Influences on Sexual Partnering Among African American Adolescents With Concurrent Sexual Relationships

Adolescents often engage in concurrent sexual partnerships as part of a developmental process of gaining experience with sexuality. The authors qualitatively examined patterns of concurrency and variation in normative and motivational influences on this pattern of sexual partnering among African American adolescents (31 males; 20 females), ages 15 to 17 years. Using content analysis, gender and contextual differences in social norms and motivations for concurrency were explored. Findings describe the normative influences on adolescent males and females with regard to sexual concurrency and the transfer of these norms from one generation to the next.     

Validating an interlingual metanorm for emotional analysis of texts

In this article, we present a set of 12 norms that characterize emotional terms in French, English, German, Spanish, Italian, and Finnish. The high correlation between the norm values in the two emotional dimensions of valence and arousal suggests an interlingual homogeneity of emotional representations and allows a significant metanorm??EMONORM??to be established with 6,383 terms characterized in valence and 4,345 terms characterized in arousal. This metanorm is a resource for creating experimental materials in studies on language and emotions. Furthermore, we perform three tests using EMONORM, with the objectives of (1) identifying basic emotions from their valence and arousal values, (2) determining the orientation of texts referring to positive and negative emotions, and (3) evaluating the intensity of emotions expressed in texts. The results are highly similar to those for human judgments. Finally, we present EMOVAL/SEMOTEX, a Web application for static and dynamic valence and arousal emotional analysis of texts using EMONORM (http://www.semotex.fr).     

Use of the estimated intraclass correlation for correcting differences in effect size by level

In a meta-analysis of intervention or group comparison studies, researchers often encounter the circumstance in which the standardized mean differences (d-effect sizes) are computed at multiple levels (e.g., individual vs. cluster). Cluster-level d-effect sizes may be inflated and, thus, may need to be corrected using the intraclass correlation (ICC) before being combined with individual-level d-effect sizes. The ICC value, however, is seldom reported in primary studies and, thus, may need to be computed from other sources. This article proposes a method for estimating the ICC value from the reported standard deviations within a particular meta-analysis (i.e., estimated ICC) when an appropriate default ICC value (Hedges, 2009b) is unavailable. A series of simulations provided evidence that the proposed method yields an accurate and precise estimated ICC value, which can then be used for correct estimation of a d-effect size. The effects of other pertinent factors (e.g., number of studies) were also examined, followed by discussion of related limitations and future research in this area.     

The Berlin School of Logical Empiricism and its Legacy

What has become generally known as the Berlin School of Logical Empiricism constitutes a philosophical movement that was erected on foundations laid by Albert Einstein. His revolutionary work in physics had a profound impact on philosophers interested in scientific issues, prominent among them Paul Oppenheim and Hans Reichenbach, the founding fathers of the school, who joined in viewing him as their hero among philosopher–scientists. Overall the membership of this school falls into three groups. The founding generation was linked by the circumstance that both Grelling and Reichenbach were collaborators of Oppenheim; the middle generation by the fact that both Hempel and Helmer were students of Reichenbach’s in Berlin; and the younger generation by the fact that all of its members were students and (at least in their early years) disciples either of Reichenbach’s or of Hempel’s in the USA. Three stages are at issue: an initial phase in Berlin, a transatlantic migration, and a continuation in the U.S.A.—principally in Pittsburgh.     

Fundamental properties of the N2pc as an index of spatial attention: effects of masking.

Masking is an important tool in many paradigms used to study the cognitive architecture. The N2pc is an electrophysiological event-related potential (ERP) that has been used as a tool to study the deployment of visual spatial attention. The aim of this paper was to study the effects of masking on the N2pc. Two stimuli were presented on the screen, one to left and one to right of fixation, and subjects reported the identity of one of them. The targets could be discriminated both by their category (letters vs. digit) and by their colour (pink vs. green). Backward masking was produced by presenting a second pair of bilateral stimuli after the offset of the first pair. The second pair of stimuli consisted of characters of the same colour and category as in the first pair. Forward masking was produced by using the very same stimuli as in the backward masking condition, but by instructing subjects to report the second stimulus. The forward mask trials had longer response times compared to no-mask trials, and backward mask trials had even longer response times, and also a higher error rate. Although the different masking procedures lead to clear behavioural effects, the N2pc was not affected, suggesting that the deployment of visual spatial attention, per se, was not affected by pattern masking. A sustained posterior contralateral negativity (SPCN) following the N2pc was also found (300 ms post-target, and beyond), and the amplitude of the SPCN was strongly modulated by the number of presented stimuli and the duration of the SPCN was positively correlated with RT in the behavioural task. We hypothesize that the SPCN reflects neural activity associated with the passage of information through visual short-term memory.     

Self-reported adjustment of teenagers at soccer training centers: the Soccer Trainee Adjustment Scale

The aim of this study was to develop a questionnaire to measure adjustment of teenagers at soccer training centers, particularly newcomers. The Soccer Trainee Adjustment Scale was adapted from the Institutional Integration Scale and assesses the trainee's adjustment to operating and social activities. The scale was tested on a sample of 136 trainees from four soccer centers. Exploratory analysis indicated that the 13 items formed five factors: peer adjustment, boarding supervisor adjustment, soccer adjustment, scholastic adjustment, and boarding adjustment. These factors had internal consistency reliability ranging from .76 to .94.     

Influence of suggestion in the DRM paradigm: what state of consciousness is associated with false memory?

We assessed the effect of suggestion on the Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm and associated it with the Remember–Know–Guess paradigm. Undergraduate students were given either lists of semantically related words or texts containing these words. After the recall task, if participants did not produce the critical lure, the experimenter suggested that the word had been present, using either a question (moderate suggestion) or an assertion (strong suggestion); these conditions were compared to a condition without suggestion. Afterwards, participants took a recognition test. The results showed that strong suggestions lead to more false recognitions than other conditions and the state of consciousness associated with false recognitions tends to be a feeling of knowing rather than remembering, regardless of the verbal version (list or text). Therefore moderate suggestions did not lead to more false recognitions compare to no suggestion. We discuss the impact of suggestion on consciousness associated with false memories.     

You want to appear competent? Be mean! You want to appear sociable? Be lazy! Group differentiation and the compensation effect

Using the two fundamental dimensions of social judgment, warmth and competence, we show that, contrary to general models of impression formation, negative information on one dimension has positive consequences on the way a target is judged on the other dimension. Participants learned about two groups which were either congruent on warmth and competence (one group high on both and the other low on both) or they were compensatory (one group high on warmth and low on competence, the other high on competence and low on warmth). Our results show that in the compensatory condition, the groups were rated more extremely than in the congruent condition and that this was especially the case for the dimension on which the groups were high. Results are discussed both in terms of how they run counter to traditional theories of impression formation and what they tell us about the fundamental dimensions of social judgment.     

Why does social dominance orientation decrease with university exposure to the social sciences? The impact of institutional socialization and the mediating role of “geneticism”

Why does university exposure to a hierarchy‐attenuating (HA) academic major (e.g., social science) lead to a decrease in anti‐egalitarianism and group domination (social dominance orientation, SDO)? The reason for this well‐documented phenomenon remains unclear. In the social sciences, the origins of differences in both behavior and personality are attributed more to social and environmental factors than to genetic ones. We hypothesized that the normative and informational influences of this academic major would lead to perceptions that genes have a less important role than nurture in the shaping of human behavior and personality. Our main hypothesis was confirmed. Decreased SDO among psychology students was mediated significantly by a decrease in belief in genetic determinism, the factor we called “geneticism.” Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.