The influence of prior knowledge and repeated questioning on children's long-term retention of the details of a pediatric examination

Children's recall of the details of pediatric examinations was examined over the course of a 6-month interval. Although the 83 4- to 7-year-old participants reported a substantial amount of information at each assessment, performance declined over time, dropping sharply over the course of 3 months but then remaining constant out to the final interview at 6 months. As expected, older children provided more total information than younger children did and reported a greater proportion of the event components in response to general rather than specific questions. However, comparable patterns of remembering and forgetting over time were observed at each age level. In addition, no effects of repeated questioning--in the form of an interview at 3 months for half of the children--were observed on performance at the 6-month assessment. Moreover, children's prior knowledge about routine doctor visits was assessed before the checkup for half of the participants at each age and was associated with initial but not delayed recall. Although knowledge increased with age as expected, it nonetheless affected recall over and above the influence of age.     

Religious Involvement and Its Association to Risk Behaviors among Older Youth in Foster Care

This study examined religious involvement and its association to risk behaviors (sexual behavior, marijuana use, alcohol use, and cigarette use) among older youth in foster care (N=383). Three dimensions of religious involvement were assessed—church or religious service attendance, religious practices, and religious beliefs. Findings showed that gender, ethnic group membership, sexual abuse history, and placement type were significantly associated with older foster care youth’s religious involvement. Hierarchical logistic regression analyses showed that religious service attendance was associated with reduced odds of youth’s engagement in sexual behavior in the past 2 months and current use of cigarettes. In addition, greater religious beliefs were associated with a reduction in odds of youth’s use of alcohol in the past 6 months and current use of cigarettes. The consideration of religious involvement as a positive influence and resource that may reduce unhealthy risk behaviors among older youth in foster care is discussed.     

Asymmetric cultural effects on perceptual expertise underlie an own-race bias for voices

The own-race bias in memory for faces has been a rich source of empirical work on the mechanisms of person perception. This effect is thought to arise because the face-perception system differentially encodes the relevant structural dimensions of features and their configuration based on experiences with different groups of faces. However, the effects of sociocultural experiences on person perception abilities in other identity-conveying modalities like audition have not been explored. Investigating an own-race bias in the auditory domain provides a unique opportunity for studying whether person identification is a modality-independent construct and how it is sensitive to asymmetric cultural experiences. Here we show that an own-race bias in talker identification arises from asymmetric experience with different spoken dialects. When listeners categorized voices by race (White or Black), a subset of the Black voices were categorized as sounding White, while the opposite case was unattested. Acoustic analyses indicated listeners’ perceptions about race were consistent with differences in specific phonetic and phonological features. In a subsequent person-identification experiment, the Black voices initially categorized as sounding White elicited an own-race bias from White listeners, but not from Black listeners. These effects are inconsistent with person-perception models that strictly analogize faces and voices based on recognition from only structural features. Our results demonstrate that asymmetric exposure to spoken dialect, independent from talkers’ physical characteristics, affects auditory perceptual expertise for talker identification. Person perception thus additionally relies on socioculturally-acquired dynamic information, which may be represented by different mechanisms in different sensory modalities.     

Bifactor models and rotations: exploring the extent to which multidimensional data yield univocal scale scores

The application of psychological measures often results in item response data that arguably are consistent with both unidimensional (a single common factor) and multidimensional latent structures (typically caused by parcels of items that tap similar content domains). As such, structural ambiguity leads to seemingly endless "confirmatory" factor analytic studies in which the research question is whether scale scores can be interpreted as reflecting variation on a single trait. An alternative to the more commonly observed unidimensional, correlated traits, or second-order representations of a measure's latent structure is a bifactor model. Bifactor structures, however, are not well understood in the personality assessment community and thus rarely are applied. To address this, herein we (a) describe issues that arise in conceptualizing and modeling multidimensionality, (b) describe exploratory (including Schmid-Leiman [Schmid & Leiman, 1957] and target bifactor rotations) and confirmatory bifactor modeling, (c) differentiate between bifactor and second-order models, and (d) suggest contexts where bifactor analysis is particularly valuable (e.g., for evaluating the plausibility of subscales, determining the extent to which scores reflect a single variable even when the data are multidimensional, and evaluating the feasibility of applying a unidimensional item response theory (IRT) measurement model). We emphasize that the determination of dimensionality is a related but distinct question from either determining the extent to which scores reflect a single individual difference variable or determining the effect of multidimensionality on IRT item parameter estimates. Indeed, we suggest that in many contexts, multidimensional data can yield interpretable scale scores and be appropriately fitted to unidimensional IRT models.     

Why Leibniz thinks Descartes was wrong and the Scholastics were right

The bundle theory is a theory about the internal constitution of individuals. It asserts that individuals are entirely composed of universals. Typically, bundle theorists augment their theory with a constitutional approach to individuation entailing the thesis ‘identity of constituents is a sufficient ground for numerical identity’ (CIT). But then the bundle theory runs afoul of Black’s duplication case—a world containing two indiscernible spheres. Here I propose and defend a new version of the bundle theory that denies ‘CIT’, and which instead conjoins it with a structural diversity thesis, according to which being separated by distance is a sufficient ground for numerical diversity. This version accommodates Black’s world as well as the three-spheres world—a world containing three indiscernible spheres, arranged as the vertices of an equilateral triangle. In this paper, I also criticize Rodriguez-Pereyra’s alternative attempt to defend the bundle theory against Black’s case and the case of the three-spheres world.     

Justice through consensus: Shared identity and the preference for a restorative notion of justice

We propose a concept of restorative justice as a sense of justice deriving from consensus about, and the reaffirmation of, values violated by an offence (in contrast to punishment‐based retributive justice). Victims should be more likely to seek restorative justice (and less likely retributive justice) when they perceive to share a relevant identity with the offender. In Study 1, when the relevant identity (university affiliation) shared with the offender was made salient (vs. not), participants found a consensus‐based response more justice‐restoring. In Study 2, when the group (company) shared with the offender was cohesive (vs. not), participants more strongly endorsed a restorative justice philosophy and, mediated by this, responded in consensus‐restoring ways. In Study 3, when the offender was an ingroup (vs. outgroup) member, participants more strongly endorsed a restorative justice philosophy, fully mediated by sadness emotions. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Alvin Plantinga on Paul Draper’s evolutionary atheology: implications of theism’s noncontingency

In his recently published Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, & Naturalism 2011 Alvin Plantinga criticises Paul Draper’s evolutionary argument against theism as part of a larger project to show that evolution poses no threat to Christian belief. Plantinga focuses upon Draper’s probabilistic claim that the facts of evolution are much more probable on naturalism than on theism, and with regard to that claim makes two specific points. First, Draper’s probabilistic claim contradicts theism’s necessary falsehood; unless Draper wishes to acknowledge that theism is necessarily true, his claim commits him to theism’s contingency and so sets him at odds with a mainstream that sees God’s existence as decidedly noncontingent. Second, Plantinga argues that Draper’s probabilistic claim is, even if true, overwhelmed by counterclaims about facts that are more likely on theism than naturalism. I argue this critique of Draper depends upon a serious error, and that Plantinga overlooks the full implications of his own presuppositions. Correcting these shortcomings shows that Plantinga’s own probabilistic-apologetics (e.g., the ‘Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism’) requires theism’s contingency no less than does Draper’s atheology.     

Preschoolers’ Anticipation of Sadness for Excluded Peers,Sympathy, and Prosocial Behavior

We investigated the relations between anticipation of sadness for excluded peers, sympathy, and prosocial behavior in a sample of 127 Italian preschoolers (M_age?=?4.84?years, SD?=?0.85). Children attributed emotions to hypothetical excluded peers who exhibited withdrawn versus aggressive behavior, and these attributions were coded for the presence and intensity of sadness. Teachers rated children’s sympathy and prosocial behavior via questionnaire. In general, children attributed more sadness to the withdrawn excluded peer than the aggressive excluded peer. A path analysis revealed that those who anticipated higher levels of sadness for the withdrawn excluded peer were rated higher in sympathy and, in turn, higher in prosocial behavior. Attributing high levels of sadness to withdrawn excluded peers—who portray relatively heightened need—may be an early social-emotional characteristic of children who are more sympathetic and more likely to channel other-oriented concerns into prosocial actions.     

The Development of “Vocational Interests”: I. The Organization of Likes and Dislikes in Ten-Year-Old Children

Seventy-two black, white, and Mexican-American boys and girls enrolled in the Lansing, Michigan, Head Start program were administered the Purdue Self-Concept Scale for Preschool Children (PSCS), and their teachers rated their self-esteem on Coopersmith's Behavior Rating Form (BRF). A low positive correlation was obtained between the scores on these two techniques. Analysis of variance showed no significant differences by ethnicity or sex on self-esteem measured by either the PSCS or the BRF. Although the literature on ethnic and sex differences in self-esteem is contradictory, these findings suggest that group differences may be minimal.