Belief in a Just World and Jury Decisions in a Civil Rape Trial

When people's belief in a just world (BJW) is challenged, it can be restored by attributing blame to the victim or alleviating the victim's suffering. In criminal cases, jurors can attribute responsibility to victims, but cannot alleviate suffering. Participants ( n = 106) heard a taped civil rape case. The effect of age of plaintiff, gender of participant, and type of participant on mock jurors' reactions to a plaintiff were examined. Participants evaluated responsibility of plaintiff and awarded monetary damages. It was hypothesized that, given this opportunity to compensate the victim, jurors would be less likely to derogate the victim. As hypothesized, women with high and low BJW attributed the same level of responsibility to the plaintiff but those with a high BJW awarded more monetaly damages. Men with high BJW awarded much less in damages than did men with low BJW. The just-world theory appears to explain many of the decisions made by mock jurors.     

The affect heuristic in judgments of risks and benefits

This paper re‐examines the commonly observed inverse relationship between perceived risk and perceived benefit. We propose that this relationship occurs because people rely on affect when judging the risk and benefit of specific hazards. Evidence supporting this proposal is obtained in two experimental studies. Study 1 investigated the inverse relationship between risk and benefit judgments under a time‐pressure condition designed to limit the use of analytic thought and enhance the reliance on affect. As expected, the inverse relationship was strengthened when time pressure was introduced. Study 2 tested and confirmed the hypothesis that providing information designed to alter the favorability of one's overall affective evaluation of an item (say nuclear power) would systematically change the risk and benefit judgments for that item. Both studies suggest that people seem prone to using an ‘affect heuristic’ which improves judgmental efficiency by deriving both risk and benefit evaluations from a common source—affective reactions to the stimulus item. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Minimizing Mistreatment by Female Adults: The Influence of Gender-Based Social Categories and Personality Differences on Attitudes about Child Sexual Abuse

We investigated the effects of gender-based social categories (i.e., men, women, boys, and girls) on attitudes about child sexual abuse and individual differences in the use of such categories. In four experiments, we systematically varied perpetrators’ sex and victims’ sex. In three investigations, we assessed personality variables potentially related to participants’ use of these social categories. Across these four experiments, we varied perpetrator-victim relationships (teacher-student, neighbors) and victims’ ages. In experiment one, individuals had the least negative attitude about child sexual abuse involving adult female neighbors and eighth grade male neighbors. In experiment two, we replicated this effect with fifth grade victims and demonstrated that attitudes were moderated by individual differences in intolerance of ambiguity. In experiment three, we again replicated the aforementioned effect while (a) extending this finding to teacher-student relationships with eighth grade adolescent victims and (b) demonstrating the need for cognition was a moderator. In experiment four, we again replicated (a) our perpetrator sex/victim sex interactive effect and (b) need for cognition moderation while also demonstrating that these effects were applicable to fifth grade victims. Methodological limitations as well as clinical and policy implications (e.g., attenuating the underreporting incidents of child sexual abuse) are discussed.     

Gender,Masculinity Threat,and Support for Transgender Rights: An Experimental Study

Sex Roles - We explore how gender, attitudes about traditional gender roles, and threats to masculinity and femininity affect U.S. participants’ support for transgender rights. First, we...     

Attachment Change in Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy and Sexual Satisfaction Outcomes in a Two-year Follow-up Study

Emotionally focused couple therapy (EFT) is an empirically validated attachment based approach to couple therapy. From an EFT perspective, sexual functioning is viewed within the context of an attachment bond, but sexual satisfaction in EFT has not been empirically tested. We examined self-reported sexual satisfaction across 24?months in a sample of 32 couples who received an average of 21 EFT sessions. We found that sexual satisfaction increased across six time points from pre to post therapy and across follow-up (6, 12, 18, and 24?months), and that decreases in attachment avoidance from pre to post therapy predicted increases in sexual satisfaction across time. These findings provide evidence that EFT may help couples improve their sexual satisfaction by reducing attachment avoidance in therapy.     

Semantic and visual relatedness of distractors impairs episodic retrieval of pictures in a divided attention paradigm

We used a divided attention (DA) paradigm to infer the representational codes needed to support episodic retrieval of pictures, by measuring susceptibility to memory interference from different distracting tasks. Participants made recognition memory decisions to semantically categorized sets of pictures while simultaneously making size judgments to a set of visually-presented distractor pictures. Recognition accuracy was worse and response times were slower under DA conditions relative to full attention (FA), regardless of semantic relatedness of distractors to targets (Experiment 1). Similarly, we found no differential memory interference under DA relative to FA when distractor pictures were either visually (but not semantically), semantically (but not visually), or unrelated to the targets (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, memory interference was significantly larger under DA at retrieval when distractors were both semantically and visually similar to the targets. Findings suggest episodic memory for pictures requires access to either visually- or semantically-based representations for optimal performance.     

Do Marital Conflict Behaviors in Response to a Novel Stressor Uniquely Predict Adolescent Outcomes?

The goal of this study was to examine whether mothers’ and fathers’ marital conflict behaviors in response to a novel stressor are uniquely predictive of adolescent outcomes. Previous research establishing the detrimental consequences of marital conflict for child outcomes has relied exclusively on assessments of conflict that measure reoccurring or past conflict. From 153 adolescents and/or both of their parents, reports were gathered on marital conflict, adolescent conflict appraisals, parent-adolescent relationship quality, and adolescent adjustment. Couples engaged in two marital problem-solving interaction tasks—one that elicited conflict behaviors by requiring discussion of salient, reoccurring topics of disagreement and one that prompted conflict behaviors by requiring that couples worked together to solve an unfamiliar problem. Results indicated that compared to behaviors during the marital conflict discussion as well as parent-reports of the frequency, intensity, and resolution of typical conflict, conflict behaviors in response to a novel stressor, particularly those displayed by mothers, were uniquely associated with adolescents’ conflict appraisals and dimensions of the parent-adolescent relationship but not adolescent adjustment. Specifically more-negative (relative to positive) conflict behaviors in response to the novel stressor was associated with more-negative adolescent conflict appraisals; mothers’ more-negative conflict behaviors in response to a novel stressor were also linked to adolescents reporting less parental monitoring. In contrast, parent reports of typical marital conflict uniquely predicted conflict property appraisals, the affective quality of mother-adolescent relationships, and adolescent adjustment. Implications for future research elucidating associations between conflict behaviors in response to a novel stressor on children and families are discussed.     

Formal Lessons Improve Informal Educational Experiences: The Influence of Prior Knowledge on Student Engagement

Educational experiences can be influenced by novel experiences, yet educators often overlook the influence novelty exerts on students. This quasi-experimental study manipulated prior knowledge before a zoo field trip for 210 urban 7^th-grade students from 2 schools, 1 comprised mostly of low-socioeconomic status (SES) families and 1 comprised mostly of middle-SES families. Students participated in 1 of 2 preparatory lessons, only 1 of which previewed field trip-related content, thereby increasing prior knowledge for half the students from each school. Prior knowledge significantly increased learner engagement, measured through attentiveness, from both schools, but in different types of behaviors. Students from the low-SES school demonstrated more attentiveness if their preparatory lesson previewed field trip material than if it was unrelated to the field trip. Students from the middle SES school displayed the same level of attentiveness in both conditions (and overall higher than the low-SES students). This study highlights complexities associated with prior knowledge and reveals strategies to help improve engagement levels for students visiting informal learning environments.     

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.