Mind your mannerisms: Behavioral mimicry elicits stereotype conformity

Four studies demonstrate that the affiliative responding that is typically encouraged by mimicry can be manifested in conformity to shared gender and racial stereotypes. In Studies 1 and 2, mimicry by a confederate led participants to perform in accordance with stereotypes about their race and gender on a math task. Studies 3 and 4 tested the boundary conditions of mimicry's influence: in Study 3, mimicry elicited stereotype-consistent math performance only among participants who believed in stereotypes about their group that could drive others' expectancies. Study 4 established that the mimicry must occur in the context of affiliation for it to elicit stereotype-consistent behavior, highlighting the important moderating role of affiliation motivation in this phenomenon. In sum, these findings suggest that mimicked individuals are more conforming to the stereotyped expectancies that they believe others hold for them, which suggests not only a potential negative consequence of mimicry but also a subtle manner through which stereotypes may be perpetuated.     

Perceptions of self in 3-5-year-old children: a preliminary investigation into the early emergence of body dissatisfaction

The main objective of this study was to investigate normal weight and overweight preschool children's ability to understand conceptualizations of body image and their association with parental perceptions of their child's body. One hundred and forty-four children aged 3-5 years were interviewed (68 girls and 76 boys) regarding their body image and their satisfaction with such. Parents completed a questionnaire that probed socio-demographic characteristics as well as their perceptions of their child's body image. Results showed that (1) children's misperceptions corresponded to those held by their parents. Specifically, overweight children and their parents underestimated the child's body size. (2) Gender differences in body dissatisfaction were consistently observed and were similar to those seen in adolescents and adults. It was determined that children's inaccuracies were not a result of developmental limits, that is, the participants' inability to understand the concepts measured.     

GENDER DIFFERENCES IN SELF-REPORTED POSTTRAUMATIC GROWTH: A META-ANALYSIS

A meta-analysis was conducted to examine the direction and magnitude of gender differences in self-reported posttraumatic growth. Results from 70 studies ( N  = 16,076) revealed a small to moderate gender difference ( g  = .27, 95% CI = .21 −.32), with women reporting more posttraumatic growth than men. Moderator analyses were then conducted to identify possible sources of these differences. The following moderators were examined: mean age of sample, measure used, nature of the stressful event, language of the measure, and type of sample (i.e., community samples, college students, or mixed). The only significant moderator was age, with women reporting incrementally more posttraumatic growth as the mean age of the sample increased ( B  = .004,  p  < .01,  SE  = .001,  Q  = 9.13). To check for publication bias, effect sizes were compared across published and unpublished research. The size of the gender difference was not significantly different between published ( g  = .30, 95% CI = .23 − .38) and unpublished ( g  = .22, 95% CI = .12 −.31) studies. The present findings indicate that modest, but reliable gender differences exist in posttraumatic growth even when unpublished data are included in the analyses. Possible explanations for these findings and suggestions for future research are discussed.     

The Effects of Alternate Forms of Performance Feedback on Elementary-Aged Students’ Oral Reading Fluency

Within the context of a brief experimental design, the current study examined the effects of providing two different types of performance feedback, performance feedback on words read correctly (PFWC) and performance feedback on words read incorrectly (PFWI), on the oral reading fluency of six elementary-aged students. For all of the participants, PFWI resulted in higher levels of oral reading fluency than PFWC. In addition, for a majority of the participants, PFWC resulted in lower levels of oral reading errors than PFWI. These results suggest that providing students with performance feedback on the number or words read correctly may enhance the reading fluency of students experiencing reading difficulties. The implications of these results for intervention selection are discussed.     

The Role of Conscious Awareness in Consumer Behavior

Consumer behavior can be influenced by mental processes that occur outside of conscious awareness. It is argued that in each domain of automaticity, researchers should specify the aspects of which consumers are presumably unaware. Three types of awareness are identified. These include awareness of (a) the environmental features that trigger an automatic process, (b) the automatic process itself, and (c) the outcome of that automatic process. Individuals may be unaware of one or more of these stages, thereby making the process nonconscious. With additional clarity regarding which aspects are nonconscious in which domains and the specific role that awareness plays, we can begin building a more comprehensive model of nonconscious processes in consumer behavior.     

Relationships Between Men’s and Women’s Body Image and Their Psychological, Social, and Sexual Functioning

This study was designed to examine the relationships between different aspects of body image and psychological, social, and sexual functioning throughout adulthood. The respondents were 211 men and 226 women (age range 18–86 years; mean = 42.26). Respondents completed measures of self-rated attractiveness, body satisfaction, body image importance, body image behaviors, appearance comparison, social physique anxiety, self-esteem, depression, anxiety, and social and sexual functioning. Body image was associated with self-esteem for all groups, but was unrelated to other aspects of psychological, social, and sexual functioning. There were some exceptions; a disturbance in body image was related to problematic social and sexual functioning among middle-aged men and to depression and anxiety symptoms in late adulthood among men and women. Middle-aged men who presented with the type of body image disturbance typical of women were more likely to have impaired interpersonal functioning. These results demonstrate that social aspects of body image appear to be important in understanding psychological functioning in later life.     

Children's understanding of death as the cessation of agency: a test using sleep versus death

An important problem faced by children is discriminating between entities capable of goal-directed action, i.e. intentional agents, and non-agents. In the case of discriminating between living and dead animals, including humans, this problem is particularly difficult, because of the large number of perceptual cues that living and dead animals share. However, there are potential costs of failing to discriminate between living and dead animals, including unnecessary vigilance and lost opportunities from failing to realize that an animal, such as an animal killed for food, is dead. This might have led to the evolution of mechanisms specifically for distinguishing between living and dead animals in terms of their ability to act. Here we test this hypothesis by examining patterns of inferences about sleeping and dead organisms by Shuar and German children between 3 and 5-years old. The results show that by age 4, causal cues to death block agency attributions to animals and people, whereas cues to sleep do not. The developmental trajectory of this pattern of inferences is identical across cultures, consistent with the hypothesis of a living/dead discrimination mechanism as a reliably developing part of core cognitive architecture.     

Understanding and sharing intentions: the origins of cultural cognition

We propose that the crucial difference between human cognition and that of other species is the ability to participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions: shared intentionality. Participation in such activities requires not only especially powerful forms of intention reading and cultural learning, but also a unique motivation to share psychological states with others and unique forms of cognitive representation for doing so. The result of participating in these activities is species-unique forms of cultural cognition and evolution, enabling everything from the creation and use of linguistic symbols to the construction of social norms and individual beliefs to the establishment of social institutions. In support of this proposal we argue and present evidence that great apes (and some children with autism) understand the basics of intentional action, but they still do not participate in activities involving joint intentions and attention (shared intentionality). Human children's skills of shared intentionality develop gradually during the first 14 months of life as two ontogenetic pathways intertwine: (1) the general ape line of understanding others as animate, goal-directed, and intentional agents; and (2) a species-unique motivation to share emotions, experience, and activities with other persons. The developmental outcome is children's ability to construct dialogic cognitive representations, which enable them to participate in earnest in the collectivity that is human cognition.     

Reliability and validity of the Yale Global Tic Severity Scale

To investigate the reliability and validity of the Yale Global Tic Severity Scale (YGTSS), 28 youth aged 6 to 17 years with Tourette's syndrome (TS) participated in the study. Data included clinician reports of tics and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) severity, parent reports of tics, internalizing and externalizing problems, and child reports of depression and anxiety. All children participated in a 2nd YGTSS administration by the same rater 48 days later. Good internal consistency and stability were found for the YGTSS scores. YGTSS scores demonstrated strong correlations with parent-rated tic severity (r = .58-.68). YGTSS scores were not significantly related to measures of clinician ratings of OCD severity (r = .01-.15), parent ratings of externalizing and internalizing behavior (r = -.07-.20), and child ratings of depression (r = .02-.26) and anxiety (r = -.06 -.28). Findings suggest that the YGTSS is a reliable and valid instrument for the assessment of pediatric TS.     

Repeated acquisitions and extinctions in classical conditioning of the rabbit nictitating membrane response

The rabbit nictitating membrane (NM) response underwent successive stages of acquisition and extinction training in both delay (Experiment 1) and trace (Experiment 2) classical conditioning. In both cases, successive acquisitions became progressively faster, although the largest, most reliable acceleration occurred between the first and second acquisition. Successive extinctions were similar in rate. The results challenge contextual control theories of extinction but are consistent with attentional and layered-network models. The results are discussed with respect to their implications for the interaction between cerebellar and forebrain pathways for eyeblink conditioning.