“Innocent Victims” of AIDS: Identifying the Subtext1

References to “innocent victims” of AIDS in the media and public discourse imply that other people with AIDS or HIV are blameworthy. In the present study, college undergraduates read two newspaper articles about an “innocent victim” of AIDS, and were required to report what they understood to be the “victim's” message. Very few participants reported the subtext without prompting. When asked directly, however, most respondents (88%) agreed that the “victim” was making an implicit statement about other people with AIDS, and 70% of this subgroup correctly identified the subtext. Compared to other respondents, those who identified the subtext had more positive attitudes toward homosexuals.     

TWO MEASURES OF PREFERENCE DURING FORCED-CHOICE ASSESSMENTS

A forced-choice preference assessment was conducted in which two dependent measures were used to select preferred stimuli: (a) approach responding and (b) latency to the first aberrant response. Stimuli identified as preferred based on both dependent measures were then evaluated during treatment. The results suggested that latency may be a useful measure in the selection of preferred stimuli during forced-choice assessments.     

Rational emotive behavior therapy women's groups: A twenty year retrospective

Editor's Note: Janet Wofe was invited to describe her significant contributions to the evolution of cognitive/behavioral/feminist women's groups, including the personal influences that led her to this particular career focus. In this retrospective, key elements in REBT women's groups are highlinghte and illustrated with a case example; and changes that have occurred in these groups over the past twenty years are described. A comparison is made with other popular types of women's groups and suggestions offered for the further development of gender-informed REBT.     

Visual pop-out in infants: Evidence for preattentive search in 3- and 4-month-olds

The present experiment tested for preattentive visual search in 3- and 4-month-old infants using stimulus features described by Treisman and Souther (1985) as producing visual “pop-out” effects in adults. Infants were presented with two visual arrays to the left and right of midline. One array comprised homogeneous elements, while the other had a discrepant element embedded in it. On the basis of previous research, we expected infants to fixate the array containing the embedded discrepant element. The pattern of fixation indicated detection of the embedded discrepant element for both age groups, but only with stimuli shown to elicit visual pop out in adults. This asymmetry in detection is consistent with the presence of preattentive visual search in infants as young as 3 months.     

Influence of Age,Gender, and Context on Attitudes Toward Sexist/Nonsexist Language: Is Sport a Special Case?

This study examined the influence of age andgender on attitudes toward sexist/nonsexist language insport and nonsport contexts. College students,university personnel, and business people (N = 292) took the Inventory of Attitudes towardSexist/Nonsexist Language. Seven percent wereAfrican-American, 2% Asian-American, 2%Hispanic-American, 1% Native American, 85%European-American, and 3% other. They averaged 3.34 on a 5-point scale,indicating ambivalence. Participants 23 years old andabove were more favorable toward nonsexist language thanwere younger participants (p < .01). Women were more supportive than men (p < .01). Age andgender explained 23% of the variance. The significantdifference between sport/nonsport contexts was notmeaningful, nor was a significant gender by contextinteraction. Sport was not a special case of resistance tononsexist language.     

Characteristics of Adult Caretakers of Children and Youth Served by an Urban Child Welfare Agency

The child welfare system of the early 1990s was marked by the proliferation of home-based services. Research on the effectiveness of various home-based interventions indicates results have been equivocal. The need to make explicit the specific characteristics of the adults and children targeted for home-based services, particularly families from diverse cultural backgrounds, has been identified as a critically needed contribution to the literature. In this study, the characteristics and service utilization experiences of adults and families served in an urban, home-based, child welfare program was examined. The results are discussed in relation to findings on the characteristics and experiences of adults and families served in other settings. Implications for future research and service delivery are discussed.     

Anomaly Detection: Eye Movement Patterns

The symptom of a garden path in sentence processing is an apparent anomaly in the input string. This anomaly signals to the parser that an error has occurred, and provides cues for how to repair it. Anomaly detection is thus an important aspect of sentence processing. In the present study, we investigated how the parser responds to unambiguous sentences that contain syntactic anomalies and pragmatic anomalies, examining records of eye movement during reading. While sensitivity to the two kinds of anomaly was very rapid and essentially simultaneous, qualitative differences existed in the patterns of first-pass reading times and eye regressions. The results are compatible with the proposal that syntactic information and pragmatic information are used differently in garden-path recovery.     

Strategically Speaking: The Problem of Essentializing Terms in Feminist Theory and Feminist Organizational Talk

This paper examines the discursive construction of collective identity in several feminist organizations, as a way of shedding new light on the debate over essentializing or totalizing terms in contemporary feminist/postmodernist theory. We argue that while this debate is about language, it has remained largely untouched by the insights of a discursive approach. The latter as we take it up here treats language as irremediably strategic or interested. In contrast, the feminist argument over essentializing terms appears to hold to a correspondence version of language, a position which limits the debate in fatal ways. Part 1 reviews the argument that terms such as women, feminist and feminist identity are essentializing discourses which dominate by silencing difference. Part 2 then considers the way one such concept – feminist identity – is actually constructed and used in the routine talk of members of feminist organizations. In Part 3 we draw out the implications of a discursive approach to such terms for the feminist/postmodernist debate.     

Cue familiarity but not target retrievability enhances feeling-of-knowing judgments.

Two hypotheses concerning people's ability to predict later memory performance for unrecalled items were investigated. The target retrievability hypothesis states that feeling-of-knowing judgments (FKJs) are based on partial target information; and the cue familiarity hypothesis asserts that they are based on recognition of the cues. In Experiments 1 and 2, subjects either generated or read the targets of paired associates. Half of the cues had been primed in a pleasantness-rating task. The generation manipulation increased recall but had no effect on FKJs. Cue priming had no effect on recall but increased FKJs. In Experiment 3, using general information questions, primed after the initial recall attempt, both cue and target priming increased FKJs. Experiment 4, which remedied difficulties in Experiment 3, showed no effect of target priming whereas cue priming increased FKJs. The results favor the cue familiarity hypothesis.