Gender and victimization by intimates

Recent data demonstrate that, although gender has an impact upon the experience of being a victim of an intimate's violence, there is no particular personality pattern that leads one to become a victim. Rather, women--who are socialized to adapt and submit, and who are likely to become victims of men's sexual violence or physical abuse--may not develop adequate self-protection skills as children, especially if they come from childhood homes in which females are victimized, leading to a later vulnerability to physical and sexual abuse. Men, however, socialized to express anger and aggression in an outward manner, learn to model the abuse witnessed or experienced in childhood and often learn that women are the "appropriate" recipients of this violence. Social learning theories of modeling and aggression are used to explain how such personality patterns develop, and the theory of learned helplessness is used to explain battered women's coping responses to their partners' abusive behavior. The extreme situation, in which a battered woman kills her partner in self-defense, is analyzed in order to understand women victims' sense of desperation and entrapment in severely abusive relationships and the extent to which their behaviors are in reaction to the abuse perpetrated by the mate.     

Lifestyle interventions in the treatment of childhood overweight: a meta-analytic review of randomized controlled trials.

CONTEXT: Evaluating the efficacy of pediatric weight loss treatments is critical. OBJECTIVE: This is the first meta-analysis of the efficacy of RCTs comparing pediatric lifestyle interventions to no-treatment or information/education-only controls. DATA SOURCES: Medline, PsycINFO, and Cochrane Controlled Trials Register. STUDY SELECTION: Fourteen RCTs targetting change in weight status were eligible, yielding 19 effect sizes. DATA EXTRACTION: Standardized coding was used to extract information on design, participant characteristics, interventions, and results. DATA SYNTHESIS: For trials with no-treatment controls, the mean effect size was 0.75 (k = 9, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.52-0.98) at end of treatment and 0.60 (k = 4, CI = 0.27-0.94) at follow-up. For trials with information/education-only controls, the mean ES was 0.48 (k = 4, CI = 0.13-0.82) at end of treatment and 0.91 (k = 2, CI = 0.32-1.50) at follow-up. No moderator effects were identified. CONCLUSIONS: Lifestyle interventions for pediatric overweight are efficacious in the short term with some evidence for extended persistence. Future research is required to identify moderators and mediators and to determine the optimal length and intensity of treatment required to produce enduring changes in weight status.     

The subliminal perception of movement and the 'suppression' in binocular rivalry.

An analogy is drawn between the perceptual limitation that characterizes the dichotic listening paradigm and the 'suppression' that occurs in binocular rivalry when different stimuli are presented to the two eyes. An experiment is reported which focuses on the fate of the information residing in a suppressed eye (unattended channel) during binocular rivalry. It is demonstrated that the temporal course of rivalry is sensitive to the presence of a subliminal moving stimulus within the currently suppressed field. The effects are seen to confirm a literal interpretation of Levelt's (1966) thesis which relates changes in the 'stimulus strength' of a rivalling field to subsequent changes in the temporal course of the phenomenon. This interpretation is consistent with the hypothesis that, despite phenomenal suppression, a full analysis is undertaken on the currently non-dominant stimulus. The data are related to models of selective attention, and to the notion that there are parallel visual systems.     

Individual responses to climate change: Framing effects on pro‐environmental behaviors

Promoting effective responses to climate change, especially among people who reject its anthropogenic causes, has been challenging. Following a qualitative study, we experimentally induce one of four frames of reference (identity, biodiversity conservation, economic prosperity, and climate change), and assess their effects on participants’ behavioral intentions using three scales (consumption‐investment, consumption‐reduction, and political participation). The sample (N = 156) included people who thought climate change is natural and those who thought it is human‐induced. Results show a significant impact of the identity frame, relative to the climate‐change frame, for both consumption scales, in the total sample, and among those who reject the anthropogenic causes. These results offer a way to address behavioral resistances associated with antagonistic views on climate change.     

Bridging computational approaches to speech production: The semantic–lexical–auditory–motor model (SLAM)

Speech production is studied from both psycholinguistic and motor-control perspectives, with little interaction between the approaches. We assessed the explanatory value of integrating psycholinguistic and motor-control concepts for theories of speech production. By augmenting a popular psycholinguistic model of lexical retrieval with a motor-control-inspired architecture, we created a new computational model to explain speech errors in the context of aphasia. Comparing the model fits to picture-naming data from 255 aphasic patients, we found that our new model improves fits for a theoretically predictable subtype of aphasia: conduction. We discovered that the improved fits for this group were a result of strong auditory–lexical feedback activation, combined with weaker auditory–motor feedforward activation, leading to increased competition from phonologically related neighbors during lexical selection. We discuss the implications of our findings with respect to other extant models of lexical retrieval.