Parental alcohol consumption and postneonatal mortality

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the role of maternal and paternal alcohol consumption as independent risk factors in postneonatal mortality. Questions on the frequency and quantity of alcoholic drinks consumed were included in a questionnaire used as part of a case-control study. Over a period of 11 months the families of 157 cases and 468 controls, matched for age and locality, were interviewed. Odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals were obtained by matched univariate analysis and by multiple conditional logistic regression. Maternal consumption during pregnancy, maternal consumption during breastfeeding and maternal consumption in the past year were not risk factors for postneonatal mortality. A multiple matched analysis did not alter these results. Matched univariate analysis of paternal alcohol consumption gave several positive results, including variables pertaining to the father's consumption in a multiple logistic regression model with traditional risk factors, which revealed that the frequency of paternal consumption in the last year, as estimated by the mother, was found to have a significant effect on postneonatal mortality.     

Predicted and Recommended Behavior of a Woman as a Function of Her Inferred Helplessness in the Dowry and Wife-Beating Predicaments

Two experiments, using hypothetical situations, examined predictions and recommendations regarding a woman's behavior in the dowry and wife-beating predicaments as a function of her perceived helplessness. The dowry experiment described the situation of a stimulus person who has to decide whether to marry a boy under the dowry condition and had a 2 (subject's sex) × 2 (stimulus person's attractiveness) × 2(stimulus person's age) × 3 (stimulus person's socioeconomic status) factorial design, with estimated likelihood of marrying and recommendation to marry as the two dependent measures. The wife-beating experiment described the situation of a battered stimulus person who has to decide whether to leave her violent husband and had a 2 (subject's sex) × 2 (stimulus person's economic independence) × 2 (stimulus person's having children) × 3 (stimulus person's socioeconomic status) factorial design, with estimated likelihood of leaving the husband and recommendation to leave the husband as the two dependent measures. The subjects of the two experiments were undergraduate or graduate students of Bombay University, with 15 subjects per cell in the dowry experiment and 13 subjects per cell in the wife-beating experiment. Female subjects gave a stronger recommendation against marrying under the dowry condition and in favor of leaving the husband than did male subjects. The economically independent women was perceived as more likely to leave the husband than the dependent woman. Results of the wife-beating experiment suggested greater social constraints, under some conditions, on the middle class woman as compared to upper and lower class women in India.     

Injustice impairs self-regulation and affects food choice

Overweight and obesity are risk factors for a range of chronic diseases, many of them caused by excessive consumption of unhealthy foods and insufficient consumption of healthy foods. The present study aims to experimentally test the effect of being exposed to injustice on the intention to consume healthy and unhealthy foods, through self-regulation. We predicted that injustice decreases self-regulation which in turn increases the intention to consume unhealthy foods and decreases the intention to consume healthy foods. Undergraduate students (N = 175; 89% women; M_age = 24.28, SD = 7.36) were randomly exposed to a scenario describing an unjust or a just academic situation. In a subsequent allegedly unrelated task, participants were asked to indicate their intention to consume each of 26 food items (half depicting unhealthy foods and half healthy foods, random order) during the subsequent week. As expected, injustice decreased self-regulation which in turn increased the intention to consume unhealthy foods and decreased the intention to consume healthy foods. These results highlight the central importance of justice perceptions in the study of consumption and contribute to frame it in the study of the consequences of economic inequalities for nutrition.     

Women are not swayed by sugar‐coated acts of verbal sexual coercion

Sexual coercion is receiving much attention with the #MeToo movement. Not all of the tactics that perpetrators use to coerce sex are perceived to be equally unacceptable. This study examined factors that may mitigate negative perceptions, including features of the perpetrator's tactics (verbal vs. physical tactics, relationship‐focused vs. self‐focused reasons to coerce sex) and raters' own current relationship (commitment, dependence, sexually coercive experiences). College women (N = 498) rated whether the perpetrator's behavior was acceptable, was excusable, and would adversely affect a relationship. Verbal (vs. physical) coercion, dependence on a current partner, and sexually coercive experiences in a current relationship mitigated negative perceptions. However, participant ratings were not influenced by the perpetrator's use of relationship‐focused reasons for coercing sex (vs. self‐focused reasons), suggesting that women may resist male attempts to sugar‐coat sexual coercion.     

Assessing aggression in adolescent romantic relationships: can we do it better?

Almost all research on aggression in adolescent romantic relationships makes use of 1-time, retrospective assessment methods. In the present research, the authors compared data on the experience of adolescent relationship aggression (physical aggression and threatening behavior) collected from 125 high school students via 2 methods: (a) a 1-time, 2-month retrospective assessment and (b) a cumulative method based on four 2-week retrospective assessments, each spaced 2 weeks apart. For the cumulative method, data from the 4 assessments were aggregated to cover the same time period as the single, 2-month retrospective assessment. A greater proportion of the sample (48.0%) reported experiencing physical aggression using the cumulative method compared with the single, 2-month retrospective method (27.0%). The prevalence of threatening behavior was also higher using the cumulative method (48.8% vs. 24.8%). Adolescent trauma and anxiety symptoms correlated more strongly with physical aggression data derived from the cumulative method than from the 1-time assessment method.     

Possible influence of linguistic musical background on perceptual pitch-matching tasks: a pilot study

Linguistic background has been identified as important in the perception of pitch, particularly between tonal versus nontonal languages. In addition, a link between native language and the perception of musical pitch has also been established. This pilot study examined the perception of pitch between listeners from tonal and nontonal linguistic cultures where two different styles of music originate. Listeners were 10 individuals born in China who ranged in age from 25 to 37 years and had spent on the average 30 mo. in the USA and 10 individuals, born on the Indian subcontinent, who ranged in age from 22 to 31 years, and had spent an average of 13 mo. in the USA. Listeners from both groups participated in two conditions. One condition involved listening to a selection of music characteristic of the individual's culture (China, pentatonic scale; Indian subcontinent, microtones), and one condition involved no music. All listeners within each condition participated in two voice pitch-matching tasks. One task involved matching the lowest and highest pitch of tape-recorded voices to a note on an electronic keyboard. Another task involved matching the voice pitch of tape-recorded orally read words to a note on the keyboard. There were no differences between the two linguistic groups. Methodological limitations preclude generalization but provide the basis for further research.     

Anxiety, depression and coping: CDI, MASC and CRI-Y for screening purposes in schools

This study used depression (CDI - Kovacs, 1981), anxiety (MASC - March, 1997) and coping strategy (CRI-Y - Moos, 1993) scales and studied the fitness and discriminant validity of reduced versions. The sample consisted of 916 Portuguese pupils, 54.3% feminine, aged 10 to 21 years old. The participants were selected from a set of public schools nation-wide. Two classes were chosen from the 5th to the 12th grades. A set of principal component analyses was carried out in a randomly chosen sample (n = 394) and all the three reduced measures were found to be strongly correlated with the previous. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) using the other part of the sample (n = 522) revealed adjustment indexes suggesting a good fit for both the whole model and gender and age groups separately. All scales revealed a good internal consistency. Globally, girls were more anxious and developed more coping strategies than boys. Older students tended to be less depressed, while younger adolescents present higher scores in depression and anxiety and less coping strategies. Reduced scales are sensitive to gender and age differences and can be used in school settings in order to establish a baseline and roadmaps for both universal and selective mental health school based programs.     

Enhancing the comparability between part-list cueing and collaborative recall: a gradual part-list cueing paradigm

The effects of part-list cueing and of collaborative recall in memory performance have been recently addressed as parallel phenomena. Notably they both impair recall (and boost frequency estimates) and they have been explained by the same underlying mechanisms. However, the comparability between the two paradigms is hindered by a number of procedural differences. The main contribution of this paper is the introduction of a new paradigm that makes standard part-list cueing and collaborative recall more comparable. In our study we compared free recall and frequency estimates of participants in a non-cueing condition with the same performance in a standard part-list cueing condition and in a condition in which part-list cues were gradually presented during recall (as it occurs in collaborative recall). Results indicate that the effects of part-list cueing continued to be reliable in both cueing conditions. Namely, recall was impaired and frequency estimates were boosted relatively to a non-cueing condition. The results obtained with this new method that enhances the direct comparability of the two paradigms provide further evidence for the parallel between the two effects.     

The learning of visually guided action: An information-space analysis of pole balancing

In cart-pole balancing, one moves a cart in 1 dimension so as to balance an attached inverted pendulum. We approached perception-action and learning in this task from an ecological perspective. This entailed identifying a space of informational variables that balancers use as they perform the task and demonstrating that they improve by traversing the space to the loci of more useful variables. We presented a novel information space-including fractional derivatives of pendulum angle (e.g., halfway between angle and angular velocity)-as possible information for balancing. Fourteen college students tried to meet a criterion of balancing the pole for 30 s on 3 of 5 successive trials, up to a maximum of 150 attempts. Loci in the fractional derivative space predicted the time series of force production well. Systematic differences were seen in loci as a function of success, and systematic changes in locus were seen with learning. The fractional derivatives were shown to predict pole angles a short time interval into the future, allowing balancers to prospectively control the action and thereby nullify visuomotor delay. In addition to loci in the information space, we analyzed loci in a calibration space, reflecting the gain relating force to information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Cognitive abilities, sociocultural background and academic achievement

The influence of students' sociocultural background on academic achievement is a well established fact. Research also points out that sociocultural background is related to students' cognitive abilities and these have an effect on their academic achievement. However, the mediator role of cognitive abilities on the relationship between sociocultural background and academic achievement is less well known. A structural equation model that represents these relationships was tested in a sample (N= 728) of Portuguese junior high school students. Multigroup analysis of the model showed the importance of the cognitive ability mediation effect between sociocultural background and academic achievement in the 7th and 9th grades, but not in the 8th grade. This difference may be the result of the academic transition experienced in the 7th and 9th grades in the Portuguese educational system, which requires parents' higher involvement in school.