The Relationship Between Perceived Violation of Social Norms and Social Control: Situational Factors Influencing the Reaction to Deviance

Social control is the generic term for all reactions through which people express their disapproval to someone who engages in a counternormative behavior or who holds a counter-normative attitude. The literature on helping behavior suggests that perceived personal implication should play an important role in the decision of whether or not to exert social control. A field study involving 5 different experimental settings was conducted in order to test this hypothesis. Confederates engaged in a variety of behaviors that violated social norms. Perceived personal implication was consistently the best predictor of social control behavior, such that the more someone felt that a deviant behavior affected him or her personally, the more he or she was likely to communicate his or her disapproval to the deviant confederate. Perceived deviance of the behavior was a less powerful predictor of social control. These findings speak to the moderating factors of social control behavior and to the circumstances under which social norms protecting public property are likely to be perpetuated.     

Self‐Efficacy,Self‐Rated Abilities,Adjustment, and Academic Performance

This study examined the association between self‐efficacy and self‐rated abilities in conjunction with adjustment and academic performance with a diverse sample of 271 undergraduate college students with majors in the liberal arts. Significant positive associations between and among the constructs in different combinations were found. The discussion focuses on the theoretical and practice implications of the results and offers suggestions for further research.     

Leave Truth Alone: On Deflationism and Contextualism

Abstract: According to deflationism, grasp of the concept of truth consists in nothing more than a disposition to accept a priori (non‐paradoxical) instances of the schema: (DS) It is true that p if and only if p. According to contextualism, the same expression with the same meaning might, on different occasions of use, express different propositions bearing different truth‐conditions (where this does not result from indexicality and the like). On this view, what is expressed in an utterance depends in a non‐negligible way on the circumstances. Charles Travis claims that contextualism shows that ‘deflationism is a mistake’, that truth is a more substantive notion than deflationism allows. In this paper, I examine Travis's arguments in support of this ‘inflationary’ claim and argue that they are unsuccessful.     

Spatial reasoning in Tenejapan Mayans

Language communities differ in their stock of reference frames (coordinate systems for specifying locations and directions). English typically uses egocentrically-defined axes (e.g., “left–right”), especially when describing small-scale relationships. Other languages such as Tseltal Mayan prefer to use geocentrically-defined axes (e.g., “north–south”) and do not use any type of projective body-defined axes. It has been argued that the availability of specific frames of reference in language determines the availability or salience of the corresponding spatial concepts. In four experiments, we explored this hypothesis by testing Tseltal speakers’ spatial reasoning skills. Whereas most prior tasks in this domain were open-ended (allowing several correct solutions), the present tasks required a unique solution that favored adopting a frame-of-reference that was either congruent or incongruent with what is habitually lexicalized in the participants’ language. In these tasks, Tseltal speakers easily solved the language-incongruent problems, and performance was generally more robust for these than for the language-congruent problems that favored geocentrically-defined coordinates. We suggest that listeners’ probabilistic inferences when instruction is open to more than one interpretation account for why there are greater cross-linguistic differences in the solutions to open-ended spatial problems than to less ambiguous ones.     

Conservatives and Racists: Inferential Role Semantics and Pejoratives

According to inferential role semantics (IRS), for any given expression to possess a particular meaning one must be disposed to make or, alternatively, acknowledge as correct certain inferential transitions involving it. As Williamson points out, pejoratives such as ‘Boche’ seem to provide a counter-example to IRS. Many speakers are neither disposed to use such expressions nor consider it proper to do so. But it does not follow, as IRS appears to entail, that such speakers do not understand pejoratives or that they lack meaning. In this paper, I examine recent responses to this problem by Boghossian and Brandom and argue that their proposed construal of the kind of inferential rules governing a pejorative such as ‘Boche’ is to be ruled out on the grounds that it is non-conservative. I defend the appeal to conservatism in this instance against criticism and, in doing so, propose an alternative approach to pejoratives on behalf of IRS that resolves the problem Williamson poses.

Substance Use and Health and Safety among Homeless Youth

This study examines how substance use is associated with the health and safety of homeless youth using cross-sectional, self-report data from 285 homeless adolescents. Path models were used to examine concurrent relationships between youth’s substance use and multiple aspects of their health and safety, including measures of psychological distress, housing risk and instability, and medical problems. Substance use was examined with both global (i.e., a composite of days of use across various drugs and alcohol) and specific (i.e., rates of use of specific drugs, injection drug use) measures. After controlling for demographic and historical variables, number of days of use was significantly related to psychological distress, whereas injection drug use was significantly related to housing risk. Examination of specific drugs revealed relationships between psychological distress and the use of alcohol, cocaine, and amphetamines, and a specific relationship between housing risk and the use of heroin. None of the measures of substance use was significantly related to youth’s medical problems. Implications for interventions with homeless adolescents are discussed.     

Exogenous and endogenous attention orienting in autism spectrum disorders.

Fifteen children with high-functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and 15 children with typical development completed an attentional cuing task using peripheral cues (exogenous orienting) and central cues (endogenous orienting). Results showed that participants with ASD had impaired exogenous and intact endogenous orienting. The pattern of exogenous orienting was related to motor functioning. Individuals with ASD who had poor motor functioning displayed slowed exogenous orienting. However, individuals with ASD who had relatively good motor functioning showed typical levels of exogenous orienting when given a short time but decreased orienting when given a longer amount of time. These results suggest attention impairments in ASD may not be specific to social orienting and instead may represent a more general orienting impairment.     

The relationship between adolescent depression and a history of sexual abuse

The purpose of this study was to examine the occurrence of depression among adolescents attending family planning clinics, and to determine the relationship among depression, a history of sexual abuse, and other risk behaviors. The sample consisted of 279 minority females. Results of the study indicated that 40 adolescents (14.3%) scored at or above a raw score of 77 for depression based on the Reynolds Adolescent Depression Scale (RADS). This suggests that these adolescents should be identified for further evaluation. Results of the Stepwise Linear Regression indicated that a history of sexual abuse was the most potent factor in predicting depression. These findings highlight the importance of screening concurrently for depression and a history of sexual abuse in family planning and other healthcare settings.     

The Effect of Disruptions During Counseling on Recall of Genetic Risk Information: The Case of Cystic Fibrosis

Genetic counseling is a communication process with two main functions: information provision and supportive counseling. The information transmission function may be compromised by disruptions that occur during counseling. At least two mediators are possible: (a) disruptions may interfere with memory by creating distractions and divided attention during encoding or (b) disruptions may degrade the flow of interaction which requires that participants engage in conversation repair rather than the task at hand. This study examined both alternatives in a group of parents (N=20 families, 40 individual parents) whose infant had received a newborn screening for cystic fibrosis (CF). Upon arrival at the hospital, each parent completed a questionnaire designed to assess his or her knowledge of CF. Their interaction with the genetic counselor was videotaped and coded for the presence of disruptions. Six weeks after the counseling, parents again completed the knowledge measure. The data showed a direct negative effect for disruptions during counseling on memory for CF-related risk information six weeks later. Disruptions also produced the anticipated effect on conversation, but counter to expectations, interruptions of conversation flow was positively associated with knowledge at time 2.     

Functional neuroimaging of autobiographical memory

Functional neuroimaging studies of autobiographical memory have grown dramatically in recent years. These studies are important because they can investigate the neural correlates of processes that are difficult to study using laboratory stimuli, including: (i) complex constructive processes, (ii) recollective qualities of emotion and vividness, and (iii) remote memory retrieval. Constructing autobiographical memories involves search, monitoring and self-referential processes that are associated with activity in separable prefrontal regions. The contributions of emotion and vividness have been linked to the amygdala and visual cortex respectively. Finally, there is evidence that recent and remote autobiographical memories might activate the hippocampus equally, which has implications for memory-consolidation theories. The rapid development of innovative methods for eliciting personal memories in the scanner provides the opportunity to delve into the functional neuroanatomy of our personal past.