USING REINFORCEMENT-BASED METHODS TO ENHANCE MEMBERSHIP RECRUITMENT IN A VOLUNTEER ORGANIZATION

The present study employed reinforcement-based methods to induce existing members to recruit new members to join a chamber of commerce. Three interventions took place during June and July of 3 successive years. The investigators trained chamber leaders to use reinforcement methods (e.g., contingent tokens) to reinforce recruitment and dues collections. All three interventions produced substantial increases in their targets.     

Scaling clinical judgments of symptom pathology by means of the psychophysiological method of magnitude estimation

Summing scores across heterogeneous symptom items without consideration of their differing psychopathological significance has been criticized as producing an inadequate picture of an individual's clinical status. The purpose of this study was to derive symptom item weights representing clinically judged seriousness of each symptom through the application of Stevens's psychophysical method of magnitude estimation. A nationwide sample of 129 clinicians rated the pathological significance of 221 symptom items in a design such that every rater rated 121 items, 21 of which were rated by all raters and 100 of which were rated only by the A or B subgroup to which each rater was randomly assigned. Each item was rated as to the seriousness of the pathology it would represent if manifested by either a boy child, girl child, boy adolescent, or girl adolescent, with one-fourth of the raters assigned to each condition. The results of 211 two-way analyses of variance revealed that age and age and sex in interaction, but not sex alone, significantly influenced the clinical ratings. The resulting magnitude estimation ratings of symptom pathology ranged from 1.0 to 9.9. They were demonstrated to have satisfactory reliability and convergent validity and to have the psychophysical characteristics of a prothetic continuum.A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the 85th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, San Francisco, August 1977. The research was supported by HEW grant MH24886. The authors wish to express appreciation to Walter W. Wengel for his work in developing the median quotient ratings used in the study, to Terrance Auger for making available unpublished raw data, and to Merton S. Krause for helpful suggestions regarding the interpretation of results.     

Misconduct and Misbehavior Related to Authorship Disagreements in Collaborative Science

Science and Engineering Ethics - Scientific authorship serves to identify and acknowledge individuals who “contribute significantly” to published research. However, specific authorship...     

Consumer engagement on social media: Evidence from small retailers

This study investigates which characteristics of the social media posts of small firms in Tasmania, Australia elicit higher levels of consumer engagement. Results from an analysis of small retail firms’ social media postings (Facebook, Instagram and Twitter) (N = 2,607) illustrate the importance of the content of the post (i.e., businesses‐related vs. non‐business‐related), the activity (i.e., text, image or video), the time of day of the posting and the platform on which the activity was posted, in eliciting responses from followers. Results show Facebook received significantly higher levels of engagement, compared with Twitter and Instagram. Contrary to expectations, the specific day of the week did not have any impact on levels of engagement. This research demonstrates how small businesses can improve their use of social media marketing to engage more effectively with customers and followers.     

Psychopathy and fear: Specific impairments in judging behaviors that frighten others

Psychopathy is a disorder associated with antisocial behavior and deficits in responding to emotional stimuli, particularly fear-related stimuli. This research demonstrates that these deficits extend to judgments about behaviors that cause fear in others. We assessed whether psychopathy is associated with the ability to identify the emotional consequences of social behaviors and with judgments about these behaviors' acceptability. We found that psychopathy, as indexed by the Psychopathic Personality Inventory, is associated with impairments in identifying behaviors that cause fear and in judging the moral acceptability of these behaviors. Ratings of emotional consequences and moral acceptability were also correlated, such that individuals who less accurately identified behaviors that cause fear also judged these behaviors to be more morally acceptable. Psychopathy scores mediated the relationship between these two variables. These findings suggest that understanding that frightening others is unacceptable relies on understanding this type of behavior's emotional consequences, and have significance for understanding the relationship between psychopathy, empathy, and antisocial behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

An Examination of Network Position and Childhood Relational Aggression: Integrating Resource Control and Social Exchange Theories

Applying resource control theory and social exchange theory, we examined the social network conditions under which elementary age children were likely to engage in relational aggression. Data on classroom peer networks and peer‐nominated behaviors were collected on 671 second‐ through fourth‐grade children in 34 urban, low‐income classrooms. Nested regression models with robust cluster standard errors demonstrated that the association between children's number of relationships and their levels of relational aggression was moderated by the number of relationships that their affiliates had. Children with more peer relationships (i.e., higher network centrality) exhibited higher levels of relational aggression, but only when these relationships were with peers who had fewer connections themselves (i.e., poorly connected peers). This finding remained significant even when controlling for common predictors of relational aggression including gender, overt aggression, prosocial behavior, victimization, social preference, and perceived popularity. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for advancing the literature on childhood relational aggression and their practical applications for identifying children at risk for these behaviors.     

Psychometric properties of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-Adolescent (MMPI-A) Clinical, Content, and Supplementary scales in a forensic sample

In this study, we evaluated the internal psychometric properties and external correlates of scores on the Clinical, Content, and Supplementary scales in a forensic sample of 496 adolescents (315 boys and 181 girls) who were court-ordered to receive psychological evaluations. We examined Cronbach's alpha coefficients, scale intercorrelation matrices, and frequencies of scale elevations. Further, we found varying degrees of support for the convergent and discriminant validity of scores on the MMPI-A (Butcher et al., 1992 ) Clinical, Content, and Supplementary scales. This study adds to the body of literature establishing the utility of the MMPI-A in forensic evaluations.     

Integrating advice and experience: learning and decision making with social and nonsocial cues

When making decisions, people typically gather information from both social and nonsocial sources, such as advice from others and direct experience. This research adapted a cognitive learning paradigm to examine the process by which people learn what sources of information are credible. When participants relied on advice alone to make decisions, their learning of source reliability proceeded in a manner analogous to traditional cue learning processes and replicated the established learning phenomena. However, when advice and nonsocial cues were encountered together as an established phenomenon, blocking (ignoring redundant information) did not occur. Our results suggest that extant cognitive learning models can accommodate either advice or nonsocial cues in isolation. However, the combination of advice and nonsocial cues (a context more typically encountered in daily life) leads to different patterns of learning, in which mutually supportive information from different types of sources is not regarded as redundant and may be particularly compelling. For these situations, cognitive learning models still constitute a promising explanatory tool but one that must be expanded. As such, these findings have important implications for social psychological theory and for cognitive models of learning.     

Are historic years understood as numbers or events? An fMRI study of numbers with semantic associations

While numbers generally cue processing of quantity or order, they can also contain semantic information, as in the case of historic years (e.g., “1492” calls forth associations of Columbus sailing the ocean blue). Whether these dates are processed as quantities or events may depend on the context in which they occur. We examined such “ambiguous number” processing in two different contexts using a paired-comparison task, recording both behavioral responses and brain activity. Participants were either asked to think of all items as numbers and to choose the larger number, or were told to treat the comparators as events and to choose the later event. Behaviorally, all events showed a normal distance effect, establishing that they may be understood and compared in an ordinal sequence. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) demonstrated significant differences between years when treated as numbers versus as events. Dates in both contexts shared activity in parietal lobe regions previously implicated in number processing. Dates as numbers showed no extra-numeric activity, while dates thought of as events evoked activity in temporal semantic processing and frontal semantic retrieval areas. These differences suggest that extra-numeric information may be easily accessed and incorporated during processing when supported by even a weak context. This work supports previous studies showing a dissociation between quantity and meaning, and illustrates the brain areas involved in these different aspects.     

Infant behaviors influence mothers’ provision of responsive and directive behaviors

Mother–infant interactions are important to infant development because they are predictive of infants’ social, cognitive, and language development (0070 and 0150). Because maternal responsive and directive behaviors are associated with differential infant outcomes, it is important to investigate influences on mothers’ provision of responsive and directive behaviors. Yet, the dyadic interaction literature is predominantly unidirectional from maternal behavior to infant outcomes. Therefore, the current study examined infant initiating behaviors and consequent maternal responses in a sample of 26 13-month-old infants and their mothers, videotaped during 5 min of free-play. Findings revealed that infants produced a variety of initiatives, and that these different infant initiatives prompted differential patterns of maternal responsive versus directive behaviors. Further, results of analyses of divergent types of maternal directive behaviors – Responsive Directives, ReDirectives, and Intrusive Directives – also may help clarify major discrepancies in the current literature regarding the positive and negative effects of maternal directiveness.