College Students' Attitudes Toward Abortion: The Role of Knowledge and Demographic Variables1

The present study sought to determine the role that knowledge of abortion information and various demographic variables play in discriminating between those who approve and those who disapprove of abortion. Four hundred and fifty-four college students completed the Abortion Knowledge Test, constructed by the researchers, as well as an abortion attitudes questionnaire which asked subjects to indicate their degree of approval or disapproval of abortion in the case of 7 different scenarios. Attitudes toward abortion were significantly predicted by knowledge of abortion-related information above and beyond the significant influence of degree of religiosity, religion, and age. No significant gender differences were found. Respondents who indicated approval of abortion scored significantly higher on the Abortion Knowledge Test and tended to be older, less religious, and non-Catholic compared to those who disapproved of abortion.     

The relationship between the motive to avoid success and vocational choice

This study examined, for 221 black and white male and female college students, the relationship between the Motive to Avoid Success (M_−s) and: (a) sex and race; (b) congruency, consistency, and differentiation of occupational choice; and (c) occupational aspirations. M_−s was assessed by a recent scoring system for verbal TAT cues and occupational choice patterns were analyzed by the Self-Directed Search. The results showed a significant sex difference on M_−s. High M_−s, in white females predicted well defined, sex-role stereotyped, and low occupational aspirations, but for white males it predicted high aspirations. No significant results were found for black males, and M_−s in black females seemed to be related to economic well-being.     

Sex differences in performance on three novel continuous response tasks

The Dynavision apparatus was used to assess psychomotor differences between men and women first-time users. Subjects, 50 men and 76 women, were tested on three 60-sec. Dynavision response tasks of graded difficulty. An analysis of variance with repeated measures indicated that men performed significantly better than women on all tasks. Performances on all tasks were also significantly different from each other within both sexes (p < or = .05). Furthermore, a significant interaction between sex and task was based on a greater drop in performance on the most complex task for women than for men.     

Aggression and self-esteem: a diary study of children's reactivity to negative interpersonal events

The study employs a daily diary design to assess self-esteem reactivity and its association with children's aggressive behavior. We test the hypothesis that the self-esteem of aggressive children will be more reactive to negative interpersonal events than the self-esteem of nonaggressive children. Results provide partial support for the aggression/reactivity hypothesis. Aggressive children's self-esteem was more reactive to negative peer events but less reactive to negative adult events than the self-esteem of less aggressive children. These findings are discussed in relation to the experimental literature relating self-esteem instability and ego-threat to aggression and in relation to the extensive body of research on childhood aggression. Intervention implications are also considered.     

Affective, behavioral, and cognitive functioning in adolescents with multiple suicide attempts

The purpose of this study was to examine affective, behavioral, and cognitive functioning in adolescents with multiple suicide attempts. Forty-seven adolescents with a history of multiple suicide attempts (MA) were compared to 74 single suicide attempters (SA) on psychiatric diagnosis, depressive symptoms, affect regulation, self-mutilation, alcohol use, and hopelessness. Results revealed that the MA group was more likely to be diagnosed with a mood disorder, and reported more severe depressive symptoms and anger, in comparison to the SA group. Behaviorally, the MA group had higher rates of disruptive behavior disorders and higher levels of affect dysregulation and serious self-mutilation than the SA group. Further, greater levels of hopelessness were reported by the MA than the SA group. After controlling for a mood disorder diagnosis, only differences in anger, affect dysregulation, and serious self-mutilation remained significant. Overall, results suggest that treatment with adolescent suicide attempters might specifically target anger and affect dysregulation to reduce risk for future suicidal behavior.     

On the recognition of emotional vocal expressions: motivations for a holistic approach

Human beings seem to be able to recognize emotions from speech very well and information communication technology aims to implement machines and agents that can do the same. However, to be able to automatically recognize affective states from speech signals, it is necessary to solve two main technological problems. The former concerns the identification of effective and efficient processing algorithms capable of capturing emotional acoustic features from speech sentences. The latter focuses on finding computational models able to classify, with an approximation as good as human listeners, a given set of emotional states. This paper will survey these topics and provide some insights for a holistic approach to the automatic analysis, recognition and synthesis of affective states.     

Evidence for working memory storage operations in perceptual cortex

Isolating the short-term storage component of working memory (WM) from the myriad of associated executive processes has been an enduring challenge. Recent efforts have identified patterns of activity in visual regions that contain information about items being held in WM. However, it remains unclear (1) whether these representations withstand intervening sensory input and (2) how communication between multimodal association cortex and the unimodal perceptual regions supporting WM representations is involved in WM storage. We present evidence that the features of a face held in WM are stored within face-processing regions, that these representations persist across subsequent sensory input, and that information about the match between sensory input and a memory representation is relayed forward from perceptual to prefrontal regions. Participants were presented with a series of probe faces and indicated whether each probe matched a target face held in WM. We parametrically varied the feature similarity between the probe and target faces. Activity within face-processing regions scaled linearly with the degree of feature similarity between the probe face and the features of the target face, suggesting that the features of the target face were stored in these regions. Furthermore, directed connectivity measures revealed that the direction of information flow that was optimal for performance was from sensory regions that stored the features of the target face to dorsal prefrontal regions, supporting the notion that sensory input is compared to representations stored within perceptual regions and is subsequently relayed forward. Together, these findings indicate that WM storage operations are carried out within perceptual cortex.     

The effect of experience and of dots’ density and duration on the detection of coherent motion in dogs

Knowledge about the mechanisms underlying canine vision is far from being exhaustive, especially that concerning post-retinal elaboration. One aspect that has received little attention is motion perception, and in spite of the common belief that dogs are extremely apt at detecting moving stimuli, there is no scientific support for such an assumption. In fact, we recently showed that dogs have higher thresholds than humans for coherent motion detection (Kanizsar et al. in Sci Rep UK 7:11259, 2017). This term refers to the ability of the visual system to perceive several units moving in the same direction, as one coherently moving global unit. Coherent motion perception is commonly investigated using random dot displays, containing variable proportions of coherently moving dots. Here, we investigated the relative contribution of local and global integration mechanisms for coherent motion perception, and changes in detection thresholds as a result of repeated exposure to the experimental stimuli. Dogs who had been involved in the previous study were given a conditioned discrimination task, in which we systematically manipulated dot density and duration and, eventually, re-assessed our subjects’ threshold after extensive exposure to the stimuli. Decreasing dot duration impacted on dogs’ accuracy in detecting coherent motion only at very low duration values, revealing the efficacy of local integration mechanisms. Density impacted on dogs’ accuracy in a linear fashion, indicating less efficient global integration. There was limited evidence of improvement in the re-assessment but, with an average threshold at re-assessment of 29%, dogs’ ability to detect coherent motion remains much poorer than that of humans.