Individual Accountability in Cooperative Learning Groups at the College Level: Differential Effects on High,Average, and Low Exam Performers

Over a three-semester period in a large undergraduate human development course, students were assigned to 5–7 member groups to work together in preparing for an exam in one of the five content units in the course. Their exam performance was tracked over three units: a baseline unit in which students worked only individually, a unit in which they worked in cooperative teams, and a follow-up unit in which the formal cooperative team structure was removed. Three different bonus-credit contingencies were used in the cooperative learning unit across the three semesters: (a) awarding full bonus credit to each individual in the group if the group as a whole improved its exam performance by the specified amount, (b) awarding partial bonus credit to each individual in the group if the group as a whole improved it exam performance by the specified amount and full bonus credit to each individual who also improved by the specified amount, and (c) awarding full bonus credit to an individual in the group if both the group and the individual improved exam performance by the specified amount. The three contingencies produced somewhat similar patterns of change for low and average performers, but the high performers fared better under the last two contingencies than under the group-only contingency.     

Health Programming for Clergy: An Overview of Protestant Programs in the United States

The health of clergy is important, and clergy may find health programming tailored to them more effective. Little is known about existing clergy health programs. We contacted Protestant denominational headquarters and searched academic databases and the Internet. We identified 56 clergy health programs and categorized them into prevention and personal enrichment; counseling; marriage and family enrichment; peer support; congregational health; congregational effectiveness; denominational enrichment; insurance/strategic pension plans; and referral-based programs. Only 13 of the programs engaged in outcomes evaluation. Using the Socioecological Framework, we found that many programs support individual-level and institutional-level changes, but few programs support congregational-level changes. Outcome evaluation strategies and a central repository for information on clergy health programs are needed.     

Gratitude and Life Satisfaction in the United States and Japan

Being grateful has been associated with many positive outcomes, including greater happiness, positive affect, optimism, and self-esteem. There is limited research, however, on the associations between gratitude and different domains of life satisfaction across cultures. The current study examined the associations between gratitude and three domains of life satisfaction, including satisfaction in relationships, work, and health, and overall life satisfaction, in the United States and Japan. A total of 945 participants were drawn from two samples of middle aged and older adults, the Midlife Development in the United States and the Midlife Development in Japan. There were significant positive bivariate associations between gratitude and all four measures of life satisfaction. In addition, after adjusting for demographics, neuroticism, extraversion, and the other measures of satisfaction, gratitude was uniquely and positively associated with satisfaction with relationships and life overall but not with satisfaction with work or health. Furthermore, results indicated that women and individuals who were more extraverted and lived in the United States were more grateful and individuals with less than a high school degree were less grateful. The findings from this study suggest that gratitude is uniquely associated with specific domains of life satisfaction. Results are discussed with respect to future research and the design and implementation of gratitude interventions, particularly when including individuals from different cultures.     

Spatiotemporal competition and task-relevance shape the spatial distribution of emotional interference during rapid visual processing: Evidence from gaze-contingent eye-tracking

People’s ability to perceive rapidly presented targets can be disrupted both by voluntary encoding of a preceding target and by spontaneous attention to salient distractors. Distinctions between these sources of interference can be found when people search for a target in multiple rapid streams instead of a single stream: voluntary encoding of a preceding target often elicits subsequent perceptual lapses across the visual field, whereas spontaneous attention to emotionally salient distractors appears to elicit a spatially localized lapse, giving rise to a theoretical account suggesting that emotional distractors and subsequent targets compete spatiotemporally during rapid serial visual processing. We used gaze-contingent eye-tracking to probe the roles of spatiotemporal competition and memory encoding on the spatial distribution of interference caused by emotional distractors, while also ruling out the role of eye-gaze in driving differences in spatial distribution. Spontaneous target perception impairments caused by emotional distractors were localized to the distractor location regardless of where participants fixated. But when emotional distractors were task-relevant, perceptual lapses occurred across both streams while remaining strongest at the distractor location. These results suggest that spatiotemporal competition and memory encoding reflect a dual-route impact of emotional stimuli on target perception during rapid visual processing.     

Affective stimuli capture attention regardless of categorical distinctiveness: An emotion-induced blindness study

Affective stimuli capture attention, whether their affective value stems from emotional content or a history of reward. The uniqueness of such stimuli within their experimental contexts might imbue them with an enhanced categorical distinctiveness that accounts for their impact on attention. Indeed, in emotion-induced blindness, categorically distinctive neutral pictures disrupt target perception, albeit to a lesser degree than do emotional pictures. Here, we manipulated the categorical distinctiveness of distractors in an emotion-induced blindness task. Participants searched within RSVP streams for a target that followed an emotional or a neutral distractor picture. In a categorically homogenous condition, all non-distractor items were exemplars from a uniform category, thus enhancing the distractor's categorical distinctiveness. In a categorically heterogeneous condition, each non-distractor item represented a distinct category. Neutral distractors disrupted target perception only in the homogenous condition, but emotional distractors did so regardless of their categorical distinctiveness.     

The perception of face gender: The role of stimulus structure in recognition and classification

The perception of face gender was examined in the context of extending “face space” models of human face representations to include the perceptual categories defined by male and female faces. We collected data on the recognizability, gender classifiability (reaction time to classify a face as male/female), attractiveness, and masculinity/femininity of individual male and female faces. Factor analyses applied separately to the data for male and female faces yielded the following results. First, for both male and female faces, the recognizability and gender classifiability of faces were independent—a result inconsistent with the hypothesis that both recognizability and gender classifiability depend on a face’s “distance” from the subcategory gender prototype. Instead, caricatured aspects of gender (femininity/masculinity ratings) related to the gender classifiability of the faces. Second, facial attractiveness related inversely to face recognizability for male, but not for female, faces—a result that resolves inconsistencies in previous studies. Third, attractiveness and femininity for female faces were nearly equivalent, but attractiveness and masculinity for male faces were not equivalent. Finally, we applied principal component analysis to the pixel-coded face images with the aim of extracting measures related to the gender classifiability and recognizability of individual faces. We incorporated these model-derived measures into the factor analysis with the human rating and performance measures.     

From Standpoint Epistemology to Epistemic Oppression

Standpoint epistemology is committed to a cluster of views that pays special attention to the role of social identity in knowledge‐acquisition. Of particular interest here is the situated knowledge thesis. This thesis holds that for certain propositions p, whether an epistemic agent is in a position to know that p depends on some nonepistemic facts related to the epistemic agent's social identity. In this article, I examine two possible ways to interpret this thesis. My first goal here is to clarify existing interpretations of this thesis that appear in the literature but that are undeveloped and often mistakenly conflated. In so doing, I aim to make clear the different versions of standpoint epistemology that one might accept and defend. This project is of significance, I argue, because standpoint epistemology provides helpful tools for understanding a phenomenon of recent interest: epistemic oppression. My second goal is to provide an analysis that makes clear how each of the readings I put forth can be used to illuminate forms of epistemic oppression.