The impact of information about the prevalence of AIDS-Preventive behavior among men and women: The mediating role of social norms

Abstract

The present study was designed to examine the effect of information about the high prevalence of safe sex on condom use intention, and to investigate the possible mediating role of the perceived social norm of friends, and the perceived social norm of future. sexual partners. Participants were provided with gender specific prevalence information, that is with the information that most men have exclusively safe sex, or with the information that most women exclusively engage in safe sexual behavior. The results show some gender differences. Information about the high prevalence of safe sex among men tends to increase women's condom use intention, and this effect seems to be mediated by the paceived social norm of future sexual partners. Men's intention, on the other hand, seems to be unaffected by high prevalence information of safe sex. Implications for research and prevention are discussed     

The Rationality of Ultimate Concern: Moral Exemplars,Theological Ethics,and the Science of Moral Cognition

This paper argues that consideration of moral exemplars may provide a means for integrating insights across philosophical ethics, theological ethics, and the scientific study of moral cognition. Key to this endeavor is an understanding of the relation of cognition and emotion in ethical decision-making, a relation that is usually understood to be oppositional but which in proper circumstances may be understood to be quite the opposite. Indeed, a distinctive feature of moral exemplarity may consist in the ability to properly integrate the emotions into the moral life, and reference to and imitation of exemplars may involve a referencing and imitating of the emotions of the exemplar.     

Anticipación semántica e interferencia de tipo Stroop en tareas de denominación de palabras

Resumen

Una relación semántica entre los componentes de estímulo relevantes e irrelevantes facilita la ejecución en tareas de anticipación pero parece inhibir la ejecución en tareas de tipo Stroop. Se estudiaron las causas de esta discrepancia. En una serie de tareas de denominación de palabras, se analizaba el efecto del número de dominios semánticos (que covariaba con el número de alternativas de respuesta) presentando a un grupo de estudiantes un conjunto idéntico de estímulos en forma bloqueada o mixta. El experimento 1 muestra que la presentación bloqueada produce un efecto de interferencia de tipo Stroop, mientras la presentación mixta produce facilitación semántica. Los experimentos 2 y 3 muestran que la variante palabra-palabra de la tarea de Stroop y la variante denominación de palabra de la tarea de anticipación semántica pertenecen a una misma familia de tareas. Ambas tareas muestran: a) un efecto de facilitación cuando el anticipador se relaciona con el objetivo y b) un efecto de interferencia cuando el anticipador es miembro del conjunto de respuesta. En la tarea de Stroop, la competición de respuestas aumenta el efecto de facilitación; en la tarea de anticipación, el efecto de facilitación semántica aumenta el efecto de competición de respuestas.     

Methods of Group Psychotherapy by Raymond J. Corsini

Abstract

I call attention to the metapsychology of sense, and the role sense plays–phenomenologically and symbolically–in the life of the clinician and the group. Each group member asserts influence in taking a role as the perceiver and the perceived, the senser and the sensed. We reach for sense, for without sense reference, we cannot grasp or even talk about psychic reality. It serves as sign and symbol, as metaphor, analogy, illustration, and model. Sense fixes experience yet may fixate experience and interfere with developing abstract thoughts. Clinical vignettes illustrate how the leader may utilize his or her particular clinical sensibility to reach the group and focus attention, to link sense to psychic qualities: to the personality of the members, the group culture and process, and the live clinical interaction.     

Performing DISCO-SCA to search for distinctive and common information in linked data

Behavioral researchers often obtain information about the same set of entities from different sources. A main challenge in the analysis of such data is to reveal, on the one hand, the mechanisms underlying all of the data blocks under study and, on the other hand, the mechanisms underlying a single data block or a few such blocks only (i.e., common and distinctive mechanisms, respectively). A method called DISCO-SCA has been proposed by which such mechanisms can be found. The goal of this article is to make the DISCO-SCA method more accessible, in particular for applied researchers. To this end, first we will illustrate the different steps in a DISCO-SCA analysis, with data stemming from the domain of psychiatric diagnosis. Second, we will present in this article the DISCO-SCA graphical user interface (GUI). The main benefits of the DISCO-SCA GUI are that it is easy to use, strongly facilitates the choice of model selection parameters (such as the number of mechanisms and their status as being common or distinctive), and is freely available.     

Allophonic mode of speech perception in dyslexia

Perceptual discrimination between speech sounds belonging to different phoneme categories is better than that between sounds falling within the same category. This property, known as "categorical perception," is weaker in children affected by dyslexia. Categorical perception develops from the predispositions of newborns for discriminating all potential phoneme categories in the world's languages. Predispositions that are not relevant for phoneme perception in the ambient language are usually deactivated during early childhood. However, the current study shows that dyslexic children maintain a higher sensitivity to phonemic distinctions irrelevant in their linguistic environment. This suggests that dyslexic children use an allophonic mode of speech perception that, although without straightforward consequences for oral communication, has obvious implications for the acquisition of alphabetic writing. Allophonic perception specifically affects the mapping between graphemes and phonemes, contrary to other manifestations of dyslexia, and may be a core deficit.     

Learning and understanding in virtual teams.

There are sufficient reasons to conclude that virtual education is not just hype. There are, among others, economic motivations such as bringing one learning module to a larger audience of learners, and pragmatic reasons such as achieving flexibility in time and space for learning, which is especially important for adult learners. However, from a pedagogic point of view there are some doubts. Current technologies meant for learning and working in teams are often designed for functional collaboration (e.g., sharing documents, communicating), but fail to support learning, understanding and team forming (e.g., carrying out pedagogically adequate tasks, understanding each other's work and group dynamic processes) in virtual teams. In order to understand virtual teams, we need to know how we can study learning and understanding in virtual teams. Interesting research questions are: Which concepts are important in understanding virtual teams? How can we measure those concepts, and in what type of setting (e.g., experimental study, case study)? The aim of this special issue is to provide and discuss concepts and pragmatic insights in research on learning and understanding in virtual teams. The aim of this article is to set the stage for those articles.     

The appraisal basis of anger: specificity, necessity and sufficiency of components

The nature of the association between anger and 5 appraisal-action tendency components--goal obstacle, other accountability, unfairness, control, and antagonism--was examined in terms of specificity, necessity, and sufficiency. In 2 studies, participants described recently experienced unpleasant situations in which 1 of the appraisal-action tendency components was present or absent and indicated which emotions they had experienced. The results showed that (a) other accountability and arrogant entitlement, as an instance of unfairness, are specific appraisals ability for anger; and most important, (b) none of the components is necessary or sufficient for anger. The findings suggest that the relation between emotions and appraisal-action tendency components should be conceptualized instead as a contingent association, meaning that they usually co-occur.     

Uniqueness of N-way N-mode hierarchical classes models

This paper presents two uniqueness theorems for the family of hierarchical classes models, a collection of order preserving Boolean decomposition models for binary N-way N-mode data. The theorems are compared with uniqueness results for the closely related family of N-way N-mode principal component models. It is concluded that the two-way two-mode PCA and N-way N-mode TuckerN models suffer more from a lack of identifiability than their hierarchical classes analogues, whereas the uniqueness conditions for N-way N-mode PARAFAC/CANDECOMP models are less restrictive than the ones derived for their N-way N-mode hierarchical classes counterparts.