Outcomes of an Intensive Couple Relationship Education Program with Fragile Families

Couple relationship education (CRE) has been proposed as one means to help fragile families stabilize their relationships. The current research is one of the first studies to look at the outcomes of a CRE program with fragile families in the areas of couple stability and marriage formation. Data were from the Family Formation Project, a federal and state funded program working with fragile family couples (n = 96) in a metropolitan area. A historical cohort control group quasi‐experimental research design was used with a matched control group from the Fragile Family and Child Well‐being Study. The intervention consisted of in‐home education and support, group educational events, and social service referrals. Findings showed that couples had the same rate of couple stability as the control group but an increased rate of marriage. These findings suggest that CRE can help fragile families achieve marriage when that is their goal, but that some fragile families may need more than CRE to help them stabilize their relationship, or they may be better off separating.     

The Impact of Adolescent Deviance on Marital Trajectories

Marriage is a key life event that has numerous benefits. Recent research extends these benefits to include desistance from crime and drug use yet there has been little investigation regarding whether deviant behavior in adolescence impacts long-term marital patterns. Since rates of marriage are low among African Americans and rates of adolescent deviance and crime are high, we investigate the long-term relationship between the two drawing on longitudinal data from the Woodlawn cohort of urban African Americans. This article investigates whether serious adolescent delinquency and marijuana use predict marital trajectories, controlling for known correlates. Multivariate findings indicate that within this African-American population, deviance predicts the probability of marriage, stability of marriage, and timing of marriage for men yet deviance relates solely to the probability of marriage for women.     

Social Judgement Theory

This paper first explores a number of themes in the psychological system developed by the Austrian-American psychologist, Egon Brunswik, focusing on those that had a formative influence on Social Judgement Theory. We show that while perception was a recurring ground for Brunswik's empirical and theoretical work, his psychology was a psychology of cognition in the broadest sense. Next, two major themes in Social Judgement Theory— functionalism and probabilism— are described, and the elegant formulation known as Brunswik's Lens Model is introduced. Some methodological and theoretical implications of these themes are presented. The paper concludes with Hammond's Cognitive Continuum Theory (CCT), which is a theory describing modes of cognition and how those modes are influenced by task characteristics.     

Understanding and supporting the career implications of international assignments

International assignments represent an important form of migration in the global economy. In contrast to most other migrants, international assignees enjoy a relatively privileged position in the labor market. Authored by a diverse team of academics and practitioners, this paper draws on insights from empirical research and unpublished examples from practice to explore how international assignees can be supported before, during and after the international assignment. We move beyond the traditional expatriate cycle as a frame of reference, arguing that many of the challenges from the individual perspective are continuous, often pertinent well before and well after the assignment. We call for a reframing of career support for international assignees to reflect the reality of the experience. We propose that future studies of the impact of international assignments on career use more sophisticated methods including longitudinal studies of career trajectories and experiences of support practices. (138)     

Long-term retention of information about presentation modality by children and adults

A mixed-modality continuous recognition task followed by a final recognition test after 0 h, 4 h, 1 day, or 7 days was administered to third- and fourth-grade children and adults. Subjects gave recognition responses and reported presentation modalities. Forgetting rates for both words and input mode were invariant with age. The decay functions for presentation modality were affected, however, by the initial input mode, with modality identification declining more rapidly for words heard first than for words seen first. Information about whether a word was seen or heard remained in memory for at least 4 h. The results demonstrate that long-term-memory representations contain a great deal of information about input mode and suggest that the theoretical distinction between automatic and effortful processing may be a useful one.     

Social desirability response bias as one source of the discrepancy between subjective weights and regression weights

This study of the judgment process investigated whether social desirability response bias is more closely associated with directly weighted subjective weights than less directly assessed regression weights. Graduating college students indicated their preferences for 11 job characteristics in four different tasks: (a) a statistical weighting task completed honestly, (b) a statistical weighting task completed to “look good” to a recruiter, (c) a subjective weighting task completed honestly, and (d) a subjective weighting task completed to “look good” to a recruiter. Predicted judgments were calculated from the weights obtained in each condition. Pearson correlation coefficients using these predicted judgments were computed between conditions; the relationship between the honest and positive impression predicted judgments derived from subjective weights was significantly greater than the relationship between honest and positive impression predicted judgments derived from regression weights for 19 of 23 participants. It was concluded that social desirability response bias was more closely related to subjective weights than to regression Weights.     

Stimulus dimensionality and temporal repetition

Two experiments involving temporal repetition of tachistoscopically presented visual stnnuh are reported. Experiment I employed an alphabet of four straight lines presented one, two, or four times. Experiment II employed three stimulus sets, such that the stimuli varied in size, brightness, or both, with the forms being presented either once or four times. The Ss made four-choice identification responses. Results indicate that multidomensionality is not a necessary condition for better Identification performance with multiple observations, and that this differential in favor of multiple observations persists after many, many experimental sessions.     

A Bayesian prediction of multiple-look identification performance from one-look data: The effect of unequal prior probabilities

Bayes’s theorem had accurately predicted multiple-look visual identification performance from one-look data in two previous studies when the prior probabilities of the visual stimuli were equal. In this study, prior probabilities were manipulated to determine whether these values were important in determining agreement between man and statistical man. The prior probabilities of the stimuli, four gap orientations in Landolt rings, were .7, .1, .1, and .1 for four Ss and .3, .3, .3, and .1 for three Ss. One-look data were used to predict two-look and four-look performance. In the 7-1-1-1 condition, the empirical percent correct increased as a function of repeated observations for the rare stimuli, but not for the high-probability stimuli. In the 3-3-3-1 condition, Ss improved over repeated observations for both types of stimuli. Predictions of multiple-look performance under unequal prior probability conditions in this study were less accurate than those under equal prior probability conditions in previous studies. Three possible determinants of this difference were discussed.     

On people’s understanding of the diagnostic implications of probabilistic data

Two lines of prior research into the conditions under which people seek information are examined in light of two statistical definitions of diagnosticity. Five experiments are reported. In two, subjects selected information in order to test a hypothesis. In the remaining three, they selected information in order to convince someone else of the truth of a known hypothesis. A total of 567 university students served as subjects. The two primary conclusions were as follows: (1) When the task is highly structured by the environment, subjects select information diagnostically, and (2) when the task is less structured, so that subjects must seek relevant information not manifest, they select information pseudodiagnostically. Possible relations to other laboratory inference tasks and to clinical judgment are discussed.