Western Anti‐Muslim Prejudice: Value Conflict or Discrimination of Persons Too?

Do Western anti‐Muslim attitudes reflect Islamophobia as a general, ethnoreligious prejudice that does not distinguish between persons and ideas, values, or behavior, or are they limited to issues perceived to be in conflict with Western liberal values? In two experiments, we measured discrimination as decreased willingness to help a Muslim versus non‐Muslim to undertake an action that was either neutral or possibly in conflict with Western liberal values. As opposed to general discrimination, the participants displayed conditional, anti‐Muslim discrimination: The two targets were treated equally when the cause was neutral, but there was less willingness to help the Muslim when the cause was conflicting (protesting against the headscarf ban and against gay rights). However, participants did demonstrate subtle discrimination by showing less willingness to help the protesting Muslim compared to the protesting non‐Muslim target. Individual differences moderated these effects with multiculturalism predicting conditional outgroup prosociality, ethnocentrism predicting global outgroup discrimination, and proatheism attitudes predicting both conditional outgroup prosociality and unprejudiced rejection of value‐conflicting behavior.     

Impact of Depression and Childhood Trauma in Mothers Receiving Home Visitation

Research has documented the deleterious effects of maternal depression and childhood trauma on parenting and child development. There are high rates of both depression and childhood trauma in new mothers participating in home visitation programs, a prevention approach designed to optimize mother and child outcomes. Little is known about the impacts of maternal depression and childhood trauma on parenting in the context of home visitation. This study contrasted depressed and non-depressed mothers enrolled in the first year of a home visitation program on parenting stress, quality of home environment, social network, and psychiatric symptoms. Mothers were young, low income, and predominantly unmarried. Results indicated that depressed mothers displayed impairments in parenting, smaller and less robust social networks, and increased psychiatric symptoms relative to their non-depressed counterparts. Path analyses for the full sample revealed a path linking childhood trauma, depression, and parenting stress. Path analyses by group revealed several differential relationships between dimensions of social network and parenting. Number of embedded networks, namely the number of different domains in which the mother is actively interacting with others, was associated with lowered parenting stress among non-depressed mothers and increased parenting stress in their depressed counterparts with childhood trauma histories. In depressed mothers, social network size was associated with lower levels of parenting stress but decreased quality of the home environment, whereas number of embedded networks was positively related to quality of the home environment. Implications of findings for home visitation programs are discussed.     

Attention switching between perception and memory

Two experiments were conducted to explore the switching of attention between perception and memory. In Experiment 1, college students performed a task that required them to cycle or switch attention between perceptual and memorial inputs. Switching times of 293 and 376 msec per switch were obtained on the basis of two formulas. In Experiment 2, the attentional load was manipulated by varying the number of perceptual and memorial inputs. Switching time increased as a function of list length, indicating that item load affects both the control processes that set attentional allocation policies and one’s ability to perform memory and/or perceptual tasks. These results suggest that modularity, or encapsulation of item and control-process systems, does not hold. A model is presented that depicts the relation between item and control-process representation in rapidly alternating attention between perception and memory.     

Recommended Curricular Change and Persistence in College

Counselor judgment regarding the appropriateness of student curricular choice and the strength of counselor commitment to that judgment were related to student persistence in college. Students who failed to change curricula when the counselor felt such change was indicated remained at the University a fewer number of terms than any of the other groups studied. Sex of student and strength of counselor judgment regarding curricular choice were also significantly related to persistence, although strength of counselor judgment regarding curricula choice was best treated as moderating the relationship between student behavior in relation to counselor judgment and academic performance. Results were discussed in terms of objectives and procedures of counseling with respect to academic performance.     

Cerebral dominance in aphasia recovery.

This investigation studied the patterns of ear preference of a group of 25 aphasic adults through the administration of two verbal dichotic tests and retests over a 2-month interval of time. These dichotic tests were a Dichotic Digits Test (DDT) and a Dichotic Animal Names Test (DANT). Schuell's short test of aphasia was given twice over this interval to assess language recovery. Results indicated that as aphasics improve in language, cerebral dominance becomes more firmly established in the right cerebral hemisphere. The data in this study tend to support a dominance shift hypothesis in the recovery of language after aphasia.     

The relationship of mother–child interaction and the child's development of symbolic play

The extent to which the mother–child interactive relationship either promotes or limits a child's ability to see options or choices in the environment was investigated. It was predicted that this quality of interaction provided primarily by the mother would relate to the child's cognitive development as reflected in his or her level of symbolic play. The level and frequency of symbolic and nonsymbolic play in 30 children, ages 12 to 47 months, were coded and mothers' options‐promoting and options‐limiting behaviors were identified. Children, across this range of ages, whose mothers created an options‐promoting social context were observed engaging in more symbolic play. Nonsymbolic play, however, was not found to be significantly influenced by the mother's interactive style. A child's symbolic play marks a dynamic developmental achievement for the child, and appears to be related to the social context created by the mother's interactive style. ©2003 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health.     

Context matters: the benefits and costs of expressing positive emotion among survivors of childhood sexual abuse

Positive emotions promote adjustment to aversive life events. However, evolutionary theory and empirical research on trauma disclosure suggest that in the context of stigmatized events, expressing positive emotions might incur social costs. To test this thesis, the authors coded genuine (Duchenne) smiling and laughter and also non-Duchenne smiling from videotapes of late-adolescent and young adult women, approximately half with documented histories of childhood sexual abuse (CSA), as they described the most distressing event of their lives. Consistent with previous studies, genuine positive emotional expression was generally associated with better social adjustment two years later. However, as anticipated, CSA survivors who expressed positive emotion in the context of describing a past CSA experience had poorer long-term social adjustment, whereas CSA survivors who expressed positive emotion while describing a nonabuse experience had improved social adjustment. These findings suggest that the benefits of positive emotional expression may often be context specific.