Personal self and collective self: when academic choices depend on the context of social comparison

This research examines the impact of same-sex versus opposite-sex social comparisons on the perception of one’s own abilities at school and subsequent reported marks and academic choices. During their final year, male and female high school students were asked to describe themselves either in comparison with boys in their class, in comparison with girls in their class or without any explicit social comparison (control group). The interaction effects of gender and comparison context on academic selfconcept, school marks and academic choices indicated that gender differences depend on the comparison context. Particularly, as predicted, gender differences disappeared in the same-sex social comparison condition, and even became inverted for the intended academic choices. Here, boys intended to choose more than girls Preparatory Courses for Higher Education (PCHE) in the opposite-sex social comparison condition, while girls more often chose a prestigious PCHE than boys in the same-sex social comparison condition. The theoretical, methodological and practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Hesitancy to Return to the Pre-pandemic Routine

Journal of Rational-Emotive & Cognitive-Behavior Therapy - The goal of the present study was to explore COVID-19 related hesitancy, which represents the inability of people to return to...     

Black Parenting Couples’ Ethnic-Racial Socialization Profiles: Associations with Sociodemographic and Race-Related Correlates

Journal of Child and Family Studies - In light of the continued racism and oppression experienced by Black Americans in the United States, ethnic-racial socialization—explicit and implicit...     

Behavior analysis of cigarette smoking

Patterns of cigarette smoking, treated as series of discrete events in time, were investigated with a variety of quantitative techniques designed to characterize individual subject smoking series and to illuminate the relationship between cigarette smoking and environmental events. Data were collected from a total of 35 subjects who were either participants in residential laboratory studies or in a smoking cessation program. Cigarette smoking events were found to be fairly irregularly distributed with respect to time within individual subject series. However, strong dependencies were found between the occurrence in time of individual acts of cigarette smoking and coffee drinking. In addition, the distribution and frequency of smoking events throughout one-hour activity sequences were found to be dependent upon the nature of the activity, and the temporal scheduling of activities was found to affect several quantitative indices of smoking patterns.     

Retention of orienting reaction habituation in patients with postmeningoencephalitic epilepsy

A polygraphic study on habituation of the somatic, autonomic, and EEG components of the orienting reaction elicited by a repetitive auditory stimulus during successive (weekly) sessions was performed in 29 patients with postmeningoencephalic epilepsy (PME) and in 116 control subjects. The study evidenced significant retention disturbances of orienting reaction habituation (i.e., of learning), the “saving” of stimulation, achieved from one session to another to obtain the habituation criterion, being lesser in PME patients than in control subjects. The severity of habituation retention disturbances depended on seizure frequency, electroclinical form, and history, as well as on features of EEG tracings.     

Maternal Emotion Socialization of Adolescent Girls Engaging in Non-Suicidal Self-Injury

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - Non-suicidal self injury (NSSI) is a transdiagnostic maladaptive behavior that is highly prevalent in adolescence. A greater understanding of the...