Coping with condom embarrassment

This study assesses the embarrassment associated with purchasing, carrying, storing, using and disposing of condoms. It incorporates coping theory into the investigation of embarrassment by analysing the strategies individuals use to cope with embarrassment during condom purchase. The results of a survey show that individuals are embarrassed at various stages related to condom use. Purchasing condoms elicits the most embarrassment, followed by carrying and disposing, while using and storing are the least embarrassing. To cope with their embarrassment while purchasing condoms, people use multiple cognitive and behavioural coping strategies, with embarrassed people using more strategies. Both embarrassment and the number of strategies used decrease with age and experience. It appears that embarrassment associated with condoms remains a barrier to condom acquisition and consistent condom use, particularly among young adult populations. Coping strategies help individuals to bridge the gap between embarrassment and use.     

Stimulus generation, ratings, phoneme counts, and group classifications for 696 famous people by British adults over 40 years of age

Matching stimuli across a range of influencing variables is no less important for studies of face recognition than it is for those of word processing. Whereas a number of corpora exist to allow experimenters to select a carefully controlled set of word stimuli, similar databases for famous faces do not exist. This article, therefore, provides researchers in the area of face recognition with a useful resource on which to base their stimulus selection. In the first phase of the investigation, British adults over 40 years of age were requested to generate the names of famous people (or celebrities) that they thought they would recognize and to write these down. The most frequently named celebrities were then rated by adults from the same age population for familiarity, distinctiveness, and age of acquisition. The result is a database of 696 famous people, with an indication of their relative eminence in the public consciousness and rated for these important variables. Phoneme counts are also provided for each famous person, together with family name frequency counts in the general population, where available. Materials and links may be accessed at www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

Time, uncertainty, and individual differences in decisions to cooperate in resource dilemmas

Many environmental problems are resource dilemmas that contain two components-social and temporal-that encourage individuals not to act in the best interest of the group. Most research has focused on the social component. The authors examined the importance of the temporal component in two resource dilemma tasks. Participants (N = 112) reported their willingness to limit resource consumption in response to hypothetical dilemmas and forfeited extra credit points in response to a real dilemma. Cooperation rates were higher when the temporal dilemma was diminished, when uncertainty about environmental impacts was low, and for women. Individuals high in both proenvironmentalism and consideration of future consequences sustained high levels of cooperation even in the face of strong temporal dilemmas.     

Research ethics for mental health science involving ethnic minority children and youths

In response to U.S. Public Health Service projects promoting attention to disparities in the outcomes of mental health treatments, in July 2001, the American Psychological Association, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the Fordham University Center for Ethics Education convened a group of national leaders in bioethics, multicultural research, and ethnic minority mental health to produce a living document to guide ethical decision making for mental health research involving ethnic minority children and youths. This report summarizes the key recommendations distilled from these discussions.     

Teacher acquisition of functional analysis methodology

The current study examined methods for training teachers to use functional analysis methods. Teachers first received written and verbal instructions detailing attention and demand conditions. They then received training that included modeling, rehearsal, and performance feedback. Finally, probes were taken during ongoing class instruction. Results indicate that teachers acquired the skills and used them in classroom settings.     

The dynamic time course of stereotype activation: activation, dissipation, and resurrection

Stereotypes activated upon initial exposure to a stereotyped individual may dissipate as the exposure continues. Participants observing a videotaped interview with a Black person showed activation of the stereotype of Black people following 15 s of observation but not following 12 min of observation. However, the discovery of a disagreement with the stereotyped individual may bring the dissipated stereotype back to mind. Participants who discovered, at the end of a 12-min videotaped interview with a Black person, that this person disagreed with them about the verdict in a court case showed activation of the stereotype of Black people, whereas participants who discovered instead that the Black person agreed with them did not. Participants who disagreed with a Black person also applied the Black stereotype to him, but this stereotype application was detected only on an implicit measure of application, not on an explicit measure.     

Courtship communication and perception

Although ethologists have detailed courtship rituals for many species, courting behavior of humans has not received extensive study from an ethological standpoint. Yet there are clearly facial expressions and gestures that are commonly labeled "flirting behaviors." These nonverbal signals have been documented recently by several investigators in field studies, but the receptivity of nonverbal courtship signals is still in question. The current research project attempted to assess the perceptual skill of naive male and female observers who were presented videotaped samples of females' nonverbal courtship and rejection behaviors and asked to rate their intensity. The results showed that overall, men rated invitational behaviors more positively than women. In contrast, signals of rejection were seen by men as sending a less potent message than that perceived by women. Evolutionary theory may offer a framework for understanding these results.