Parental influence on youth propensity to join the military

The purpose of this research was to apply the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) in a model of youths’ career choice intentions and parents’ recommendation intentions. Specifically, a TPB model was developed for youth-parent dyads and tested with SEM to examine parental influence on youth intentions as well as behavior. Results indicated that a modified TPB model is useful for describing how youth and parent beliefs translate into enlistment intentions and pre-enlistment behavior. The strongest impact parents appeared to have on their children was through efficacy beliefs, followed by the link between parents’ attitudes and youths’ normative beliefs. Implications for recruitment and outreach efforts are discussed.     

LABELING OF ABUSE EXPERIENCES AND RATES OF VICTIMIZATION

Research has consistently found that a history of previous sexual victimization increases risk for future sexual assault, which might be due to women with a history of sexual victimization having difficulty identifying risky cues and not perceiving their own vulnerability for future assaults. This study investigated how acknowledgment of previous experiences with interpersonal violence is related to risk perception and rates of victimization. Participants were 198 college women who completed assessments of victimization, personal risk appraisal, and acknowledgment. Analyses indicated differences in rates of victimization based on labeling of experiences and differences in efforts to change behaviors to reduce risk for future assaults based on level of acknowledgment. Also, there were a number of situational factors significantly related to likelihood of acknowledgment. The findings differed for physical and sexual violence. This study suggests that acknowledgment is an important factor to consider in studies of sexual and physical revictimization.     

An Empirical Investigation of Critical Success Factors in the Personal Selling Process for Homogenous Goods

This study uses a Critical Success Factor approach to evaluate a representative set of 51 selling techniques with the intent of determining what techniques are more critical to sales success for salespeople who sell homogenous products than others and what techniques are associated with failure. A set of twelve techniques were identified that distinguished salespeople in the top decile from those in the bottom decile.     

Effects of perspective taking on courtroom decisions

Four experiments examined the hypothesis that perspective taking with a defendant would lead to greater empathy, which would mediate lowered perceptions of culpability, with lowered culpability mediating a lower probability of guilt and recidivism. Experiments 1 and 2 established that perspective taking leads to a lower probability of guilty verdicts and recidivism, mediated by a decreased perception of the defendant's culpability. Experiment 2 showed that it does so by increasing empathy. Experiment 3 showed that perspective taking also heightens the perception of culpability through increased empathy for the victim. Experiment 4 showed that decreased culpability is in part driven by leniency, which is also a function of empathy. We tie our findings into other research investigating links between empathy and perspective taking.     

Is Negligence a First Cousin to Intentionality? Lay Conceptions of Negligence and Its Relationship to Intentionality

In three studies, we examined lay conceptions of negligence and how they are used when making judgments about actors' intentions, negligence, and blame. Study 1 examined the extent to which participants agreed about what constitutes negligence and accidents. After finding a high level of agreement between participants, Study 2 explored the features that defined participants' folk understanding of negligence. Additionally, we examined if definitions of negligence overlapped with key features of definitions of intentionality proposed in the literature. Study 2 suggested there were some key overlapping features and differences between negligence and intentionality. Finally, Study 3 examined how two key features of intentionality and negligence (knowledge and awareness) were related to attributions of negligence, accidental causation, blame, and desire to punish. The findings suggested that knowledge and awareness are positively related to judgments of negligence, blame, and desire to punish. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Retrieval practice over the long term: Should spacing be expanding or equal-interval?

If multiple opportunities are available to review to-be-learned material, should a review occur soon after initial study and recur at progressively expanding intervals, or should the reviews occur at equal intervals? Landauer and Bjork (1978) argued for the superiority of expanding intervals, whereas more recent research has often failed to find any advantage. However, these prior studies have generally compared expanding versus equal-interval training within a single session, and have assessed effects only upon a single final test. We argue that a more generally important goal would be to maintain high average performance over a considerable period of training. For the learning of foreign vocabulary spread over four weeks, we found that expanding retrieval practice (i.e., sessions separated by increasing numbers of days) produced recall equivalent to that from equal-interval practice on a final test given eight weeks after training. However, the expanding schedule yielded much higher average recallability over the whole training period.