Implicit Association Test: separating transsituationally stable and variable components of attitudes toward gay men

Implicit attitudes are conceived of as formed in childhood, suggesting extreme stability. At the same time, it has been shown that implicit attitudes are influenced by situational factors, suggesting variability by the moment. In the present article, using structural equation modeling, we decomposed implicit attitudes towards gay men into a person factor and a situational factor. The Implicit Association Test (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998), introduced as an instrument with which individual differences in implicit attitudes can be measured, was used. Measurement was repeated after one week (Experiment 1) or immediately (Experiment 2). Explicit attitudes towards gay men as assessed by way of questionnaires were positive and stable across situations. Implicit attitudes were relatively negative instead. Internal consistency of the implicit attitude assessment was exemplary. However, the within-situation consistency was accompanied by considerable unexplained between-situation variability. Consequently, it may not be adequate to interpret an individual implicit attitude measured at a given point in time as a person-related, trait-like factor.     

An infant-based assessment of early lexicon acquisition

The majority of research on the acquisition of spoken language has focused on language production, due to difficulties in the assessment of comprehension. A primary limitation to comprehension assessment is maintaining the interest and attention of younger infants. We have developed an assessment procedure that addresses the need for an extensive performance-based measure of comprehension in the 2nd year of life. In the interest of developing an engaging approach that takes into account infants’ limited attention capabilities, we designed an assessment based on touchscreen technology. This approach builds upon prior research by combining standardization and complexity with an engaging infant-friendly interface. Data suggest that the touchscreen procedure is effective in eliciting and maintaining infant attention and will yield more extensive and reliable estimates of early comprehension than do other procedures. The software to implement the assessmentis available free of charge for academic purposes.     

Guilt assessment after retracted voluntary and coerced-compliant confessions in combination with exculpatory or ambiguous evidence

We investigated how voluntary confessions, coerced-compliant confessions, and no-confessions influenced guilt assessments in combination with other exculpatory or ambiguous evidence. In three experiments (total N = 808), participants studied case information and provided guilt assessments. As expected, in Experiment 1 and 2a, (i) voluntary confessions to protect a family member elicited stronger guilt attributions than no-confessions and (ii) ambiguous evidence led to stronger guilt attributions than exculpatory evidence. In Experiment 2b, voluntary confessions to protect a group-member (but not to protect a family-member) elicited stronger guilt attributions than no-confessions. Exculpatory eyewitness evidence elicited stronger guilt attributions than exculpatory DNA evidence and participants assigned more weight to exculpatory DNA than eyewitness evidence. Participants were able to discount coerced-compliant confessions when they received information about the interrogations (Experiments 2a/b), but did not consistently consider risk factors for (voluntary) false confessions outside the interrogation room when assessing guilt.     

Killing your children to hurt your partner: A South African perspective on the motivations for revenge filicide

The aim of the study was to investigate the offence characteristics and motivations for revenge filicides. Revenge filicide is an act where one parent kills their own offspring for retribution to hurt and upset the other parent. The cases of 20 revenge filicide murderers (14 male and six female) were analysed to determine the motivations and offence characteristics of revenge filicide offenders. It is the first South African study to highlight the motivations and associated characteristics in revenge filicides. Themes such as a loss of social identity due to rejection; extreme rage type anger; external locus of control; sadism; a desire to cause pain and a need to inflict harm are highlighted in this article. The initial emotional response may escalate from mild anger to a level of narcissistic rage which eventually culminates in the murdering of the child to punish and hurt the other parent and to restore control.     

Latinx Mental Health Scholars' Experiences with Cultural Adaptation and Implementation of Systemic Family Interventions

An increasing number of culturally adapted family-level interventions address mental health disparities with marginalized populations in the United States. However, with these developments many barriers have arisen, such as challenges with degree of cultural fit, engagement, and sustainability. We conducted 12 elite phenomenological interviews with mental health scholars involved in prevention and intervention family research with various Latinx communities within and outside of the United States. These scholars discussed their experiences of overcoming barriers in their research. We used thematic analysis to code and analyze participant responses, and our findings support the gaps in previous literature and highlight potential pathways to overcoming barriers in cultural adaptation research. Themes included the need for: (a) better understanding of the intersection between culture and context; (b) community-centered approaches to addressing implementation challenges; and (c) structural changes within institutional, governmental, and political levels. We discuss implications for researchers and practitioners working with Latinx families.     

Combining whole-school and targeted programs for the reduction of bullying victimization: A randomized,effectiveness trial

Despite the extensive evaluation of school-based interventions for bullying, victimization remains a significant problem in schools. Bullying victimization is significantly predicted by contextual (school-related) factors. As a consequence whole-school programs have been commonly used to prevent and reduce bullying victimization. Evidence also points to individual risk factors (such as emotional distress) in predicting victimization, yet programs to prevent bullying victimization by changing these individual risks are far less developed. Few studies have approximated “real-world” implementation conditions in their trials. The current effectiveness trial evaluated the combination of a whole-school program designed to prevent bullying perpetration and victimization together with a targeted intervention for at-risk students, teaching them individual and dyadic strategies to reduce their anxiety and manage victimization, allowing schools some latitude to implement programs as they typically would. Students from Grades 3 and 4 (N = 8,732) across 135 schools were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: combined intervention; whole-school intervention only; individual intervention only; and care as usual. Victimization decreased significantly and similarly across all four conditions at 12 and 24 months following baseline. Similar reductions and failure to discriminate conditions were found on other key constructs: anxiety; bullying perpetration; and depression. Possible reasons for the failure to demonstrate victimization prevention differences and lessons learned from this large, effectiveness trial are considered.     

Space in Hand and Mind: Gesture and Spatial Frames of Reference in Bilingual Mexico

Speakers of many languages prefer allocentric frames of reference (FoRs) when talking about small-scale space, using words like “east” or “downhill.” Ethnographic work has suggested that this preference is also reflected in how such speakers gesture. Here, we investigate this possibility with a field experiment in Juchitán, Mexico. In Juchitán, a preferentially allocentric language (Isthmus Zapotec) coexists with a preferentially egocentric one (Spanish). Using a novel task, we elicited spontaneous co-speech gestures about small-scale motion events (e.g., toppling blocks) in Zapotec-dominant speakers and in balanced Zapotec-Spanish bilinguals. Consistent with prior claims, speakers’ spontaneous gestures reliably reflected either an egocentric or allocentric FoR. The use of the egocentric FoR was predicted—not by speakers’ dominant language or the language they used in the task—but by mastery of words for “right” and “left,” as well as by properties of the event they were describing. Additionally, use of the egocentric FoR in gesture predicted its use in a separate nonlinguistic memory task, suggesting a cohesive cognitive style. Our results show that the use of spatial FoRs in gesture is pervasive, systematic, and shaped by several factors. Spatial gestures, like other forms of spatial conceptualization, are thus best understood within broader ecologies of communication and cognition.     

Reflections on how color term acquisition is constrained

Compared with object word learning, young children typically find learning color terms to be a difficult linguistic task. In this reflections article, I consider two questions that are fundamental to investigations into the developmental acquisition of color terms. First, I consider what constrains color term acquisition and how stable these constraints are over culture and age. I review recent studies that have identified conceptual, attentional, and linguistic constraints that seemingly operate on the acquisition of color terms compared with object words and the differential acquisition of color terms within a given language. Second, I consider whether these constraints are specific to the acquisition of color terms or whether they reflect more general constraints that operate on other classes of lexical terms such as different abstract property terms.     

Seventy years of research on personality and close relationships: substantive and methodological trends over time

The present review is based on a quantitative analysis of the abstracts for 477 studies published since 1932 on the topic of personality and close (romantic) relationships. This approach enables a "bird's-eye" view of the content and methods that have characterized research in this area and an examination of publication trends over time. Results showed that 60% of all published studies in this area relied exclusively on cross-sectional and self-report methods; that nearly all used convenience samples, though more than half used nonstudent samples; and that more than one-third relied exclusively on data from individuals rather than couples. Few studies appeared to include elaborated networks of constructs in either the personality or relationship domain or to attempt to integrate an elaborated model of personality with an elaborated relationship model. Examination of trends over time revealed a mixed picture, with increasing use of the least informative designs balanced by evidence of increasingly complex conceptual models.