Nutritional misinformation of children: A developmental and experimental analysis of the effects of televised food commercials

This study assessed the accuracy of judgments of 100 school age children as to the presence of real fruit content in 3 sets of cereals and beverages advertised on TV: real fruit, nonfruit, and artificially fruit flavored products. In the baseline session, accuracy was an increasing function of age, but children at each age were deceived about real fruit content of artificial fruit products. In session 2, the experimental group saw TV ads for 6 products embedded in a program (naturalistic viewing). They then judged fruit content for these six advertised products, plus a matched set of six for which ads were not shown. Controls saw toy ads on TV, and then judged the same 12 products. In session 3, subjects in each group saw the same ads they had seen in Session 2, without the program and with instruction to attend very carefully to messages in the ad (intensive viewing). They then judged all 12 products again. After naturalistic viewing, few significant differential changes from baseline were found. But after intensive viewing, accuracy of judgment of advertised artificial fruit products was lower than baseline among experimental group children. By contrast, accuracy was higher than baseline both for control children's judgements of “advertised” prod-     

Reminiscence as Continuity: Comparison of Young and Older Adults

This study empirically investigates key propositions of a continuity theory approach to reminiscence. According to continuity theory, individuals seek familiarity in the face of uncertainty or impending change, which can accompany the aging process. The reminiscence behavior of young (n = 43) and older (n = 47) adults was compared to ascertain whether significant differences would emerge between the two populations concerning how often they reminisce and their use of reminiscence during transitional periods. Also of interest were differences in potential links between the content of reminiscence episodes and postreminiscence affect. Young adults in this sample reminisced significantly more frequently than older adults and were more likely to reminisce during times of change than were older adults. In addition, there was a direct relationship between the content of reminiscence episodes and postreminiscence affect, with older adults reporting greater emotional satisfaction after recalling the past than did younger adults. Findings lend support to continuity theory: Reminiscence occurs throughout the life span and should not be conceptualized as occurring most frequently in old age.     

Marital Status and Sex: Impact on Career Self-Efficacy

Bandura's (1977, 1986) self-efficacy theory served as the theoretical framework for examining the preferences of 214 individuals for either traditionally male or traditionally female occupations. An interaction between sex and marital status was found with regard to efficacy for traditionally female occupations. Married women scored higher than did married men, and unmarried women scored higher than did unmarried men for the traditionally female occupations. No difference between married and unmarried men or between married and unmarried women was indicated for the traditionally female occupations. A significannt main effect of sex, with men scoring higher than women, was found for both the traditionally male and traditionallyfemale occupations. Implications for further research as well as for career counseling and development are discussed.     

Demands on attention and the role of response priming in visual discrimination of feature conjunctions

This study examined how response mapping of features within single- and multiple-feature targets affects decision-based processing and attentional capacity demands. Observers judged the presence or absence of 1 or 2 target features within an object either presented alone or with distractors. Judging the presence of 2 features relative to the less discriminable of these features alone was faster (conjunction benefits) when the task-relevant features differed in discriminability and were consistently mapped to responses. Conjunction benefits were attributed to asynchronous decision priming across attended, task-relevant dimensions. A failure to find conjunction benefits for disjunctive conjunctions was attributed to increased memory demands and variable feature-response mapping for 2- versus single-feature targets. Further, attentional demands were similar between single- and 2-feature targets when response mapping, memory demands, and discriminability of the task-relevant features were equated between targets. Implications of the findings for recent attention models are discussed.     

Young and Poor: The Well-Being of Adolescent Girls Living in Families Receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program

We present our findings on the current well-being of 125 adolescent girls living in families receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program (TANF) in terms of their health, mental health, and substance abuse status, academic performance, and teenage behaviors. This mixed-method study included separate structured face-to-face interviews with each adolescent and her mother. In addition, 20 daughters were randomly selected and completed more in-depth qualitative interviews. The findings suggest that generally the daughters were in good physical health although they reported mental health problems at about twice the rate that would be expected in a general pediatric sample. Further, about 3–5% of the daughters had a potential serious substance abuse problem. With respect to school, about 28% were not currently attending school although the majority of daughters who were attending school maintained a B average or better. Nearly two-thirds of the daughters reported being sexually active and almost 17% of the adolescents had children of their own, much higher than the 2.9% national rate of girls in this age cohort. While many of these daughters life circumstances may not be optimal, findings from both the quantitative and qualitative interviews with both mothers and daughters indicate that these daughters possess many strengths, abilities, and desires.     

Impaired oral reading in two atypical dyslexics: a comparison with a computational lexical-analogy model

A computational model of reading was developed based upon the notion that the structural relationship between orthography and phonology is of greater importance than the dimension of semantics for the reading aloud of single words. Degradation of this model successfully simulated the reading performance of two patients with atypical acquired dyslexia. The first patient CAV, studied and described in the literature by Warrington in 1981, presented with unusual concrete word dyslexia, i.e., he had a category-specific reading deficit for concrete words compared with abstract words. The second patient BG is a phonological dyslexic who, although displaying a strong concreteness effect (concrete words read better than abstract words), was able to read functors individually perfectly well, a pattern that is rarely if ever seen. The computational model was used to generate a set of words for which it was predicted that BG would show no concreteness effect. The results of BG's reading of these words were consistent with this prediction, thereby providing greater support for the validity of the model. It is concluded that a computational approach that attempts not only to reproduce the core symptoms of the major varieties of acquired dyslexia but also to simulate clinical data from specific patients has much to contribute to the understanding of cognitive deficits and to the design of effective rehabilitation strategies.     

Macro and Micro Views of Erotic Tourism

This article examines the deviant phenomenon of erotic tourism from both macro and micro level perspectives. The current study deals exclusively with erotic tourism involving the provision of a sexual experience for male tourists either as voyeurs or participants in sex acts with females. The origins of the industry are discussed as well as its implications for sexual deviance.     

examining the informal sanctioning of deviance in a chat room culture

This study explores the nature of everyday deviance at the micro level, within the context of a particular chat room culture. It focuses on the normative structure of the Married Life chat culture through examination of the processes of informal social sanctioning of behavior that is defined as deviant within the culture. It is suggested that the nature of cyberspace produces environmental conditions analogous to social disorganization models of deviance and crime. Furthermore, mechanisms for sanctioning deviance within cyber cultures in general are identified.     

Perceptual organization and artificial attention for visual landmarks detection

In biological vision systems, attention mechanisms are responsible for selecting the relevant information from the sensed field of view, so that the complete scene can be analyzed using a sequence of rapid eye saccades. In recent years, efforts have been made to imitate such attention behavior in artificial vision systems, because it allows optimizing the computational resources as they can be focused on the processing of a set of selected regions. In the framework of mobile robotics navigation, this work proposes an artificial model where attention is deployed at the level of objects (visual landmarks) and where new processes for estimating bottom-up and top-down (target-based) saliency maps are employed. Bottom-up attention is implemented through a hierarchical process, whose final result is the perceptual grouping of the image content. The hierarchical grouping is applied using a Combinatorial Pyramid that represents each level of the hierarchy by a combinatorial map. The process takes into account both image regions (faces in the map) and edges (arcs in the map). Top-down attention searches for previously detected landmarks, enabling their re-detection when the robot presumes that it is revisiting a known location. Landmarks are described by a combinatorial submap; thus, this search is conducted through an error-tolerant submap isomorphism procedure.