San Antonio’s Barrio Gangs: Size,Scope, and Other Characteristics

I analyze data gathered from a sample of men who were gang members in San Antonio in the 1950s. Using subject-generated lists of gangs and reputable members citywide, the work examines the size, scope, and other salient characteristics of the barrio gang phenomenon from that era. By extrapolating rough estimates from Census data, qualitative fieldwork, and a police database, I find that the proportion of young Chicano males involved in gang activity today is comparable to what it was in the 1950s. In both eras, nearly 10% of the total population of Chicano males ages 12–19 in San Antonio are and were gang involved. Implications of this finding, study limitations, and future research are discussed.     

Utilizing Creative Expressive Techniques and Group Counseling to Improve Adolescents of Divorce Social-Relational Capabilities

Adolescents of divorce present challenges for mental health counselors unfamiliar with issues this population encounters. Problems such as negative societal perceptions and low behavioral self-efficacy can combine, causing long-lasting problems. Specifically, adolescents of divorce appear to be at risk for developing inadequate social/relational capabilities. To improve adolescents’ relational and social competencies, the authors advocate for a creative combination of expressive techniques and group counseling. This brief, six-week intervention may be a viable, creative tool for counselors working with this distinct client population.     

Disrupted attentional learning in high schizotypy: Evidence of aberrant salience

The relationship between learned variations in attention and schizotypy was examined in two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants low on a negative subscale of schizotypy exhibited an explicit bias in overt attention towards stimuli that were established as predictive of a trial outcome, relative to stimuli that were irrelevant. The same participants also showed a bias in learning about these stimuli when they presented in a novel context. Neither of these effects was observed in participants high in schizotypy. In Experiment 2, participants low on the negative subscale of schizotypy exhibited faster reaction times towards a target that was cued by a stimulus that had a history of predictive validity relative to a stimulus that had a history of irrelevance. Again, this effect was not present in participants high in schizotypy. These results imply a disruption in the normal allocation of attention to cues that have predictive significance in schizotypy.     

Television exposure predicts body size ideals in rural Nicaragua

Internalization of a thin ideal has been posited as a key risk factor in the development of pathological eating attitudes. Cross‐culturally, studies have found a preference for heavier bodies in populations with reduced access to visual media compared to Western populations. As yet, however, there has been little attempt to control for confounding variables in order to isolate the effects of media exposure from other cultural and ecological factors. Here, we examined preferences for female body size in relation to television consumption in Nicaraguan men and women, while controlling for the potential confounding effects of other aspects of Westernization and hunger. We included an urban sample, a sample from a village with established television access, and a sample from a nearby village with very limited television access. The highest BMI preferences were found in the village with least media access, while the lowest BMI preferences were found in the urban sample. Data from the rural sample with established television access were intermediate between the two. Amongst rural women in particular, greater television consumption was a stronger predictor of body weight preferences than acculturation, education, hunger, or income. We also found some evidence for television consumption increasing the likelihood of women seeking to lose weight, possibly via body shape preferences. Overall, these results strongly implicate television access in establishing risk factors for body image disturbances in populations newly gaining access to Western media.     

Moral Theory and Theorizing in Healthcare Ethics

This paper takes up the question of the role of philosophical moral theory in our attempts to resolve the ethical problems that arise in health care, with particular reference to the contention that we need theory to be determinative of our choice of actions. Moral theorizing is distinguished from moral theories and the prospects for determinacy from the latter are examined through a consideration of the most promising candidates: utilitarianism, deontology and the procedures involved in reflective equilibrium. It is argued that the current lack of any generally accepted method of solving moral problems, together with the extreme improbability of philosophy achieving a plausibly determinate theory, should encourage us to approach the problems in a spirit of agnosticism regarding the way in which theoretical material might be of relevance. The practical test for both moral theorizing and moral theories is thus not determinacy but the degree to which they increase our understanding of moral problems by serving, as they do in philosophy, as a means of inquiry into their nature.     

Three-dimensional spatial cognition: information in the vertical dimension overrides information from the horizontal

Fish live in three-dimensional environments, through which they swim with three translational and three rotational degrees of freedom. Navigating through such environments is recognised as a difficult problem, yet fish, and other animals that swim and fly, achieve this regularly. Despite this, the vast majority of research has considered how animals navigate horizontally from place to place and has ignored the vertical component. Here, we test the importance of the vertical axis of space for fish solving a three-dimensional spatial cognition task. We trained banded tetras (Astyanax fasciatus) to learn the route towards a goal in a rotating Y-maze in which the arms led either up and left or down and right in an environment that allowed access to visual landmarks providing horizontal and vertical information. Our results revealed that the landmarks increased navigational efficiency during training. However, these landmarks were ignored when the horizontal and vertical components were placed in conflict with each other by rotating the maze 90° during testing. From this surprising result, we conclude that the cues that are present in the vertical axis (presumably hydrostatic pressure) override landmark cues that have been shown to be salient in experiments that only consider the horizontal component of space.     

Recognition of own- and other-race faces in autism spectrum disorders

Empirical data regarding the extent of face recognition abnormalities in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is inconsistent. Here, 27 ASD and 47 typically developing (TD) children completed an immediate two-alternative forced-choice identity matching task. We contrasted recognition of own- and other-race faces, and, counter to prediction, we found a typical advantage for recognizing own- over other-race faces in both the ASD and TD groups. In addition, ASD and TD groups responded similarly to stimulus manipulations (use of identical or different photographs for identity matching and cropping stimuli to remove hair information). However, age-standardized scores varied widely within the ASD sample, and a subgroup of ASD participants with impaired face recognition did not exhibit a significant own-race recognition advantage. An explanation regarding early experience with faces is considered, and implications for research of individual variation within ASD are discussed.     

The other-race effect does not rely on memory: Evidence from a matching task

Viewers are typically better at remembering faces from their own race than from other races; however, it is not yet established whether this effect is due to memorial or perceptual processes. In this study, UK and Egyptian viewers were given a simultaneous face-matching task, in which the target faces were presented upright or upside down. As with previous research using face memory tasks, participants were worse at matching other-race faces than own-race faces and showed a stronger face inversion effect for own-race faces. However, subjects' performance on own and other-race faces was highly correlated. These data provide strong evidence that difficulty in perceptual encoding of unfamiliar faces contributes substantially to the other-race effect and that accounts based entirely on memory cannot capture the full data. Implications for forensic settings are also discussed.     

Genetic and environmental influences on personality trait stability and growth during the transition to adulthood: a three-wave longitudinal study

During the transition to adulthood individuals typically settle into adult roles in love and work. This transition also involves significant changes in personality traits that are generally in the direction of greater maturity and increased stability. Competing hypotheses have been offered to account for these personality changes: The intrinsic maturation hypothesis suggests that change trajectories are endogenous, whereas the life-course hypothesis suggests that these changes occur because of transactions with the social environment. This study investigated the patterns and origins of personality trait changes from ages 17 to 29 using 3 waves of Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire data provided by twins. Results suggest that (a) trait changes were more profound in the first relative to the second half of the transition to adulthood; (b) traits tend to become more stable during the second half of this transition, with all the traits yielding retest correlations between .74 and .78; (c) Negative Affectivity declined over time, and Constraint increased over time; minimal change was observed on agentic or communal aspects of Positive Emotionality; and (d) both genetic and nonshared environmental factors accounted for personality changes. Overall, these genetically informed results support a life-course perspective on personality development during the transition to adulthood.     

Mental representations of familiar faces

The Bruce and Young (1986) framework makes a number of important distinctions between the types of representation needed to recognize a familiar face. Here, we return to these, focussing particularly on face recognition units. We argue that such representations need to incorporate idiosyncratic within-person variability, asking questions such as 'What counts as a picture of Harrison Ford?'. We describe a mechanism for achieving this, and discuss the relation between image variability and episodic face memories, in the context of behavioural and neurophysiological data.