Exploring the sexual world of the unemployed adolescent

Unemployed adolescents may be at substantial risk of the negative consequences of sexuality. This study investigated the sexual perceptions and practices of 125 unemployed adolescents. Gender, but not age, differences were found in sexual perceptions and practices. Overall, this sample was engaging in high levels of sexual activity with a low rate of condom use.     

Discrimination of Facial Identity and Facial Affect by Temporal and Frontal Lobectomy Patients

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which lobectomy affects ability to discriminate facial identity or facial expression. Fifteen right temporal, 15 left temporal, 5 right frontal, and 4 left frontal lobectomy patients, pair-matched for age, sex, and education to normal control subjects, participated in this study. Tasks included a Facial Identity Matching Task and a Facial Affect Matching task. The lobectomized patients as a whole were significantly impaired on both tasks (22% decrement in performance). The patients made twice as many errors resulting from perseveration of response-set of the first condition (identity or emotion matching) into the second condition. The site of lobectomy did not influence general performance on any one task or selective performance on any subset of affective categories. It was concluded that all four brain regions play a significant and equal role in face processing, and that circuits more specifically dedicated to visual face processing, which are responsible for hemispheric dominance affects and affect/identity dissociations, are probably located more posteriorly in the brain. Finally, it was concluded that perseveration of acquired habit may, under specific conditions, characterize temporal lobe dysfunction just as much as frontal lobe dysfunction.     

Social Identity,Relative Deprivation,and Coping With the Threat of Position Loss: A Field Study Among Native Shopkeepers in Amsterdam1

The present study investigates how native shopkeepers in Amsterdam respond to the threat experienced by the emergence of immigrant stores. A survey among 101 native shopkeepers confirmed that psychological, rather than instrumental, considerations play an important role. First, perceptions of fraternal deprivation were relatively independent of the amount of egoistical deprivation people perceived. Instead, the experience of fraternal deprivation was related to people's identification as native shopkeepers. Second, egoistical deprivation resulted in negative perceptions of all other entrepreneurs, regardless of their ethnic origin. Third, regardless of perceived egoistical deprivation, native shopkeepers were more likely to discredit immigrant entrepreneurs, as they thought they were more fraternally deprived.     

Gender and managers' causal attributions for subordinate performance: A field story

The study addresses the effect of gender on managers' causal explanations for subordinate work performance. Prior laboratory studies suggest women's work performance will be attributed in a manner disadvantageous to their career progression within organizations. There are, however, numerous reasons to question the generalizability of the laboratory work to organizational settings. The study was performed to address the gap in field research on this issue. Ninety-three mainly Caucasian managers in two organizations made attributions for successful and unsuccessful performance of direct subordinates. Contrary to the hypotheses, subordinate gender was unrelated to managers' causal explanations for either positive or negative outcomes. Implications of the results for future research on attributional gender effects in organizational settings are discussed.     

Age changes in nonverbal decoding as a function of increasing amounts of information

A test of nonverbal decoding skill (the PONS test) was administered to 632 subjects of eight different age levels, ranging from third graders to adults (Ages 8–33 years). Females were more accurate than males, older subjects were more accurate than younger ones, and all samples tended to decode more successfully when more information was available. Three different analyses showed that the increase in accuracy with increasing amounts of information was more pronounced for the older than for the younger groups. This differential effectiveness in the utilization of available information was discussed in terms of processing capacity, effort, and strategies for sampling a diversity of cues.