AN ALTERNATING TREATMENTS COMPARISON OF TWO INTENSIVE INTERVENTIONS FOR FOOD REFUSAL

We compared two treatment packages involving negative reinforcement contingencies for 3 children with chronic food refusal. One involved physically guiding the child to accept food contingent on noncompliance, whereas the other involved nonremoval of the spoon until the child accepted the presented food. Subsequent to baseline, an alternating treatments comparison was implemented in a multiple baseline design across subjects. After each child had been exposed to at least nine sessions of each treatment condition and percentage of bites accepted had increased to at least 80%, the child's caregivers selected the preferred treatment package. The results indicated that both treatments were effective in establishing food acceptance. However, physical guidance was associated with fewer corollary behaviors, shorter meal durations, and parental preference.     

Gender roles and role conflict in feminist lesbian and heterosexual women

Thirty-nine lesbian and 39 heterosexual feminist women were compared on (1) gender role orientation; (2) intra- and interrole conflict in daughter, intimate partner, and work roles; and (3) satisfaction with interpersonal relationships with parents, intimate partners, and co-workers/employers. The majority were Caucasian and either graduate students or professionals. Contrary to theoretical assumptions, lesbians and heterosexual women did not differ in gender role orientation. Heterosexual women reported more interrole conflict between daughter and work roles; whereas lesbians reported more interrole conflict between daughter and intimate partner roles, primarily as a result of perceived disapproval of their intimate relationships by others. Lesbians additionally reported less satisfaction with their relationships with co-workers and employers. Role conflict/satisfaction was not a function of disclosure vs. nondisclosure of sexual orientation for the lesbian women.This article is based on the first author's master's thesis. Portions of this article were presented at the meeting of Southeastern Psychological Association, Atlanta, Georgia, April 1990.The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the regional women's organization, the Students for Choice organization of the participating university, and the Tennessee chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union for their assistance in data collection. We would also like to thank Ramsey McGowen, Judith Hammond, and Lillian Range for their editorial comments on an earlier draft of this article.     

Reading About AIDS and Cognitive Coping Style: Their Effects on Fear of AIDS and Homophobia

An experiment was conducted to investigate the effects of reading about AIDS on fear of AIDS, knowledge of AIDS, and homophobia. Introductory psychology students read one of three magazine articles: one stressing the low likelihood of contracting AIDS through casual contact (reassuring article), one stressing the high likelihood of contracting AIDS through casual contact (alarming article), or a control article that did not mention AIDS. Compared to the control group, subjects who read the reassuring article were lower in fear of AIDS, whereas subjects who read the alarming article were higher; the articles had no effect on knowledge of AIDS or homophobia. In addition, subjects were classified on the basis of their cognitive coping style (high vs. low monitors) and sex. High monitors tended to be more fearful of AIDS but were neither better informed about AIDS nor more homophobic than low monitors. Men were more fearful of AIDS and more homophobic than women.     

Changes in Fear of AIDS and Homophobia in a University Population

A survey measuring attitudes toward fear of AIDS and homophobia, taken in the fall of 1985, was repeated in the fall of 1989 on the same university population. The results indicated that whereas fear of AIDS decreased, the degree of homophobia remained essentially unchanged. In addition, although respondents were much more knowledgeable about AIDS in 1989 than in 1985, there was no evidence of any change in the relatively high correlation between the fear of AIDS and homophobia.     

A psychosocial study of hyperactive and learning-disabled boys

Adequately reading hyperactive boys, normally behaved learning-disabled (LD) boys, and normal controls were contrasted on tests measuring personality traits, cognitive role taking, and moral reasoning. Additionally, parents and teachers rated all children on a number of behaviors, and parents were interviewed in a process-oriented fashion to assess home stimulation potential. Hyperactive boys were rated more aggressive and anxious than LD boys and controls and had not been encouraged as much by parents to achieve. Hyperactives had been born to younger parents, on the average, and 25% lived with their mothers and stepfathers. None of the LD or control boys had stepfathers. The groups did not differ significantly in moral reasoning ability, cognitive role taking, or locus of control; on the Junior Personality Inventory hyperactives tended to have elevated scores on the neuroticism scale while LD boys had higher scores on the lie scale.This research was supported by Grant HDNS-09119 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.     

Gender differences in autobiographical memory for everyday events: retrieval elicited by SenseCam images versus verbal cues

Gender differences are frequently observed in autobiographical memory (AM). However, few studies have investigated the neural basis of potential gender differences in AM. In the present functional MRI (fMRI) study we investigated gender differences in AMs elicited using dynamic visual images vs verbal cues. We used a novel technology called a SenseCam, a wearable device that automatically takes thousands of photographs. SenseCam differs considerably from other prospective methods of generating retrieval cues because it does not disrupt the ongoing experience. This allowed us to control for potential gender differences in emotional processing and elaborative rehearsal, while manipulating how the AMs were elicited. We predicted that males would retrieve more richly experienced AMs elicited by the SenseCam images vs the verbal cues, whereas females would show equal sensitivity to both cues. The behavioural results indicated that there were no gender differences in subjective ratings of reliving, importance, vividness, emotion, and uniqueness, suggesting that gender differences in brain activity were not due to differences in these measures of phenomenological experience. Consistent with our predictions, the fMRI results revealed that males showed a greater difference in functional activity associated with the rich experience of SenseCam vs verbal cues, than did females.     

The Perceived Stress Reactivity Scale: measurement invariance, stability, and validity in three countries

There is accumulating evidence that individual differences in stress reactivity contribute to the risk for stress-related disease. However, the assessment of stress reactivity remains challenging, and there is a relative lack of questionnaires reliably assessing this construct. We here present the Perceived Stress Reactivity Scale (PSRS), a 23-item questionnaire with 5 subscales and 1 overall scale, based on an existing German-language instrument. Perceived stress reactivity and related constructs were assessed in N = 2,040 participants from the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany. The 5-factor structure of the PSRS was found to be similar in the 3 countries. In the U.S. sample the questionnaire was applied using 2 modes of administration (paper-pencil and computerized), and measures were repeated after 4 weeks. Measurement invariance analyses demonstrated full invariance across mode of administration and partial invariance across gender and countries. Scale scores differed between countries and genders, with women scoring higher on most scales. Overall, reliability analysis suggested good stability of PSRS scores over a 4-week period, and validation analysis showed expected associations with related constructs such as self-efficacy, neuroticism, chronic stress, and perceived stress. Perceived stress reactivity was also associated with depressive symptoms and sleep. These associations were particularly strong when individuals scoring high on perceived stress reactivity were exposed to chronic stress. In sum, our findings suggest that the PSRS is a useful and easy-to-administer instrument to assess perceived stress reactivity.     

Evidentiality in language and cognition

What is the relation between language and thought? Specifically, how do linguistic and conceptual representations make contact during language learning? This paper addresses these questions by investigating the acquisition of evidentiality (the linguistic encoding of information source) and its relation to children's evidential reasoning. Previous studies have hypothesized that the acquisition of evidentiality is complicated by the subtleness and abstractness of the underlying concepts; other studies have suggested that learning a language which systematically (e.g. grammatically) marks evidential categories might serve as a pacesetter for early reasoning about sources of information. We conducted experimental studies with children learning Korean (a language with evidential morphology) and English (a language without grammaticalized evidentiality) in order to test these hypotheses. Our experiments compared 3- and 4-year-old Korean children's knowledge of the semantics and discourse functions of evidential morphemes to their (non-linguistic) ability to recognize and report different types of evidential sources. They also compared Korean children's source monitoring abilities to the source monitoring abilities of English-speaking children of the same age. We found that Korean-speaking children have considerable success in producing evidential morphology but their comprehension of such morphology is very fragile. Nevertheless, young Korean speakers are able to reason successfully about sources of information in non-linguistic tasks; furthermore, their performance in these tasks is similar to that of English-speaking peers. These results support the conclusion that the acquisition of evidential expressions poses considerable problems for learners; however, these problems are not (necessarily) conceptual in nature. Our data also suggest that, contrary to relativistic expectations, children's ability to reason about sources of information proceeds along similar lines in diverse language-learning populations and is not tied to the acquisition of the linguistic markers of evidentiality in the exposure language. We discuss implications of our findings for the relationship between linguistic and conceptual representations during development.