High school students' perceptions of AIDS risk: realistic appraisal or motivated denial?

We examined perceptions of risk for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) in 296 high school students living in or near a major urban center. We hypothesized that students with a dispositional tendency to deny threat would be more likely to misperceive their risk of contracting AIDS. Results indicated that study participants, overall, used their behaviors as a basis for assessing personal risk in the sense that they perceived higher risk when their behavior was in fact riskier. However, this relation did not hold for those students classified as repressors on a repression-sensitization scale; repressors' perceptions of absolute (but not comparative) risk were negatively correlated with degree of behavioral risk. In a secondary analysis, perceived absolute risk was found to be a significant predictor of intention to change AIDS-risk behaviors. This study provides support for a motivational interpretation of perceived invulnerability and has implications for the development of models of health behavior change.     

Evoked potentials and stages of information processing: Methods of analysis

The use of principal components analysis (PCA) for the study of evoked-response data may be complicated by variations from one trial to another in the latency of underlying brain events. Such variation can come from either random intra-and intersubject variability or from the effects of independent variables that are manipulated between conditions. The effect of such variability is investigated by simulation of these latency-varying events and by analysis of evoked responses in a behavioral task, the Sternberg memory search task, which is well known to generate variation in the latency of brain events. The results of PCA of within-subjects differences in these two situations are plausibly related to underlying stages of information processing, and the technique may augment reaction time data by providing information on the time of occurrence as well as the duration of stages of information processing.     

Changes in Television and Magazine Exposure and Eating Disorder Symptomatology

The relationship between girls' media exposure and their development of eating disorder symptomatology was assessed. At Time 1 and Time 2 (16 months later), participants (N = 374; M age = 12.0) completed a questionnaire that assessed eating disorder sympto-matology and television and fashion magazine exposure. Girls were divided into 3 groups: increased, decreased, or no change in eating disorder symptomatology between Times 1 and 2. Girls with increased symptomatology had significantly increased their exposure to fashion magazines but decreased their number of hours of television viewing. Girls with decreased symptomatology had significantly decreased their exposure to both television and fashion magazines.     

In the Night Kitchen: What Are the Ingredients of Infantile Sexuality?

Building upon Frances Thomson-Salo and Campbell Paul’s own reference to the image from Maurice Sendak’s Caldecott-winning 1970 book In the Night Kitchen, Vaughan argues that the “joyful erotism” of Sendak’s “naked baby tumbling through the night” is central to the main point of the paper, namely, that sexuality is inseparable from other essential elements of vitality such as intensely pleasurable excited gratification, physical embodiment, and embeddedness in the mother–father–child relational matrix. She suggests that attempts at parsing and separating these inseparable ingredients of early eroticism from one another is as futile as trying to decide whether the egg, the flour, or the milk are the most important ingredient in making a cake. Instead, with this aside, Thomson-Salo and Paul demonstrate that vitality in all its forms is created in the joyful eroticism of early life experience in which sexuality, sensuality, emotionality, and connectedness meet. By understanding and celebrating the charged connection between parent and infant, the authors help the parents they work with to enjoy, stretch, and kindle the joyful excitement of early infancy that must always contain sexuality at its core. By creating in their infants the “quality of intensely pleasurable excited gratification,” parents help create new ways of being together and sharing the contours and shapes of an experience that are crucial to early development.     

The cognitive consequences of envy: attention, memory, and self-regulatory depletion

In a series of 4 experiments, we provide evidence that--in addition to having an affective component--envy may also have important consequences for cognitive processing. Our first experiment (N = 69) demonstrated that individuals primed with envy better attended to and more accurately recalled information about fictitious peers than did a control group. Studies 2 (N = 187) and 3 (N = 65) conceptually replicated these results, demonstrating that envy elicited by targets predicts attention and later memory for information about them. We demonstrate that these effects cannot be accounted for by admiration or changes in negative affect or arousal elicited by the targets. Study 4 (N = 152) provides evidence that greater memory for envied--but not neutral--targets leads to diminished perseverance on a difficult anagram task. Findings demonstrate that envy may play an important role in attention and memory systems and deplete limited self-regulatory resources available for acts of volition.     

Train the Trainers: A First Step towards a Science‐Based Cognitive Lie Detection Training Workshop Delivered by a Practitioner

A training workshop utilising recent research in cognitive lie detection was designed and evaluated. A unique future of the training was that a practitioner (retired police detective) instead of scientists (e.g. the training developers) introduced the techniques. To evaluate the training, 27 experienced police detectives each interviewed one mock suspect (a truth teller or liar) before training, and another group of 23 experienced police detectives interviewed one mock suspect (a truth teller or liar) after training. The police detectives were free to interview the mock suspect in any way they felt appropriate, but those who had received training were asked to try to incorporate (some of) the taught techniques in their interviews. The detectives made veracity judgements, and the interviews were transcribed and coded for the amount of detail elicited and the questions asked. Training had a modest effect on the ability to distinguish between truths and lies but resulted in a higher percentage of appropriate questions asked. Trainees did not implement the taught techniques to an equal extent, but when they did, the techniques enhanced the elicitation of information. The training study also revealed challenges, particularly difficulty in implementing the taught techniques into practice and asking the right questions to elicit differences in detail between truth tellers and liars. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.