Romantic relationships and sexuality in adolescence and young adulthood: The role of parents,peers, and partners

The formation of romantic relationships and the engagement in sexual behaviours are considered normative and salient developmental tasks for adolescents and young adults. These developmental tasks are increasingly viewed from an ecological perspective, thus not only as individual processes, but also as strongly embedded in different social contexts, including the proximal social domains of parents, peers, and partners. This special issue brings together seven recent empirical studies on adolescents' and young adults' romantic relationships and sexuality in the context of relationships and interactions with parents, peers, and partners. In this editorial introduction, we describe two important recent changes in the theoretical perspectives on emerging romantic relationships and sexual activity: from risky behaviours to normative tasks, and from individual to contextualized processes. We then discuss recent advances in empirical research on romantic relationships and sexuality of adolescents and young adults. After that, we review the seven studies in this special issue, and discuss the contributions of these studies to the existing literature. Finally, we discuss directions for future research regarding how the interrelational perspective can be further incorporated into empirical research, and how the gap between the research fields on romantic relationships and sexuality may be bridged.     

Bats, balls, and substitution sensitivity: cognitive misers are no happy fools

Influential work on human thinking suggests that our judgment is often biased because we minimize cognitive effort and intuitively substitute hard questions by easier ones. A key question is whether or not people realize that they are doing this and notice their mistake. Here, we test this claim with one of the most publicized examples of the substitution bias, the bat-and-ball problem. We designed an isomorphic control version in which reasoners experience no intuitive pull to substitute. Results show that people are less confident in their substituted, erroneous bat-and-ball answer than in their answer on the control version that does not give rise to the substitution. Contrary to popular belief, this basic finding indicates that biased reasoners are not completely oblivious to the substitution and sense that their answer is questionable. This calls into question the characterization of the human reasoner as a happy fool who blindly answers erroneous questions without realizing it.     

When less is not always more: stereotype knowledge and reasoning development

Developmental studies on heuristics and biases have reported controversial findings suggesting that children sometimes reason more logically than do adults. We addressed the controversy by testing the impact of children's knowledge of the heuristic stereotypes that are typically cued in these studies. Five-year-old preschoolers and 8-year-old children were tested with a card game version of the classic base-rate task. Problems were based on stereotypes that were familiar or unfamiliar for preschoolers. We also manipulated whether the cued stereotypical response was consistent (no-conflict problems) or inconsistent (conflict problems) with the correct analytic response that was cued in the problem. Results showed that an age-related performance decrease on the conflict problems was accompanied by an age-related performance increase on the no-conflict problems. These age effects were most pronounced for problems that adopted stereotypes that were unfamiliar for the 5-year-old preschoolers. When preschoolers were familiar with the stereotypes, their performance also started being affected. Findings support the claim that previously reported age-related performance decreases on classic reasoning tasks need to be attributed to the increased need to deal with tempting heuristics and not to a decrease in analytic thinking skills per se.     

Comparative mapping of higher visual areas in monkeys and humans

The advent of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in non-human primates has facilitated comparison of the neurobiology of cognitive functions in humans and macaque monkeys, the most intensively studied animal model for higher brain functions. Most of these comparative studies have been performed in the visual system. The early visual areas V1, V2 and V3, as well as the motion area MT are conserved in humans. Beyond these areas, differences between human and monkey functional organization are increasingly evident. At the regional level, the monkey inferotemporal and intraparietal complexes appear to be conserved in humans, but there are profound functional differences in the intraparietal cortex suggesting that not all its constituent areas are homologous. In the long term, fMRI offers opportunities to compare the functional anatomy of a variety of cognitive functions in the two species.     

Towards a common processing architecture underlying Simon and SNARC effects

It has been shown repeatedly that relatively small numbers are responded to faster with the left hand and relatively large numbers are responded to faster with the right hand. This so-called SNARC effect (Dehaene, Bossini, & Giraux, 1993) is thought to arise through activation of irrelevant spatial codes associated with the magnitude of the number. This conflict between irrelevant magnitude information and the response is conceptually similar to the well-known Simon effect. Recently, both Mapelli, Rusconi, and Umiltà (2003) and Keus and Schwarz (in press) directly compared both effects in a single task within the framework of the additive factor method (Sternberg, 1969). While Mapelli et al. found additive effects of SNARC and Simon levels, suggesting different processing stages, Keus and Schwarz found that the SNARC effect depended on the compatibility level of the Simon task leading them to propose a common origin at the response selection stage. In the present study we demonstrate in 2 experiments that the relationship between Simon and SNARC depends on the relevance of the magnitude code, thereby violating one of the core assumptions of the AFM. Instead we propose a temporal overlap model to interpret the relationship between these effects which allows to commensurate apparently divergent outcomes.     

The hot-hand fallacy in cognitive control: Repetition expectancy modulates the congruency sequence effect

In this study, the role of expectancies in cognitive control was tested. On the basis of the original interpretation of the congruency sequence effect (Gratton, Coles, & Donchin, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 121:480–506, 1992), we sought evidence for a repetition bias steering attentional control. In a series of four Stroop experiments, we investigated how participants’ explicit predictions about the upcoming (in)congruency proactively influenced subsequent Stroop performance. Similar to the fallacious “hot-hand” belief in gambling, repeating stimulus events were overpredicted, as participants consistently expected more repetitions of the congruency level than the actual presented number of congruency-level repetitions (50 %). Moreover, behavioral adjustments (i.e., a congruency sequence effect) were only found when participants anticipated a congruency-level repetition, whereas no modulation of the Stroop effect was found following alternation predictions. We propose that proactive control processes in general, and repetition expectancy in particular, should be given more attention in current theorizing and modeling of cognitive control, which is characterized by an emphasis on reactive, conflict-induced control adjustments.     

Establishing normative data for repeated cognitive assessment: A comparison of different statistical methods

Serial cognitive assessment is conducted to monitor changes in the cognitive abilities of patients over time. At present, mainly the regression-based change and the ANCOVA approaches are used to establish normative data for serial cognitive assessment. These methods are straightforward, but they have some severe drawbacks. For example, they can only consider the data of two measurement occasions. In this article, we propose three alternative normative methods that are not hampered by these problems—that is, multivariate regression, the standard linear mixed model (LMM), and the linear mixed model combined with multiple imputation (LMM with MI) approaches. The multivariate regression method is primarily useful when a small number of repeated measurements are taken at fixed time points. When the data are more unbalanced, the standard LMM and the LMM with MI methods are more appropriate because they allow for a more adequate modeling of the covariance structure. The standard LMM has the advantage that it is easier to conduct and that it does not require a Monte Carlo component. The LMM with MI, on the other hand, has the advantage that it can flexibly deal with missing responses and missing covariate values at the same time. The different normative methods are illustrated on the basis of the data of a large longitudinal study in which a cognitive test (the Stroop Color Word Test) was administered at four measurement occasions (i.e., at baseline and 3, 6, and 12 years later). The results are discussed and suggestions for future research are provided.     

Modeling external events in the three-level analysis of multiple-baseline across-participants designs: A simulation study

In this study, we focus on a three-level meta-analysis for combining data from studies using multiple-baseline across-participants designs. A complicating factor in such designs is that results might be biased if the dependent variable is affected by not explicitly modeled external events, such as the illness of a teacher, an exciting class activity, or the presence of a foreign observer. In multiple-baseline designs, external effects can become apparent if they simultaneously have an effect on the outcome score(s) of the participants within a study. This study presents a method for adjusting the three-level model to external events and evaluates the appropriateness of the modified model. Therefore, we use a simulation study, and we illustrate the new approach with real data sets. The results indicate that ignoring an external event effect results in biased estimates of the treatment effects, especially when there is only a small number of studies and measurement occasions involved. The mean squared error, as well as the standard error and coverage proportion of the effect estimates, is improved with the modified model. Moreover, the adjusted model results in less biased variance estimates. If there is no external event effect, we find no differences in results between the modified and unmodified models.