Infants' use of social partnerships to predict behavior

The experiences of social partners are important motivators of social action. Can infants use such experiences to make predictions about how social agents will behave? Sixteen‐month‐old infants were introduced to two social pairs. Initial events established within‐pair cooperation as well as between‐pair conflict involving an individual from each pair. Following these events, infants looked longer when between‐pair members who had never previously interacted now cooperated – instead of conflicted – with each other. Thus, infants tracked the third‐person allegiances and inferred that the conflict would generalize across social partnerships. These findings demonstrate a critical feature of early social cognition and promote needed, further research on the role of social allegiances in social cognition across development.     

Structure of outcome beliefs in condom use. The Project RESPECT Study Group.

To study the structure of beliefs about condom use outcomes, the authors derived and tested 4 psychosocial hypothetical models: (a) a 2-factor model of the personal and social outcomes of condom use; (b) a 2-factor model of the pros and cons of the behavior; (c) a 3-factor model (i.e., physical, self-evaluative, and social) of outcome expectancies; and (d) a thematic 4-factor model of the protection, self-concept, pleasure, and interaction implications of the behavior. All 4 models were studied with a confirmatory factor analysis approach in a multisite study of 4,638 participants, and the thematic solution was consistently the most plausible. Self-concept and pleasure were most strongly associated with attitudes toward using condoms, intentions to use condoms, and actual condom use, whereas protection and interaction generally had little influence.     

False Remembering in the Aged

ABSTRACT— Researchers studying human memory have increasingly focused on memory accuracy in aging populations. In this article we briefly review the literature on memory accuracy in healthy older adults. The prevailing evidence indicates that, compared to younger adults, older adults exhibit both diminished memory accuracy and greater susceptibility to misinformation. In addition, older adults demonstrate high levels of confidence in their false memories. We suggest an explanatory framework for the high level of false memories observed in older adults, a framework based on the theory that consciously controlled uses of memory decline with age, making older adults more susceptible to false memories that rely on automatic processes. We also point to future research that may remedy such deficits in accuracy.     

Processes underlying the cross-race effect: an investigation of holistic, featural, and relational processing of own-race versus other-race faces

Adults are often better at recognising own-race than other-race faces. Unlike previous studies that reported an own-race advantage after administering a single test of either holistic processing or of featural and relational processing, we used a cross-over design and multiple tasks to assess differential processing of faces from a familiar race versus a less familiar race. Caucasian and Chinese adults performed four tasks, each with Caucasian and Chinese faces. Two tasks measured holistic processing: the composite face task and the part/whole task. Both tasks indicated holistic processing of own-race and other-race faces that did not differ in degree. Two tasks measured featural and relational processing: the Jane/Ling task, in which same/ different judgments were made about face pairs that differed in features of their spacing, and the scrambled/blurred task, in which test faces were scrambled (isolates memory for components) or blurred (isolates memory for relations). Both tasks provided evidence of an own-race advantage in both featural and relational processing. We conclude that even when adults process other-race faces holistically, other manifestations of an own-race advantage remain.     

From Treatment to Empowerment: New Approaches to Youth Mentoring

Traditional approaches to formal youth mentoring have focused primarily on improving the lives of “at‐risk” youth through the assignment of individual mentors who are typically disconnected from youth's communities. Similarly, research in the field of formal mentoring has emphasized the dyadic relationship between the mentor and the mentee, with less attention paid to the broader relational contexts in which such relationships unfold. The current paper proposes a new framework that expands the scope of mentoring interventions to include approaches that build on and cultivate informal supports and empower youth to identify and reach out to networks of potential supportive adults, thus increasing the reach of youth mentoring.     

Family-based physical activity interventions and family functioning: A systematic review

Family physical activity (PA) can confer multiple health benefits, yet whether PA interventions affect general family functioning has not been appraised. The purpose of this review was to evaluate studies that have examined the effect of family PA interventions, where child PA was the focus of the intervention, on constructs of family functioning. Literature searches were concluded on January 11, 2022 using seven common databases. Eligible studies were in English, utilized a family PA intervention, and assessed a measure of family functioning as a study outcome. The initial search yielded 8413 hits, which was reduced to 20 independent PA interventions of mixed quality after screening for eligibility criteria. There was mixed evidence for whether family PA interventions affected overall family functioning; however, analyses of subdomains indicated that family cohesion is improved by PA interventions when children are in the early school years (aged 5–12). High-quality studies also showed an impact of family PA interventions on family organization. Targeted interventions at specific family subsystems (e.g., father–son, mother–daughter), characteristics (low-income, clinical populations, girls), and broad multibehavioral interventions may have the most reliable effects. Overall, the findings show that family PA interventions can promote family cohesion and organization, particularly among families with children in the early school years. Higher quality research, employing randomized trial designs and targeting specific intervention and sample characteristics (e.g., different clinical conditions, specific parent–child dyads), is recommended in order to better ascertain the effectiveness of these approaches.