Experimental evaluation of a modular approach to mobilizing antitobacco influences of peers and parents

The experimental evaluation of two components of a community intervention to prevent adolescent tobacco use are described. Youth antitobacco activities (e.g., peer quizzes, sidewalk art, poster and T-shirt giveaways, etc.) and family communications activities (pamphlets to parents and student quizzes of parents) were evaluated in two time-series experiments, each of which was conducted in two experimental and one control community. Students in Grades 6 and 8 and their parents were assessed in a series of four phone surveys in the first experiment and six phone surveys in the second. Implementation of the youth antitobacco and family communications activities led to significantly greater exposure of young people to antitobacco information. They led to increases in parent and youth knowledge about tobacco use and more negative attitudes toward tobacco. In Experiment 2, youths in intervention communities had significantly lower rated intentions to smoke. The findings suggest the value of a modular approach to community interventions for influencing the social context relevant to the onset of adolescent tobacco use.     

Using religious paradox to facilitate life review groups with shame-driven older adults

This article explains how pastoral counselors who lead life review groups with shame-driven older members can use religious paradox as a model for change. The article first elaborates upon the challenge to self-acceptance that poor self-esteem poses for older adults engaged in life review. It then shows how paradoxes enhance self-acceptance by drawing reviewers to a more holistic understanding of their past and evoking insights about the meaning of their personal history. It presents a model of group process in which members individually select religious paradoxes and relate such paradoxes to their life review. It concludes with examples of how three participants used religious paradoxes to own the life review instead of feeling threatened by it.     

Perspectives on the home advantage: A comparison of football players, fans and referees

Objectives

The study aimed to address the paucity of research pertaining to perceptions of causes of the home advantage. The views of three key personnel groups in football (soccer) were examined with regard to their perspectives.

Design and procedure

Players (n = 94), fans (n = 116) and referees (n = 163) completed a ten-item questionnaire on which they rated the contribution of the most prominent factors known to influence the home advantage.

Results

Factor analysis revealed three subscales (officials, player state and home environment) relating to explanations for the home advantage. A MANOVA examining the groups’ ratings for these three subscales found that the fans and player gave higher ratings for the contribution of officials and player state than did referees, while the fans gave higher ratings for the home environment.

Conclusion

The present study provides an insight into conceptualisations of the home advantage from the perspectives of different football groups. The relevance of self-enhancement, emanating from motivational and information processing mechanisms, is considered.     

Conceptualizing Sex Offender Denial From a Multifaceted Framework: Investigating the Psychometric Qualities of a New Instrument

The authors examined the psychometric properties of a clinician‐rated measure of sex offender denial. Convergent and discriminant validity for the measure was supported, and given its relationship to treatment attitudes, the measure demonstrated utility for assessing treatment change and readiness.     

Using ambiguous plaid stimuli to investigate the influence of immediate prior experience on perception

In a series of three experiments, we used an ambiguous plaid motion stimulus to explore the behavioral and electrophysiological effects of prior stimulus exposures and perceptual states on current awareness. The results showed that prior exposure to a stimulus biased toward one percept led to subsequent suppression of that percept. In contrast, in the absence of stimulus bias, prior perceptual experience can have a facilitative influence. The suppressive effects caused by the prior stimulus were found to transfer to an ambiguous plaid test stimulus rotated 180º relative to the adaptation stimulus, but were abolished if (1) the ambiguous test stimulus was only rotated 90º relative to the adaptation stimulus or (2) the adaptation stimulus was heavily biased toward the component grating percept. Event-related potential recordings were consistent with the involvement of visual cortical areas and suggested that the influence of recent stimulus exposure may involve recruitment of additional brain processes beyond those responsible for initial stimulus encoding. In contrast, the effects of prior and current perceptual experience appeared to depend on similar brain processes. Although the data presented here focus on vision, the work is discussed within the context of data from a parallel series of experiments in audition.     

Does this book make me look fat? The effect of protagonist body weight and body esteem on female readers’ body esteem

Effects of visual representations of the thin ideal in the media have been widely explored, but textual representations of the thin ideal in novels have received scant attention. The chick literature genre has been criticized for depicting characters who worry about their body weight and who have poor body esteem. Excerpts from two chick lit novels were used to examine the effect of a protagonist's body weight and body esteem on college women's (N = 159) perceptions of their sexual attractiveness and weight concern. Two narratives were used to minimize the possibility that idiosyncratic characteristics of one excerpt might influence the study's results. Underweight (vs. healthy weight) protagonists predicted readers’ lower perceived sexual attractiveness. Protagonists with low body esteem (vs. control) predicted readers’ increased weight concern. Scholars and health officials should be concerned about the effect chick lit novels might have on women's body image.     

Substitute or stepping stone? Assessing the impact of low‐threshold online collective actions on offline participation

Anecdotes of past social movements suggest that Internet‐enabled technologies, especially social media platforms, can facilitate collective actions. Recently, however, it has been argued that the participatory Internet encourages low‐cost and low‐risk activism—slacktivism—which may have detrimental consequences for groups that aim to achieve a collective purpose. More precisely, low‐threshold digital practices such as signing online petitions or “liking” the Facebook page of a group are thought to derail subsequent engagement offline. We assessed this postulation in three experiments (N = 76, N = 59, and N = 48) and showed that so‐called slacktivist actions indeed reduce the willingness to join a panel discussion and demonstration as well as the likelihood to sign a petition. This demobilizing effect was mediated by the satisfaction of group‐enhancing motives; members considered low‐threshold online collective actions as a substantial contribution to the group's success. The findings highlight that behavior that is belittled as slacktivism addresses needs that pertain to individuals' sense of group membership. Rather than hedonistic motives or personal interests, concerns for the ingroup's welfare and viability influenced the decision to join future collective actions offline. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Power and the objectification of social targets

Objectification has been defined historically as a process of subjugation whereby people, like objects, are treated as means to an end. The authors hypothesized that objectification is a response to social power that involves approaching useful social targets regardless of the value of their other human qualities. Six studies found that under conditions of power, approach toward a social target was driven more by the target's usefulness, defined in terms of the perceiver's goals, than in low-power and baseline conditions. This instrumental response to power, which was linked to the presence of an active goal, was observed using multiple instantiations of power, different measures of approach, a variety of goals, and several types of instrumental and noninstrumental target attributes. Implications for research on the psychology of power, automatic goal pursuit, and self-objectification theory are discussed.     

Relational and imageric recall in young and older adults under conditions of high task demand

Research indicates the presence of an age-related pictorial processing deficit, for which the elderly may attempt to compensate through the use of relational information. Cognitive asynchrony theory, a recent synthetic formulation which unites elements of the generalized slowing hypothesis, environmental support theory, and the item-specific/relational information distinction, has proven useful in a number of experiments in explaining these aspects of visual cognitive aging. The present experiments tested this theoretical formulation under high processing demand conditions in both the relational and the pictorial/item-specific realm. Young and older adults yielded a complex pattern of results consistent with the cognitive asynchrony synthesis of these theoretical considerations. The present experiments add to the growing body of findings indicating that the cognitive subsystems of memory decline at different rates, that the differences in cognitive processing between young and older adults tend to be more quantitative than qualitative, and that the global age-related memory deficits of popular belief are in fact relatively circumscribed and specific. This research was supported by grant AG11605 from the National Institute on Aging, and by a grant from the College of Science and Mathematics, California State University.