Characteristics and motives of adolescents talking with strangers on the internet.

Despite widespread concerns about the dangers of adolescents' online communication with strangers, we know little about (a) which types of adolescents talk with strangers and (b) what motivates them to do so. Drawing on a survey among 412 Dutch adolescents, we found that early adolescents (12-14-year-olds) were most prone to talk with strangers on the internet. If adolescents communicated online more frequently, they less often talked with strangers on the internet. However, if adolescents engaged in long chat sessions, they tended to talk with strangers on the internet more often. In contrast to earlier research, introversion was not related to adolescents' tendency to talk with strangers. The motives of entertainment, meeting new people, and social compensation increased adolescents' online communication with strangers.     

Efficacy of Pharmacological Interventions in Targeting Decision-Making Impairments across Substance and Behavioral Addictions

Neuropsychology Review - Decision-making impairments reflect tendencies towards risky or unwise choices as manifested by presence of psychiatric symptoms or cognitive impairment (e.g....     

Influence of reference frames on asymmetries in Troxler's effect

In 1804, Troxier discovered that, when an observer fixates on a point in central vision and attends to a peripheral stationary stimulus, the peripheral stimulus eventually fades from awareness. This phenomenon is known as Troxler's effect and is allegedly influenced by spatial attention. Asymmetries in Troxler's effect along horizontal and vertical meridian were a recent discovery. However, viewer- and environment-centered reference frames were aligned in prior studies, making it impossible to assess whether asymmetries correspond to viewer- versus environment-centered coordinate systems. This study was undertaken to (a) replicate the asymmetries in the upright condition among 39 participants without health issues and (b) use the asymmetrics to test contrasting predictions made by viewer- and environment-centered coordinate systems when they are decoupled using an experimental head-tilt condition. The horizontal and vertical asymmetries were replicated and consistent with a viewer-centered rather than an environment-centered reference frame.     

Metatraits and assessment of attributional style

Some personality trait dimensions may not be equally applicable to all people. The degree of applicability of a given trait, or traitedness, is conceptually distinct from trait level. In this study, 3 ways of assessing traitedness--interitem variance (R. F. Baumeister & D. M. Tice, 1988), scalability (K. Lanning, 1988), and construct similarity (W. F. Chaplin, 1991)--were applied to attributional style. A nonclinical sample (N = 123) completed measures of attributional style and depressive symptoms. In a series of multiple regression analyses, none of the traitedness indicators significantly moderated the relation of attributional style with depressive symptoms. The authors discuss several methodological and conceptual explanations for these null results.     

Preadolescents' and adolescents' online communication and their closeness to friends

The 1st goal of this study was to investigate how online communication is related to the closeness of existing friendships. Drawing from a sample of 794 preadolescents and adolescents, the authors found that online communication was positively related to the closeness of friendships. However, this effect held only for respondents who primarily communicated online with existing friends and not for those who mainly talked with strangers. The 2nd goal was to refine 2 opposing hypotheses, the rich-get-richer and the social compensation hypotheses. Consistent with the rich-get-richer hypothesis, socially anxious respondents communicated online less often than did nonsocially anxious respondents. However, socially anxious respondents perceived the Internet as more valuable for intimate self-disclosure than did nonsocially anxious respondents, and this perception in turn led to more online communication. This result is consistent with the social compensation hypothesis. Online communication and closeness to friends increased with age. There was a curvilinear relationship between age and perceived value of the Internet for intimate self-disclosure, such that 15-year-olds were at the epitome of online self-disclosure. Girls were closer to friends and more socially anxious than were boys.     

Distinguishing Between Higher and Lower Risk Youth Offenders: Applications for Practice

The authors report the development of an assessment process for distinguishing between higher and lower risk youth offenders through the use of 3 measures. Preliminary results and applications for practice are included.     

Super-Recognisers show an advantage for other race face identification

The accurate identification of an unfamiliar individual from a face photo is a critical factor in several applied situations (e.g., border control). Despite this, matching faces to photographic ID is highly prone to error. In lieu of effective training measures, which could reduce face matching errors, the selection of “super-recognisers” (SRs) provides the most promising route to combat misidentification or fraud. However, to date, super-recognition has been defined and tested using almost exclusively “own-race” face memory and matching tests. Here, across three studies, we test Caucasian participants' performance on own- and other-race face identification tasks (GFMT, MFMT, CFMT+, EFMT, CFMT-Chinese). Our findings show that compared to controls, high-performing typical recognisers (Studies 1 and 2) and SRs (Study 3) show superior performance on both the own- and other-race tests. These findings suggest that recruiting SRs in ethnically diverse applied settings could be advantageous.