Catching up with wonderful women: The women‐are‐wonderful effect is smaller in more gender egalitarian societies

Inequalities between men and women are common and well‐documented. Objective indexes show that men are better positioned than women in societal hierarchies—there is no single country in the world without a gender gap. In contrast, researchers have found that the women‐are‐wonderful effect—that women are evaluated more positively than men overall—is also common. Cross‐cultural studies on gender equality reveal that the more gender egalitarian the society is, the less prevalent explicit gender stereotypes are. Yet, because self‐reported gender stereotypes may differ from implicit attitudes towards each gender, we reanalysed data collected across 44 cultures, and (a) confirmed that societal gender egalitarianism reduces the women‐are‐wonderful effect when it is measured more implicitly (i.e. rating the personality of men and women presented in images) and (b) documented that the social perception of men benefits more from gender egalitarianism than that of women.     

Do Not Revise Ockham's Razor Without Necessity

Ockham's razor asks that we not multiply entities beyond necessity. The razor is a powerful methodological tool, enabling us to articulate reasons for preferring one theory to another. There are those, however, who would modify the razor. Schaffer (2010: 313—our italics), for one, tells us that, ‘I think the proper rendering of Ockham's razor should be ‘Do not multiply fundamental entities without necessity’’. Our aim, here, is to challenge such re‐workings of Ockham's razor.     

The Experiences of Being a Talented Youth Athlete: Lessons for Parents

Involvement in organized sport can be highly demanding for young athletes who encounter many difficult situations and stressors. This can be exacerbated among youth athletes who have been recruited into talent-identification youth sport programs. Given that there are a range of negative consequences that can result when talent-identified (TI) youth athletes are unable to cope with the stressors they encounter, additional support is therefore necessary. Parents are uniquely situated to assist in this regard, but they are not always equipped to provide optimal levels of support. Therefore, the aim of this study was to understand the experiences of being a TI youth athlete and present the findings as “lessons” for parents seeking to enhance their involvement in TI youth sport settings. This article reports on qualitative data collected from the 1st year of a 3-year longitudinal study involving TI youth athletes from South Australia. Fifty male athletes (M age = 14.6 years) participated in focus groups to hear their experiences of being a TI youth athlete and understand what difficulties they want their parents to know. From the thematic analysis, 3 major themes were identified from the focus groups with TI youth athletes: (a) difficulties with being talented, (b) negotiating the future, and (c) playing for improvement. From the findings, a number of lessons for parents and youth sport organizations are offered to assist the transmission of knowledge to an applied setting.     

Citizenship’s tangled web: Associations,gaps and tensions in formulations of European youth active citizenship across disciplines

Abstract

How does academic literature across various disciplines conceptualize and empirically address active citizenship? What are the potential benefits and dangers of dominant epistemological and ideological perspectives on ‘good citizenship’? Our paper engages with these questions by drawing on literature across 12 disciplines. We used textual analysis software T-LAB to quantify and visualize co-occurrences, word associations and thematic clusters in the abstracts of 770 texts gathered by eight country teams and original in-depth qualitative analyses of ideological positions and discourses taken up in a selection of key texts across the corpus. Our paper elaborates the findings: that many of the key themes surrounding young people and citizenship in the literature share little or no connection with European citizenship; that there is a significant gap in the literature on young European citizens; and that studies connected to internal, status-based factors connected to citizenship are far more prevalent than those examining external, practice-based factors or dissidence and dissent. Our conclusions examine the potential normative implications of the disjuncture between dominant conceptions and critical accounts of youth active citizenship.     

Visuo-spatial representations of the alphabet in synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes

Visuo-spatial representations of the alphabet (so-called 'alphabet forms') may be as common as other types of sequence-space synaesthesia, but little is known about them or the way they relate to implicit spatial associations in the general population. In the first study, we describe the characteristics of a large sample of alphabet forms visualized by synaesthetes. They most often run from left to right and have salient features (e.g., bends, breaks) at particular points in the sequence that correspond to chunks in the 'Alphabet Song' and at the alphabet mid-point. The Alphabet Song chunking suggests that the visuo-spatial characteristics are derived, at least in part, from those of the verbal sequence learned earlier in life. However, these synaesthetes are no faster at locating points in the sequence (e.g., what comes before/after letter X?) than controls. They tend to be more spatially consistent (measured by eye tracking) and letters can act as attentional cues to left/right space in synaesthetes with alphabet forms (measured by saccades), but not in non-synaesthetes. This attentional cueing suggests dissociation between numbers (which reliably act as attentional cues in synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes) and letters (which act as attentional cues in synaesthetes only).     

Effects of changes in narrative time on eye movements and recognition responses

Abstract

Gibbs and O'Brien (1990) recently claimed that the images that people associate with everyday idioms reflect the deep conceptual metaphors that underlie the meanings of those idioms. However, because idiomatic strings can convey both a literal and an idiomatic meaning, people must be able to inhibit or ignore literal meanings if they are to produce mental images that uniquely reflect idiomatic meanings. We investigated the potential interference between literal and idiomatic meanings in three experiments. Experiment 1 used a mental-image production task similar to that used by Gibbs and O'Brien. Counter to Gibbs and O'Brien's claim, the images that we obtained referred overwhelmingly to the literal meanings of idiomatic strings rather than to their idiomatic meanings. Experiments 2 and 3 employed a paraphrase verification task to examine the effects of mental imagery on idiom comprehension. If the images associated with an idiom reflect that idiom's meaning, then imagery should facilitate comprehension. No evidence for facilitation was found in either experiment. Instead, imagery interfered with comprehension, as assessed by paraphrase verification time, both for idiomatic meanings and for literal, concrete meanings. We conclude that the images associated with idioms do not reflect idiom meanings.     

Psychological adaptation of adolescents with immigrant backgrounds

In the present study, the author examined 3 theoretical perspectives--family values, acculturation strategies, and social group identity--as predictors of the psychological well-being of adolescents from immigrant backgrounds. The 3 perspectives share the view that immigrants' successful adaptation involves the balancing of their heritage culture and the culture of the society of settlement. The participants were 506 adolescents from 4 backgrounds--Vietnamese, Pakistani, Turkish, and Chilean--who were living in Norway. The 3 theoretical perspectives together accounted for between 12% and 22% of the explained variance of mental health, life satisfaction, and self-esteem. The predictive powers of the different perspectives, however, were dependent on which outcome was predicted. On the whole, social group identity showed the strongest predictive power.     

Interactive property attribution in concept combination

We address the question of how people understand attributive noun-noun compounds. Alignment-and-comparison models suggest that the similarity of the constituent concepts guides interpretation. We propose, as an alternative, an interactive property attribution model wherein the modifier and head concepts have different functions: The head provides relevant dimensions, whereas the modifier provides candidate features for attribution. According to our model, the interaction of dimensions and features, rather than constituent similarity, guides interpretation. In this study, we empirically contrasted the two models by holding constituent similarity of compounds constant while varying the interaction of modifier feature salience and head dimension relevance. Compounds consisting of a head concept with a relevant dimension for attribution and a modifier with a salient property on that dimension were interpreted by means of property attribution. Other compounds with equivalent constituent similarity, but lacking the high salience-relevance interaction, were not interpreted by means of attribution. The interactive property attribution model more accurately predicted interpretation of noun-noun compounds.     

Cognitive functioning after medial frontal lobe damage including the anterior cingulate cortex: a preliminary investigation

Two patients with medial frontal lobe damage involving the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) performed a range of cognitive tasks, including tests of executive function and anterior attention. Both patients lesions extended beyond the ACC, therefore caution needs to be exerted in ascribing observed deficits to the ACC alone. Patient performance was compared with age and education matched healthy controls. Both patients showed intact intellectual, memory, and language abilities. No clear-cut abnormalities were noted in visuoperceptual functions. Speed of information processing was mildly reduced only in Patient 2 (bilateral ACC lesion). The patients demonstrated weak or impaired performance only on selective executive function tests. Performance on anterior attention tasks was satisfactory. We tentatively suggest that our findings are inconsistent with anterior attention theories of ACC function based on neuroimaging findings. We propose that the data may imply that the ACC does not have a central role in cognition. We speculate that our findings may be compatible with the view that the ACC integrates cognitive processing with autonomic functioning to guide behaviour.