of false memories when evaluating eyewitness memory reports.     

A comparison of functional analysis methods of inappropriate mealtime behavior

Investigators have evaluated two procedural variations for conducting a functional analysis of inappropriate mealtime behavior exhibited by children with feeding problems. One method involves prompting bites only in the escape condition (e.g., Najdowski et al., 2008). Another method involves prompting bites across all conditions (e.g., Piazza et al., 2003). We assessed the food refusal of 3 children diagnosed with a feeding disorder by comparing the two variations. The two methods resulted in different outcomes for 2 of 3 children. Prompting bites only in the escape condition identified a single function (i.e., escape). Prompting bites across all conditions identified multiple functions (i.e., escape and attention). We then examined the relative effects of extinction procedures (individually and in combination) to determine the validity of each method. Results of the treatment evaluation suggested that the procedural variation that failed to identify an attention function for 2 of 3 children produced false negative findings.     

Noncontingent and differential reinforcement in the treatment of pediatric feeding problems

We conducted functional analyses of the inappropriate mealtime behavior of 5 children diagnosed with feeding problems. Then, we compared the effects of differential and noncontingent reinforcement, and the relative effects of escape extinction with and without differential or noncontingent reinforcement, when escape extinction appeared necessary. Both reinforcement procedures were effective without escape extinction to treat food refusal for 1 child, but only differential reinforcement was effective without escape extinction to treat the child's liquid refusal. Escape extinction was necessary for 4 of 5 children. The addition of positive reinforcement resulted in beneficial effects (i.e., more stable acceptance, decreased inappropriate mealtime behavior or negative vocalizations) with 3 of 4 children. With escape extinction, differential reinforcement was more effective to treat food refusal for 2 children and noncontingent reinforcement was more effective for 1 child.     

Socio-economic status and the developing brain in adolescence: A systematic review

Socioeconomic status is associated with differences in social, cognitive, and behavioral outcomes for adolescents. Correspondingly, the period reflects continued dynamic, complex, and adaptive brain development. Research demonstrates associations between the developing adolescent brain and SES; however, such research has not been systematically integrated. We undertook a systematic search of studies and review 21 papers that examined both SES and brain development or functioning as measured during adolescence or young adulthood in nonclinical populations (13–25 years old). Few studies focused on architecture and such findings were varied. The majority of studies focused on functioning with two themes emerging. First, studies demonstrate different activation in regions of interest to cognitive and behavioral tasks relative to SES. Second, when similar neurological activation is evident, they can be related to different behavioral observations relative to SES. There is also evidence of different neurological functioning associated with SES with regard to different conceptualizations and coding of SES. Further, some of the reviewed studies identified potential mediators to the relationship, such as parenting practices, stress, and IQ. Overall, the findings suggest it is important to consider SES and neighborhood context within neuroscience research and practice.     

The role of social support in fostering school engagement in urban schools characterised by high risk of early leaving from education and training

Tackling early leaving from education and training (ELET) is one of the main education policy targets of the European Union and many of its member states. This paper offers new insights on this issue by studying how so-called at-risk students develop their educational trajectory by embedding their attitudes towards and engagement in schooling within the various support networks they navigate. We argue that the concept of school engagement, operationalized within the broader theoretical framework of the self-system model of motivational development, is crucial for better understanding ELET. The structural equation modelling is based upon survey data from 1401 students in grade 10 and 12 of vocational tracks across 26 different urban school locations in Flanders, Belgium. The results show that parental, peer and in particular teacher support directly and indirectly strengthen students’ academic and behavioural engagement. We argue that universal and targeted support by educators can positively impact pro-school attitudes and school engagement of so-called at-risk students and may be one of the most important strategies in addressing ELET.

     

Do Questions Get Infants Talking? Infant Vocal Responses to Questions and Declaratives in Maternal Speech

Maternal questions play a crucial role in early language acquisition by virtue of their special grammatical, prosodic and lexical forms, and their abundance in the input. Infants are able to discriminate questions from other sentence types and produce rising intonations in their own requests. This study examined whether caregiver questions were related to the quantity of infant vocalizations. Thirty‐six infants aged 10 and 14 months participated in a laboratory play session with their mothers. In separate blocks, mothers were instructed to ask questions and to refrain from asking questions. Both block‐level and utterance‐level analyses found no evidence that maternal questions affected the amount of infant‐response vocalizations. Mothers of 14‐month‐olds (but not 10‐month‐olds) tended to repeat questions. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The effects of colour and valence on news evaluation

Research across different fields of psychology has reported effects of colour cues on a variety of cognitive processes. Especially, the colour red has been shown to have striking influences. In the context of media reception, however, colour effects have been widely neglected so far. This study made a first step in this direction by investigating the effects of the colour red (compared with blue and grey) on the way news articles are evaluated. Two types of news were framed by a coloured border while the valence of the news content additionally varied. Based on 369 participants who read and evaluated the news articles online, we observed effects for colour cues and news valence in the absence of an interaction effect, indicating that the colour red induced approach motivation. However, only the contrast between red and grey reached statistical significance, indicating that chromatic and achromatic colours may differ in their perceived visual saliency. Overall, these results provide an important complement to previous studies and have practical implications for media researchers and producers.