Moral Concerns and Consumer Choice of Fresh and Processed Organic Foods1

This study used the theory of planned behavior (TPB) to examine the impact of moral concerns on intention to buy organic apples and organic pizza. Initially, beliefs were elicited from a group of 30 people using a combination of the traditional TPB elicitation technique supplemented by direct questioning about emotions associated with the behavior. The questionnaire—which included measures of behavioral beliefs, attitudes, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control, and measures of moral norms (worded both positively and negatively)—was completed by 281 people. Multiple regressions showed that for both foods, the positive moral component added significantly to the prediction of intention, while negative ones did not. Also, affective attitude was a strong predictor of intention for both foods.     

The role of the media in body image concerns among women: a meta-analysis of experimental and correlational studies

Research suggests that exposure to mass media depicting the thin-ideal body may be linked to body image disturbance in women. This meta-analysis examined experimental and correlational studies testing the links between media exposure to women's body dissatisfaction, internalization of the thin ideal, and eating behaviors and beliefs with a sample of 77 studies that yielded 141 effect sizes. The mean effect sizes were small to moderate (ds = -.28, -.39, and -.30, respectively). Effects for some outcome variables were moderated by publication year and study design. The findings support the notion that exposure to media images depicting the thin-ideal body is related to body image concerns for women.     

Neural Correlates of Reward Processing in Adolescents With a History of Inhibited Temperament

ABSTRACT— Functional imaging data were acquired during performance of a reward-contingency task in a unique cohort of adolescents (ages 14–18 years) who were characterized since infancy on measures of temperamental behavioral inhibition. Neural activation was examined in striatal structures (nucleus accumbens, putamen, caudate) with a known role in facilitating response to salient reward-related cues. Adolescents with a history of behavioral inhibition, relative to noninhibited adolescents, showed increased activation in the nucleus accumbens when they believed their selection of an action would affect reward outcome. Neural responses did not differ between the two groups when participants made a prespecified response that they knew would result in reward or when they produced random motor responses that they knew would not be rewarded. These results link inhibited temperament and perturbed neural responses to reward-contingency cues.     

Beyond sex differences: Family and occupational roles' impact on women's and men's dreams

The question addressed is: do recent changes in the occupational roles of women, with their indirect influence on men's lives, have an impact on the dreams of women and men? Three groups of parents (N=96) including in equal numbers, mothers at home, wage-earning mothers and fathers, kept a dream diary from which two dreams per dreamer were content analyzed. Assuming continuity between daytime and dream experiences, it was hypothesized that differences in manifest dream content would be a function of single versus dual role enactment, rather than sex. Contrary to predictions, statistical analyses performed on selected dream variables did not yield significant differences between groups for pleasant and unpleasant emotions, friendly interactions and aggression. Dream characters, and the concerns they reflect, were found to vary, though, according to social roles. Commitment to their family was reflected above all in the mothers' at home dreams, while commitment to their profession took precedence in those of the wage-earning mothers. Comparable commitment to work and family was found among the fathers. Findings suggest that as gender differences in waking life decrease, so may differences in dreams.     

Differential effectiveness of explicit verbal feedback on children's communication skills

In order to specify by which combination of content and form dimensions the explicit verbal feedback comes to be most effective in enhancing communication skills, a training experiment was designed where both dimensions were factorially manipulated. Forty children (mean age, 5–10) were randomly assigned to one of four treatment conditions: Interrogative Cognitive feedback, Declarative Cognitive feedback, Interrogative Perceptual feedback, and Declarative Perceptual feedback. The Cognitive type of feedback specified the successive cognitive steps underlying the comparison activity whereas the Perceptual type of feedback stressed only the necessity of describing perceptual differences when communicating. These two contents of feedback were either provided by a set of standardized questions or of declarative statements, after each trial of a speaking training task. Subjects were given a pretest, and immediate and delayed posttests comprised of a speaking task and a listening generalization task. A 2 (Contents) × 2 (Forms) × 2 (Tasks) × 2 (Post-tests) analysis of variance showed that all subjects performed significantly better on the speaking task than on the listening generalization task and that subjects in the Interrogative Cognitive condition performed better than subjects in the three other conditions, on both post-test tasks. Results emphasize the mutual facilitating effects of the Interrogative Form and the Cognitive Content of explicit feedback and are discussed in terms of the generalization and stability of the induced learning.     

Language skills in developmentally disabled children

Language measures of receptive and expressive vocabulary, story telling, and immediate verbal memory, as well as two perceptual tests, were administered to a group of developmentally disabled children, and three groups of normal children, one matched for chronological age, one for mean length of utterance, and one for performance on one of the perceptual tests. When diagnostic subgroups of “autism,” “childhood schizophrenia,” and “other severe disturbance” were formed using standard diagnostic tools, no language differences were found between diagnostic subgroups. When compared with the normal control groups, many of the language skills of the entire group of disabled children, and of the autistic children alone, were rather evenly delayed, showing only a relative sparing of the naming function, and a relative deficit on immediate verbal memory. Furthermore, a high correlation was found in a small subsample between the difficulty levels of morphemes in the disabled children and those reported for young normal children. Experienced special-education and early-childhood teachers could not discriminate the stories of the disabled children from those of young normal children. Analysis of the disabled children's error strategies, however, revealed features of their language not found in normal children's language: (1) extreme perseveration in test answers and stories, (2) attention to minor features of test stimuli, and (3) failure to adopt alternate, flexible communicative strategies. We conclude that the language acquisition of the developmentally disabled children is delayed but not deviant in its semantic and syntactic competence, and that current diagnostic practice does not differentiate linguistically distinct subgroups. We further argue that where developmentally disabled children do exhibit aberrant features of language, such deviance parallels similar features in other cognitive skills, and is not unique to language.     

Minority influence and idiosyncrasy credit: A new comparison of the Moscovici and Hollander theories of innovation

Moscovici's model of minority influence and Hollander's model of idiosyncrasy credit were compared in an experiment conducted with I6 discussion groups composed of four male undergraduates (N = 64) and a confederate. Their task was to rank-order unanimously 10 proposals to remediate urban problems, to which the confederate attempted to have one more added, thus introducing a norm change. Two variables were manipulated: Status of the innovator (minority versus elected leader) and Ideological criterion for innovation (avant-garde versus reformist). It was predicted that the consistent behavioural style of the minority would make him more influential under the avant-garde condition than under the reformist condition whereas the idiosyncrasy credit of the leader would make him more influential under the reformist condition. Although the adoption hypotheses failed to be supported, the evaluations of the confederate were consistent with both the Moscovici and Hollander models. While the minority con federate's action gained him visibility and distinctive attributions of determination and assurance, the leader con federate's initiative cost him his competence and cooperation credits. Strategies devised to adopt the innovation or to reject it (five groups versus four) pointed to the importance of interactive networks within the majority and to the decisive role played by group leaders for the innovator's influence to be exerted. These findings lead to speculate that Hollander's theorizing could be complementary to Moscovici's to account for the diffusion of minority influence.     

Hedonic contrast and condensation: Good stimuli make mediocre stimuli less good and less different

Loud sounds make soft sounds softer (contrast) and also make them less discriminable (which we callcondensation). We report on parallel phenomena in hedonics: Good stimuli reduce the pleasantness of less good stimuli, and also reduce people’s preferences among the less good stimuli. In Experiment 1, subjects rated the pleasantness of fruit juices diluted to approximate hedonic neutrality. Subjects who had just previously drunk and rated some good-tasting full-strength juices rated the diluted juices lower than did subjects who had not (hedonic contrast). In Experiment 2, subjects drank pairs of diluted juices and rated their preference for one juice over the other. Subjects who had just previously drunk and rated pairs of full-strength juices gave lower preference ratings between the diluted juices than did subjects who had not (condensation). Thus the same stimulus set produced contrast in Experiment 1 and condensation in Experiment 2, paralleling results in loudness.     

Involvement of alpha-bungarotoxin-sensitive nicotinic receptors in long-term memory formation in the honeybee (Apis mellifera)

In the honeybee Apis mellifera, multiple-trial olfactory conditioning of the proboscis extension response specifically leads to long-term memory (LTM) which can be retrieved more than 24 h after learning. We studied the involvement of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors in the establishment of LTM by injecting the nicotinic antagonists mecamylamine (1 mM), alpha-bungarotoxin (alpha-BGT, 0.1 mM) or methyllycaconitine (MLA, 0.1 mM) into the brain through the median ocellus 20 min before or 20 min after multiple-trial learning. The retention tests were performed 1, 3, and 24 h after learning. Pre-training injections of mecamylamine induced a lower performance during conditioning but had no effect on LTM formation. Post-training injections of mecamylamine did not affect honeybees' performances. Pre-training injections of MLA or post-training injection of alpha-BGT specifically induced LTM impairment whereas acquisition as well as memory retrieval tested 1 or 3 h after learning was normal. This indicates that brain injections of alpha-BGT and MLA did not interfere with learning or medium-term memory. Rather, these blockers affect the LTM. To explain these results, we advance the hypothesis that honeybee alpha-BGT-sensitive acetylcholine receptors are also sensitive to MLA. These receptors could be essential for triggering intracellular mechanisms involved in LTM. By contrast, medium-term memory is not dependent upon these receptors but is affected by mecamylamine.