Object Relations and Interpersonal Problems in Sexually Abused Female Patients: An Empirical Study With the SCORS and the IIP

Ninety-three children from a child guidance clinic were asked to select the Rorschach card which represented their mother, their father, the card they liked best, the card they liked least, and the most frightening card. In comparing the present data with earlier findings, it was determined that no reliable selection of a parental card could be safely made. However, card X appears to represent consistently the best liked card and Card IV a negative reaction card. As in earlier studies, none of the significant results represents a majority of the group's choices for any one stimulus value.     

The Gender Gap on Wall Street: An Empirical Analysis of Confidence in Investment Decision Making

We attempted to identify the personal characteristics that influence confidence in an investment decision in an experiment administered to 1,359 subjects nationwide. Multiple regression was used to control statistically for variation among subjects and to develop a model of investment decision confidence. The most striking finding was that women had significantly lower confidence in an investment task than men, after controlling for all other relevant variables and characteristics including the amount of the investment decision itself. Familiarity with and present attitude about investing in the stock market, college credit hours in accounting and finance, experience in evaluating common stocks, the current level of the stock market, and the investment decision itself (the amount to be invested) were also found to be significant. Age, value of personal portfolio, years of college, and years of business experience were not significant characteristics.     

A valence-specific lateral bias for discriminating emotional facial expressions in free field

Findings from subjects with unilateral brain damage, as well as from normal subjects studied with tachistoscopic paradigms, argue that emotion is processed differently by each brain hemisphere. An open question concerns the extent to which such lateralised processing might occur under natural, freeviewing conditions. To explore this issue, we asked 28 normal subjects to discriminate emotions expressed by pairs of faces shown side-by-side, with no time or viewing constraints. Images of neutral expressions were shown paired with morphed images of very faint emotional expressions (happiness, surprise, disgust, fear, anger, or sadness). We found a surprising and robust laterality effect: When discriminating negative emotional expressions, subjects performed significantly better when the emotional face was to the left of the neutral face; conversely, when discriminating positive expressions, subjects performed better when the emotional face was to the right. We interpret this valence-specific laterality effect as consistent with the idea that the right hemisphere is specialised to process negative emotions, whereas the left is specialised to process positive emotions. The findings have important implications for how humans perceive facial emotion under natural conditions.     

Examining the Relationships Between the Justice Facets and Turnover Intent: The Mediating Roles of Overall Justice and Psychological Strain

We examined how interpersonal justice from coworkers, the traditional justice facets (i.e., distributive, procedural, interpersonal, informational), and overall justice perceptions relate to employee psychological strain and turnover intentions in Canadian Armed Forces personnel. Specifically, we hypothesized that overall justice would mediate the relationships between the justice facets (including coworker justice) and strain, and strain would mediate the relationship between overall justice and turnover intent. We used a cross-sectional correlational design with personnel from 2 military units (total N = 218) as our sample. A 2-step structural equation modeling technique was used to evaluate our hypotheses. Support for our hypotheses was obtained with 1 exception: informational justice did not predict overall justice judgments. Our results suggest that employees’ reactions to individual justice events and different sources of justice exert their effects on strain and turnover intent indirectly through their impact on a global evaluation of justice in their work environment.     

Process Evaluation of A Physical Activity Self-Management Program For Children: Spark

Abstract

SPARK is a controlled field study of a multi-component elementary school program to promote physical activity. One component is a weekly classroom-based self-management program, with the goal of increasing physical activity outside of school. The curriculum included goal setting, behavioral skills training, a reward system, and parent involvement. An evaluation of curriculum implementation and association between process and outcome was conducted using direct observation of lessons, subjective ratings by 24 teachers and 391 parents, and participation records of 549 students. Teachers viewed the self-management curriculum less positively than the physical education curriculum. Teachers were observed implementing an average of 65% of curriculum elements, which may have contributed to the limited effects of the self-management program. Student participation in the program, measured by points earned for doing out of school physical activity, was correlated significantly with changes in body mass index and multiple psychosocial variables among boys but not girls. Barriers to full program implementation were identified, and a remaining challenge is to improve self-management curriculum implementation by teachers.     

Reliability and Validity of the Dyadic Observed Communication Scale (DOCS)

We evaluated the reliability and validity of the Dyadic Observed Communication Scale (DOCS) coding scheme, which was developed to capture a range of communication components between parents and adolescents. Adolescents and their caregivers were recruited from mental health facilities for participation in a large, multi-site family-based HIV prevention intervention study. Seventy-one dyads were randomly selected from the larger study sample and coded using the DOCS at baseline. Preliminary validity and reliability of the DOCS was examined using various methods, such as comparing results to self-report measures and examining interrater reliability. Results suggest that the DOCS is a reliable and valid measure of observed communication among parent-adolescent dyads that captures both verbal and nonverbal communication behaviors that are typical intervention targets. The DOCS is a viable coding scheme for use by researchers and clinicians examining parent-adolescent communication. Coders can be trained to reliably capture individual and dyadic components of communication for parents and adolescents and this complex information can be obtained relatively quickly.     

Gaze bias: Selective encoding and liking effects

People look longer at things that they choose than things they do not choose. How much of this tendency—the gaze bias effect—is due to a liking effect compared to the information encoding aspect of the decision-making process? Do these processes compete under certain conditions? We monitored eye movements during a visual decision-making task with four decision prompts: Like, dislike, older, and newer. The gaze bias effect was present during the first dwell in all conditions except the dislike condition, when the preference to look at the liked item and the goal to identify the disliked item compete. Colour content (whether a photograph was colour or black-and-white), not decision type, influenced the gaze bias effect in the older/newer decisions because colour is a relevant feature for such decisions. These interactions appear early in the eye movement record, indicating that gaze bias is influenced during information encoding.