Making reference: The cohesive use of pronouns in the narrative discourse of hemidecorticate adolescents

The cohesive use of referential language in narrative production reveals communicative goals as well as specific aspects of language use. A formalism for analyzing pronominal cohesion was developed and applied to the narrative discourse of three hemidecorticate adolescents. The results revealed hemisphere-dependent differences in overall narrative skill as well as distinct individual discourse strategies. Neither left hemidecorticate planned narration in extended discourse units: One demonstrated a linear and highly explicit discourse style with redundant over-statement of referent nouns and the other produced narratives cluttered with pronouns of both correct and ambiguous reference, relying on nonpersonal pronouns at considerable cost to narrative specificity. The right hemidecorticate produced narratives that were more economical in form and richer in content: He was the only subject able to maintain simultaneous story lines with multiple pronouns and referential relationships cohesively embedded. All subjects expressed at least some story content, but only the right hemidecorticate narratives conveyed suggestion and implication as well as explicit statement.     

Inspiration From Role Models and Advice for Moving Forward

This Behavior Therapy series on overcoming the glass ceiling followed from a highly attended panel at ABCT on the same topic. The current paper summarizes the common themes across the various papers in this series with respect to obstacles prominent women have faced, and how we can learn from their stories to help inform the future. These themes include the importance of role models, messages from a supportive environment, difficulties balancing careers with children, coordinating careers with family, importance of taking charge of one's career, moving forward despite negative internal and external messages, and questions about whether things have changed substantially. In addition, this paper contains a summary of the helpful advice from accomplished women in academia for navigating the academic waters. It is our aspiration that going forward this series will stimulate other conversations as well as increase thought, behavior, solidarity, and awareness about this topic so that we can continue to work toward a future when things will continue to improve for women.     

Assessing emotion sensitivity in female offenders with borderline personality symptoms: results from a fear-potentiated startle paradigm

An instructed fear-conditioning paradigm was used to measure fear-potentiated startle (FPS) in a sample of 80 Caucasian, female offenders assessed using the Personality Assessment Inventory-Borderline Features Scale (Morey, 1991). As predicted, women with higher levels of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) symptoms showed significantly greater FPS than women with lower levels when required to focus attention on the threat-relevant dimension of the experimental stimuli. However, FPS was not greater for women with higher levels of BPD symptoms in the two conditions that required participants to direct attention away from the threat-relevant dimension. These results highlight the importance of attention for moderating the association between BPD symptoms and exaggerated responses to threat-relevant information and may, therefore, help to resolve the inconsistent evidence on emotional reactivity in BPD. Moreover, the potential importance of attentional factors in BPD may shed new light on prominent symptoms of the disorder and existing theoretical perspectives on BPD.     

Psychopathy increases perceived moral permissibility of accidents

Psychopaths are notorious for their antisocial and immoral behavior, yet experimental studies have typically failed to identify deficits in their capacities for explicit moral judgment. We tested 20 criminal psychopaths and 25 criminal nonpsychopaths on a moral judgment task featuring hypothetical scenarios that systematically varied an actor's intention and the action's outcome. Participants were instructed to evaluate four classes of actions: accidental harms, attempted harms, intentional harms, and neutral acts. Psychopaths showed a selective difference, compared with nonpsychopaths, in judging accidents, where one person harmed another unintentionally. Specifically, psychopaths judged these actions to be more morally permissible. We suggest that this pattern reflects psychopaths' failure to appreciate the emotional aspect of the victim's experience of harm. These findings provide direct evidence of abnormal moral judgment in psychopathy.     

Application of a CBPR Framework to Inform a Multi-level Tobacco Cessation Intervention in Public Housing Neighborhoods

African American women in urban, high poverty neighborhoods have high rates of smoking, difficulties with quitting, and disproportionate tobacco-related health disparities. Prior research utilizing conventional "outsider driven" interventions targeted to individuals has failed to show effective cessation outcomes. This paper describes the application of a community-based participatory research (CBPR) framework to inform a culturally situated, ecological based, multi-level tobacco cessation intervention in public housing neighborhoods. The CBPR framework encompasses problem identification, planning and feasibility/pilot testing, implementation, evaluation, and dissemination. There have been multiple partners in this process including public housing residents, housing authority administrators, community health workers, tenant associations, and academic investigators. The advisory process has evolved from an initial small steering group to our current institutional community advisory boards. Our decade-long CBPR journey produced design innovations, promising preliminary outcomes, and a full-scaled implementation study in two states. Challenges include sustaining engagement with evolving study partners, maintaining equity and power in the partnerships, and long-term sustainability of the intervention. Implications include applicability of the framework with other CBPR partnerships, especially scaling up evolutionary grassroots involvement to multi-regional partnerships.     

Foreign Language Exposure,Cultural Threat,and Opposition to Immigration

In the present article, we extend the notion of cultural threat posed by immigrants beyond its current conceptualization as symbolic, collective‐level threats to American culture and identity. Instead, we argue that routine encounters with non‐English‐speaking immigrants cause many individuals to feel threatened because of real barriers to interpersonal communication and exchange. We draw upon survey and experimental data to demonstrate that local contact with immigrants who speak little to no English, as well as incidental exposure to the Spanish language, heighten feelings of cultural threat, which increases anti‐immigrant sentiment and policy preferences.     

New insights into the impact of digital signage as a retail atmospheric tool

This article investigates the previously little‐researched role of digital signage (DS) in retail atmospherics, using an environmental psychology framework, drawing support from the Limited Capacity Model of Mediated Message Processing (LCM). DS consists of screen displays in public spaces showing video. The method consisted of a structured questionnaires quasi‐experiment (n = 357), comparing before and after DS installation against an unchanged control mall. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of DS, which has a positive effect on shoppers' approach behaviors such as spending, mediated by perceptions of the retail environment and positive affect. Results are limited as the DS screens content was information based, whereas according to LCM, people pay more attention to emotion‐eliciting communications. The results have practical implications as DS appeals to employed shoppers. This study contributes to theory by providing a rare longitudinal environmental psychology study of the effects of an atmospheric stimulus on real shoppers in a real retail context. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On the (non)persuasive power of a brain image

The persuasive power of brain images has captivated scholars in many disciplines. Like others, we too were intrigued by the finding that a brain image makes accompanying information more credible (McCabe & Castel in Cognition 107:343-352, 2008). But when our attempts to build on this effect failed, we instead ran a series of systematic replications of the original study—comprising 10 experiments and nearly 2,000 subjects. When we combined the original data with ours in a meta-analysis, we arrived at a more precise estimate of the effect, determining that a brain image exerted little to no influence. The persistent meme of the influential brain image should be viewed with a critical eye.