Alcohol as social lubricant.

This study examines how consuming alcohol differentially affects the communicative behavior and perceptions of high and low social self‐esteem (SSE) women as they engage in a brief interaction with a flirtatious male. Alcohol myopia theory proposes that alcohol affects behavior when it blocks a person's normal inhibitions about enacting a behavior. It was predicted that low SSE women would be more inhibited when talking to a flirtatious male than would high SSE women and, therefore administration of a social self‐esteem measure and random assignment to an alcoholic or nonalcoholic beverage condition, participants (N=50) talked with an attractive, flirtatious male confederate. Low SSE women were less anxious and self‐disclosed more when drinking than when sober, whereas high SSE women were not significantly affected by alcohol consumption. The discussion highlights the complex and often contradictory effects of alcohol consumption on social interaction.     

Marital Stress, Psychological Distress, and Healthful Dietary Behavior: A Longitudinal Analysis

This longitudinal study examined the role of marital and psychological distress on healthful dietary change. A theoretical model is proposed that specified barriers to healthful dietary behavior as mediating the effect of depressive symptoms, role disagreement, inequity, and education on dietary change over time. Subjects were 97 married couples interviewed in their homes at 2 separate times. Selection in the first wave was by random area sampling based on population concentration. The findings provide evidence of the negative influence of interpersonal and intrapsychic distress on positive dietary change. For wives, marital and psychological distress and the barriers to dietary change were important factors in actual changes in dietary behavior. For both husbands and wives, higher barriers were associated with lesser positive dietary change.     

Machine learning in suicide science: Applications and ethics

For decades, our ability to predict suicide has remained at near‐chance levels. Machine learning has recently emerged as a promising tool for advancing suicide science, particularly in the domain of suicide prediction. The present review provides an introduction to machine learning and its potential application to open questions in suicide research. Although only a few studies have implemented machine learning for suicide prediction, results to date indicate considerable improvement in accuracy and positive predictive value. Potential barriers to algorithm integration into clinical practice are discussed, as well as attendant ethical issues. Overall, machine learning approaches hold promise for accurate, scalable, and effective suicide risk detection; however, many critical questions and issues remain unexplored.     

Media Internalization and Social Comparison as Predictors of Eating Pathology Among Latino Adolescents: The Moderating Effect of Gender and Generational Status

Using a sociocultural framework, this cross-sectional study examined eating pathology among 235 Latino adolescents from the Southwestern U.S. who differed in generational status. Participants completed self-report measures of media pressures, internalization, social comparison, and eating pathology. Overall, results revealed stronger relationships between these sociocultural variables and eating pathology for girls. Girls reported greater social comparison, thin-ideal pressure and internalization, and eating pathology than boys. Generational status was positively correlated with these sociocultural variables and eating pathology for girls only. Moderated hierarchical regression analyses indicated that athletic-ideal internalization was a key predictor of eating pathology for girls but not boys. Discussion highlights gender, more than generational status, as critical to a sociocultural framework for eating pathology among adolescent Latino Americans.     

Constituent Length Affects Prosody and Processing for a Dative NP Ambiguity in Korean

Two sentence processing experiments on a dative NP ambiguity in Korean demonstrate effects of phrase length on overt and implicit prosody. Both experiments controlled non-prosodic length factors by using long versus short proper names that occurred before the syntactically critical material. Experiment 1 found that long phrases induce different prosodic phrasing than short phrases in a read-aloud task and change the preferred interpretation of globally ambiguous sentences. It also showed that speakers who have been told of the ambiguity can provide significantly different prosody for the two interpretations, for both lengths. Experiment 2 verified that prosodic patterns found in first-pass pronunciations predict self-paced reading patterns for silent reading. The results extend the coverage of the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis [Fodor, J Psycholinguist Res 27:285–319, 1998; Prosodic disambiguation in silent reading. In M. Hirotani (Ed.), NELS 32 (pp. 113–132). Amherst, MA: GLSA Publications, 2002] to another construction and to Korean. They further indicate that strong syntactic biases can have rapid effects on the formulation of implicit prosody.     

Self-esteem agreement in the marital relationship.

With the use of the circular-causal model of relationship development, this study examined the convergence of the self-esteem of marriage partners over four martial life stages. Three hundred thirty-six married couples in the United States were randomly selected and divided into four life stage groups: younger couples with a child (or children) under age 6; couples with children in school; empty nest couples, in which the wife is in the age range of 45-59 years; and retired couples. Measures of a partner's self-esteem and his or her evaluation of the spouse's self-esteem were taken. The findings demonstrated a convergence of the partners' self-esteem across life stages.