A nation challenged: the impact of foreign threat on America's tolerance for diversity

Three experiments investigated how perceived foreign threats to the United States can influence Americans' endorsement of assimilation and multiculturalism as models for foreign and domestic intergroup relations. The initial study, conducted during the 6-month anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks (9/11), discovered that a diverse group of Americans preferred assimilation as a foreign policy and multiculturalism as a domestic policy. After reading that foreigners were supporting the dominant global status of the United States, however, Americans in Experiment 2 no longer expressed this preference for assimilation as a model for foreign intergroup relations. Experiment 3 discovered that Americans primed with 9/11 (i.e., a foreign threat) revealed higher levels of national identity than did those primed with the Columbine massacre (i.e., a domestic threat); moreover, level of national identity predicted support for multiculturalism as a domestic policy and assimilation as a foreign policy.     

First names and first impressions: A fragile relationship

Given only first names, reliable differences are found in guesses about personal characteristics. It was hypothesized that this finding is strongly dependent on the lack of interference from competing information. Therefore such first-name effects should be fragile in that, if a subject is exposed to additional and relevant material, the differential effect of a first name would be mitigated. This interpretation was tested by exposing one group of subjects to a set of good and bad male first names, while a second group encountered the same names accompanied by photographs. The results showed that there was a replication of previously reported differences between these good and bad names if no photograph was present, but the addition of the photograph blocked the differential effect of first names. The results paralleled a similar finding with female first names. Overall, the results argue against too much emphasis on the possible deleterious effects of a particular first name.     

Clamped Corticosterone (B) Reveals the Effect of Endogenous B on Both Facilitated Responsivity to Acute Restraint and Metabolic Responses to Chronic Stress

To determine the effects of both corticosterone (B) and chronic stressors on acute ACTH responses to restraint, young male rats were exposed to streptozotocin-induced diabetes, cold (5-7 degreesC) or intracerebroventricular (icv) neuropeptide Y (NPY) for 5 d and then exposed to restraint within 2 h after lights on. Two groups of rats were studied: intact and adrenalectomized replaced with B pellets that maintained plasma B in the normal mean 24-h range of intact rats. In addition to ACTH and B responses to restraint on d 5, body weight, food intake, fat depots, glucose and other hormones were measured to determine the role of stress-induced elevations in B on energy balance. ACTH responses to restraint were normal in intact rats subjected to diabetes or cold. By contrast, there was no ACTH or B response to restraint in NPY-infused intact rats. All 3 groups of chronically stimulated adrenalectomized rats with clamped B had facilitated ACTH responses to restraint compared to their treatment controls. Overall food intake increased in all groups of stressed rats; however, augmented intake occurred only during the light in intact rats and equally in the light and dark in B-clamped rats. White adipose depot weights were decreased by both diabetes and cold and increased by NPY in intact rats; the decreases with cold and increases with NPY were both blunted and changes in fat stores were not significant in adrenalectomized, B-clamped rats. We conclude that: 1. diabetes- and cold-induced facilitation of restraint-induced afferent input to hypothalamic control of the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis is opposed in intact rats by the elevated feedback signal of B secretion; 2. NPY does not induce facilitation of afferent stress pathways; 3. chronic stimulation of the HPA axis induces acute hyperresponsiveness of hypothalamic neurons to restraint provided that the afferent input of this acute stimulus is not prevented by B feedback; 4. stimulus-induced elevations in B secretion result in day-time feeding; 5. insensitivity of both caloric efficiency and white fat stores to chronic stress in adrenalectomized, B-clamped rats results from loss of normally variable B levels.     

Curriculum bias in standardized tests of reading decoding

This study examined overlap between four basal reading programs and the phonetic analysis subtest of three standardized achievement measures. Raw scores, percentages of items correct, grade equivalents, and percentile scores were computed for a hypothetical student who had mastered all grapheme-phoneme correspondences taught at each grade level. The results indicated that (a) programs differed in the number and sequence of phonics skills taught; (b) percentile and grade-equivalent scores differed across programs at each grade level for a given test; and (c) the proportion of grade-equivalent scores falling at or above expected grade levels differed across tests for a given program (range of 29%–71%). The implications for selecting and interpreting standardized measures of reading decoding are discussed.     

The Role of Family Processes and Coping Strategies in the Relationship Between Parental Chronic Illness and Childhood Internalizing Problems

Sixty-nine families (father, mother, and one child) in which the father had hemophilia, approximately half of whom were HIV positive, were assessed in an examination of the relationship between parental chronic illness, family functioning, child coping strategies, and child adjustment. Latent variable path analyses with partial least-squares estimation procedures (PLS) were used to test a model of the relationship between parental chronic illness, family process variables, child coping strategies, and child internalizing behavior problems. The severity of the father's illness predicted family process variables, which predicted the coping style of the child. The use of more avoidant coping strategies was associated with more internalizing problems.     

A method for examining short-term retention of haptic cues in monkeys

Tasks used to examine short-term memory (STM) in animals have almost exclusively required retention of visual cues. To determine if haptic information can be retained, three rhesus monkeys were trained to perform, using only haptic cues, a simultaneous (SMS) and a delayed matching-to-sample (DMS) task. On each trial, the monkeys felt and responded to a sample stimulus on a centrally located manipulandum. They were then presented two comparison stimuli located on both sides of the central manipulandum. A response matching the comparison stimulus with the sample stimulus was reinforced. In SMS a mean of 2,725 trials was required to reach a criterion of 90% correct. As in DMS performance for visual cues, in haptic DMS the monkeys were capable of above-chance responding at retention intervals of greater than 1 min. This haptic DMS task should be useful for testing STM models, for examining the physiological basis of STM, and for examining drug effects.     

Limit properties of Luce's choice theory

Luce's Axiom is interpreted in terms of a sequence of measures on the unit interval, and their limit properties are discussed. In particular, all limit laws are found to be either absolutely continuous with density x^α for α ∈ (?1, ∞) or else degenerate laws consisting of a point mass at 0 or 1. A close connection between Luce's choice theory and Karamata's theory of regularly varying functions is established and systematically used.