Why Don’t We Report Sexual Harassment? An Application of the Theory of Planned Behavior

The study found that an individual’s attitudes toward the behavior, normative beliefs, and perceived behavioral control predicted an individual’s intention to report an incident of hostile environment sexual harassment. Even though women indicated a greater intention to report, there was not a gender difference in whether an individual reported an incident of hostile environment sexual harassment. Our findings provide support for the theory of planned behavior as a model for predicting an individual’s intention to report sexual harassment. These findings provide insight for the formulation of policy and procedures and the development of training programs to facilitate reporting of incidents.     

Can Blended Classroom and Distributed Learning Approaches be Used to Teach Medical Students How to Initiate Behavior Change Counseling During a Clinical Clerkship?

Medical school curricula often provide insufficient time and instruction for health behavior change counseling. We examined the feasibility of blending classroom and distributed learning experiences to teach medical students how to initiate health behavior change counseling and analyzed the impact of this approach on their attitudes, knowledge, and skills. Usage patterns and pre- to post-class attitude and knowledge changes were assessed with self-report questions among 153 third year family medicine clerkship students. Most students viewed at least 90% of the online written content and took an average of 41 min (SD = 24 min 35 s) to view all of the content. Students’ confidence in their ability to help patients change unhealthy behaviors significantly improved (p < .01). The blended learning curriculum facilitated learning of behavior change skills, encouraged interaction with course materials, and improved medical students’ self confidence for using health behavior change skills.     

Screaming, yelling, whining, and crying: categorical and intensity differences in vocal expressions of anger and sadness in children's tantrums

Young children's temper tantrums offer a unique window into the expression and regulation of strong emotions. Previous work, largely based on parental report, suggests that two emotions, anger and sadness, have different behavioral manifestations and different time courses within tantrums. Individual motor and vocal behaviors, reported by parents, have been interpreted as representing different levels of intensity within each emotion category. The present study used high-fidelity audio recordings to capture the acoustic features of children's vocalizations during tantrums. Results indicated that perceptually categorized screaming, yelling, crying, whining, and fussing each have distinct acoustic features. Screaming and yelling form a group with similar acoustic features while crying, whining, and fussing form a second acoustically related group. Within these groups, screaming may reflect a higher intensity of anger than yelling while fussing, whining, and crying may reflect an increasing intensity of sadness.     

The measurement of cyberbullying: dimensional structure and relative item severity and discrimination

In relation to a sample of 1,092 Italian adolescents (50.9% females), the present study aims to: (a) analyze the most parsimonious structure of the cyberbullying and cybervictimization construct in male and female Italian adolescents through confirmatory factor analysis; and (b) analyze the severity and the discrimination parameters of each act using the item response theory. Results showed that the structure of the cyberbullying scale for perpetrated and received behaviors in both genders could best be represented by a monodimensional model where each item lies on a continuum of severity of aggressive acts. For both genders, the less severe acts are silent/prank calls and insults on instant messaging, and the most severe acts are unpleasant pictures/photos on Web sites, phone pictures/photos/videos of intimate scenes, and phone pictures/photos/videos of violent scenes. The items nasty text messages, nasty or rude e-mails, insults on Web sites, insults in chatrooms, and insults on blogs range from moderate to high levels of severity. Regarding the discrimination level of the acts, several items emerged as good indicators at various levels of cyberbullying and cybervictimization severity, with the exception of silent/prank calls. Furthermore, gender specificities underlined that the visual items can be considered good indicators of severe cyberbullies and cybervictims only in males. This information can help in understanding better the nature of the phenomenon, its severity in a given population, and to plan more specific prevention and intervention strategies.     

Emotion Socialization in Cross‐Cultural Perspective

Emotion socialization aims to promote children’s emotion competence. Children’s competence is embedded in cultural contexts that influence caregivers’ expectations of appropriateness of children’s expression and experience of emotions. Two aspects of emotion competence – individualistic and relational emotion competence – are outlined. They offer a theoretical framework to interpret cultural commonalities and differences in emotion socialization strategies. This review summarizes current knowledge about caregivers’ emotion socialization strategies toward children’s negative emotional expressions and related behaviors in cultural perspective. The number of empirical studies in cultures outside of United States remains low. Nonetheless, the available evidence describes a range of emotion socialization strategies that are embedded in caregiving, and their consequences for children’s emotion development. Besides several commonalities across cultures, we describe differences in the degree to which strategies are endorsed by caregivers as well as some of the qualitative information that point to cultural variations. Finally, we note gaps in the literature and suggest future research directions.     

Seeing faces as objects: no face inversion effect with geometrical discrimination

Inversion dramatically impairs face perception, recognition, and discrimination. Yet it does not interfere with the ability to make precise estimates of facial feature distances. To investigate this discontinuity between facial feature distance estimation and general perception and recognition, we assessed the effect of inversion on the discrimination of differences in facial compression and elongation or expansion using geometrically distorted faces. The results clearly showed that geometrical face discrimination is not subject to the traditional face inversion effect and did not show a benefit for natural faces. Although discrimination thresholds were not affected by inversion, response times to the distance judgments were faster with inversion, especially when the inverted faces contained natural configurations. Based on these counterintuitive results, we suggest that participants used analytical processing to do the discrimination task. Moreover, we suggest that the depth with which a face is holistically encoded depends on the nature of the task, face orientation, and similarity between a face and the prototypical face template.     

The School and Community Study: Characteristics of Students Who Have Emotional and Behavioral Disabilities Served in Restructuring Public Schools

We present selected initial results from a study investigating the effects of school restructuring and reform activities on outcomes for students who are identified as having serious emotional and behavioral disabilities. A review of the literature revealed six key areas of reform for investigation: accountability, governance, parent involvement, includedness, curriculum and instruction, and pro-social discipline. Ten schools (five elementary, two K-8, one middle, and two high schools) actively engaged in school restructuring and reform efforts were selected to participate in the study, and their status related to these six areas is presented. Characteristics of the students identified as having emotional and behavioral disabilities and served in these schools in special education settings (N = 116) are described. Results from the administration of standardized assessments revealed that these students have significant levels of emotional and behavioral disabilities that impair their functioning at school and at home. Further, school staff are providing the majority of counseling services to these students during the school day, with non-school professionals providing services to 25% of the students.     

Spatial relational memory in 9-month-old macaque monkeys

This experiment assesses spatial and nonspatial relational memory in freely moving 9-mo-old and adult (11-13-yr-old) macaque monkeys (Macaca mulatta). We tested the use of proximal landmarks, two different objects placed at the center of an open-field arena, as conditional cues allowing monkeys to predict the location of food rewards hidden in one of two sets of three distinct locations. Monkeys were tested in two different conditions: (1) when local visual cues marked the two sets of potentially baited locations, so that monkeys could use both local and spatial information to discriminate these locations from never-baited locations; and (2) when no local visual cues marked the two sets of potentially baited locations, so that monkeys had to rely on a spatial relational representation of the environment to discriminate these locations. No 9-mo-old or adult monkey associated the presence of the proximal landmarks, at the center of the arena, with the presence of food in one set of three distinct locations. All monkeys, however, discriminated the potentially baited locations in the presence of local visual cues, thus providing evidence of visual discrimination learning. More importantly, all 9-mo-old monkeys tested discriminated the potentially baited locations in absence of the local visual cues, thus exhibiting evidence of spatial relational learning. These findings indicate that spatial memory processes characterized by a relational representation of the environment are present as early as 9 mo of age in macaque monkeys.     

Cholinergic modulation of trace conditioning trained in serial compound: A developmental analysis

In four experiments the effects of serial compound conditioning on responding to a trace-conditioned CS were evaluated using a fear conditioning paradigm. The subjects were 18- and 25-day-old Sprague-Dawley rats, previously shown to exhibit little or no trace fear conditioning. Here, animals as young as 18 days of age were shown to be capable of trace conditioning between a visual CS1 and a shock US, provided the trace interval was filled with a non-target CS2 during serial conditioning trials (CS1-->CS2-->US). To explore cholinergic mechanisms involved in trace and serial conditioning, additional experiments assessed conditioned responding following pre-training administration of the muscarinic receptor antagonist scopolamine. Scopolamine produced a dose-dependent reduction in responding to the trace CS1, regardless of whether subjects were trained with standard trace (CS1-->trace interval-->US) or serial (CS1-->CS2-->US) trials. Responding to CS2 was unaffected by scopolamine. These data suggest that central cholinergic systems are functional in the young animals, but are not normally sufficiently activated by standard trace conditioning procedures. The results suggest that serial compound conditioning can promote trace conditioning in young rats, as it does in adults, perhaps by enhancing cholinergic activity during training. Implications for the late ontogenetic emergence of trace conditioning as it relates to maturation of neural pathways and their role in the potentiating effects of a gap filler are discussed.     

Prediction of prosocial and emotional competence from maternal behavior in African American preschoolers

This research investigates whether individual differences in African American preschoolers' prosocial behavior and emotional regulation ability were differentially predicted by parenting practices around prosocial behavior and emotions, once variance due to SES was explained. Seventy African American preschoolers were visited at their preschools and their prosocial and emotion regulation behaviors were observed. Mothers' emotion and prosocial-related socialization behaviors were observed during a separate home visit. Positive prosocial-related maternal variables (i.e., social approval of the act and praise of the child) were positively associated with prosocial behavior, above and beyond SES. On the other hand, positive emotion-related maternal variables, such as matching and discussion of emotions were more strongly related to emotion regulation behavior. Findings are discussed in terms of the lack of research on higher SES African American children and the associated methodological challenges of conducting developmental research on diverse populations.