Identifying Differences of Environmental Ethics and Place Attachment Among Visitors and Managers at State Parks

ABSTRACT

Understanding place attachment and environmental ethic variables may improve management of natural areas, including enhanced communication related to management practices, managing various natural resources for specific or designated uses, and mediating significant differences between visitors and managers. Bridging any gaps of knowledge and understanding between visitors and those taking care of these natural places may enhance use and management of those areas into the future. This study elicited place attachment, environmental ethics, and demographic information from visitors to four state parks in Oklahoma. State park managers and state park visitors were found to be significantly different in their levels of place attachment and environmental ethics. Using t tests and discriminant analysis, researchers were able to use proenvironmental ethics and place identity to explain and predict the significant differences between the two groups. Implications for natural resource management include improved resource conservation and sustainability through enhanced education, interpretation efforts, and specific programming to connect people to natural places.     

Association Between Socio-Ecological Risk Factor Clustering and Mental,Emotional, and Behavioral Problems in Hispanic Adolescents

Compared to non-Hispanic whites, Hispanic adolescents in the U.S. report higher rates of several mental, emotional, and behavioral problems such as substance use, sexual risk behaviors, and internalizing and externalizing problems. There is evidence of common pathways in the development of mental, emotional, and behavioral problems with certain subgroups of Hispanic adolescents being at greater risk. In the present article, we report analysis of baseline data for 959 Hispanic adolescents who participated in one of two randomized controlled trials evaluating a family-based preventive intervention. Utilizing latent class analysis, we identified subgroups of Hispanic adolescents based on socio-ecological risk and protective factors (e.g., parent–adolescent communication, parental involvement in school). Three distinct socio-ecological risk subgroups (high, medium, and low risk) were identified and exhibited significant differences from each other across a majority of socio-ecological risk and protective factors. Adolescents in higher socio-ecological risk subgroups reported greater mental, emotional, and behavioral problems across all outcomes. Individual comparisons revealed significant differences between the low socio-ecological risk group and both the medium and high socio-ecological risk group in lifetime alcohol use, smoking, and sex, as well as internalizing and externalizing problems. Implications for intervention include focusing on specific risk subgroups and targeting shared risk and protective factors rather than specific mental, emotional, and behavioral outcomes.     

Retrieval properties of negative vs. positive mental images and autobiographical memories in social anxiety: outcomes with a new measure

High (n = 41) and low (n = 39) socially anxious (SA) participants completed the Waterloo Images and Memories Interview (WIMI), a new assessment tool that measures the accessibility and properties of mental images and associated autobiographical memories that individuals may experience across both anxiety-provoking (negative) and non-anxiety-provoking (positive) social situations. Results indicated that both high and low SA individuals experience negative images and associated autobiographical memories in anxiety-provoking social situations, but the rates of endorsement of such images and memories among high SA participants were substantially lower than those reported in recent studies. Moreover, whereas low SA individuals were capable of accessing a relatively balanced array of both negative and positive self-representations that were rich in episodic detail, high SA individuals retrieved a higher, more unbalanced ratio of negative-to-positive images and memories, as well as impoverished positive images that were significantly degraded in episodic detail. Finally, negative images influenced the two groups differently, with high SA individuals experiencing more negative emotional and cognitive consequences associated with bringing such images to mind. These results are discussed in relation to theoretical models of learning and memory within the context of contemporary cognitive behavioral models of social anxiety.     

Development of approximate number sense across the elementary school years: A cross‐cultural longitudinal study

In recent years, there has been growing interest among researchers in exploring approximate number sense (ANS)—the ability to estimate and discriminate quantities without the use of symbols. Despite the growing number of studies on ANS, there have been no cross‐cultural longitudinal studies to estimate both the development of ANS and the cross‐cultural differences in ANS growth trajectories. In this study, we aimed to estimate the developmental trajectories of ANS from the beginning of formal education to the end of elementary school in two countries, Russia and Kyrgyzstan, which have similar organization of their educational systems but differences in socioeconomic status (SES) and in the results of large‐scale educational assessments. To assess the developmental trajectories of ANS, we used a four‐wave longitudinal study with 416 participants from two countries and applied the mixed effect growth approach and the latent class growth approach. Our analysis revealed that the rate of growth in ANS accuracy was higher for the Russian sample than for the Kyrgyz sample and that this difference remained significant even after controlling for fluid intelligence. We identified two latent classes of growth trajectories: the first class had a significant growth in ANS, whereas the second class had no growth. Comparing the distribution of latent classes within the two countries revealed that there was a significantly larger proportion of schoolchildren from the second class in Kyrgyzstan than in Russia.     

Planning at the Phonological Level during Sentence Production

In two picture–word interference experiments we examined whether phrase boundaries affected how far in advance speakers plan the sounds of words during sentence production. Participants produced sentences of varying lengths (short determiner + noun + verb or long determiner + adjective + noun + verb) while ignoring phonologically related and unrelated words to the verb of the sentence. Response times to begin producing both types of sentences were faster in the presence of a related versus unrelated distractor. The results suggest that the activation of phonological properties of words outside the first phrase and first and second phonological word affect onset of articulation during sentence production. The results are discussed in the light of previous evidence of phonological planning during multi-word production. Implications for the phonological facilitation effect in the picture–word interference paradigm are also discussed.The research reported in this article served as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the PhD degree at Harvard University for Tatiana T. Schnur     

Making sense of sentences in schizophrenia: electrophysiological evidence for abnormal interactions between semantic and syntactic processing

Event-related potentials to critical verbs were measured as patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls read sentences word by word. Relative to their preceding context, critical verbs were (a) congruous, (b) incongruous and semantically unrelated to individual preceding words (pragmatic-semantic violations), (c) incongruous but semantically related to individual preceding words (animacy-semantic violations), or (d) syntactically anomalous. The N400 was modulated normally in patients, suggesting that semantic integration between individual words within sentences was normal in schizophrenia. The amplitude of the P600 to both syntactic and animacy-semantic violations was reduced in patients relative to controls. The authors suggest that, in schizophrenia, an abnormality in combining semantic and syntactic information online to build up propositional meaning leaves sentence processing to be primarily driven by semantic relationships between individual words.     

Vowels, syllables, and letter names: differences between young children's spelling in English and Portuguese

Young Portuguese-speaking children have been reported to produce more vowel- and syllable-oriented spellings than have English speakers. To investigate the extent and source of such differences, we analyzed children's vocabulary and found that Portuguese words have more vowel letter names and a higher vowel-consonant ratio than do English words. In a spelling experiment, we found that Portuguese speakers used more vowels, but did not produce more syllabic spellings, than did English speakers. The differences that we observed are attributable to quantitative differences in the languages and their writing and letter name systems. They do not support the widespread idea that speakers of Romance languages pass through an additional, syllabic, stage of development.