Ethnic pride and self-control related to protective and risk factors: test of the theoretical model for the strong African American families program.

OBJECTIVE: To test a theoretical model of how ethnic pride and self-control are related to risk and protective factors. DESIGN: A community sample of 670 African American youth (mean age = 11.2 years) were interviewed in households. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Measures of cigarette smoking, alcohol use, and sexual behavior (lifetime to past month). RESULTS: Structural modeling analyses indicated parenting was related to self-control and self-esteem, and racial socialization was related to ethnic pride. Self-control and self-esteem variables were related to levels of deviance-prone attitudes and to perceptions of engagers in, or abstainers from, substance use and sexual behavior. The proximal factors (behavioral willingness, resistance efficacy, and peer behavior) had substantial relations to the criterion variables. Participant gender and parental education also had several paths in the model. Results were generally similar for the 2 outcome behaviors. CONCLUSIONS: In this population, self-esteem and self-control are related to parenting approaches and have pathways to attitudes and social perceptions that are significant factors for predisposing to, or protecting against, early involvement in substance use and sexual behavior.     

Children's perception of certain musical properties: scale and contour

Children's perception of scale and contour in melodies was investigated in five studies. Experimental tasks included judging transposed renditions of melodies (Studies 1 and 3), discriminating between transposed renditions of a melody (Study 2), judging contour-preserving transformations of melodies (Study 4), and judging similarity to a familiar target melody of transformations preserving rhythm or rhythm and contour (Study 5). The first and second studies showed that young children detect key transposition changes even in familiar melodies and they perceive similarity over key transpositions even in unfamiliar melodies. Young children also are sensitive to melodic contour over transformations that preserve it (Study 5), yet they distinguish spontaneously between melodies with the same contour and different intervals (Study 4). The key distance effect reported in the literature did not occur in the tasks of this investigation (Studies 1 and 3), and it may be apparent only for melodies shorter or more impoverished than those used here.     

Cognition and olfaction: a review

Examines research in cognitive psychology, which has in the past paid little attention to the olfactory modality. But there is now a significant body of literature on the role of the olfactory system in memory and cognition. Human beings possess an excellent ability to detect and discriminate odors, but they typically have great difficulty in identifying particular odorants. This results partly from the use of an improverished and idiosyncratic language to describe olfactory experiences, which are normally encoded either in a rudimentary sensory form or as part of a complex but highly specific biographical episode. Consequently, linguistic processes play only a very limited role in olfactory processing, whereas hedonic factors seem to be of considerable importance.     

Ethical dilemmas in context: Some preliminary questions

I have tried to build on O'Neill's thought-provoking paper by examining two influences that shape and define ethical dilemmas in the community: our personal agendas and the broader context. The first influence is the way in which our personal and professional values shape our agendas for community work. The way these agendas frame the choices for action are a force to be recognized separate from the question of who constitutes our community constituency. Our values may push us into proactive roles and we must face the way our actions make personal/political statements. The broader context of the community situation and the ways in which resource limitations frame the ethical question also need to be actively recognized. Otherwise there is a danger of making the psychologist the victim by posing the ethical dilemma as a question of how they alone should find a solution. The nature of our personal agenda must be clear before we ask “responsible to whom?” The broader context must be considered before we ask “responsible for what?”     

EVIDENCE FOR RELATIONAL-CODING IN CONCEPT FORMATION,AND A NOTE ON THE EFFECTS OF FEEDBACK*

The purpose of the present paper was to determine whether people encode relations among component features in experience, or whether they simply encode the occurrence of features separately as independent cues. This has become a major issue in theories of concept-formation at the present time. It is suggested in this paper that two problems have particularly obstructed a clear resolution of the issue. The first is a consistent failure to check to what extent training materials actually contain relations among features, before results are declared in favour of a particular model. The second is the use, hitherto, of only informal methods of analysing such relations, where they exist, and of predicting from them the structure of the concept. This paper describes an expression for measuring the overall relations among feature-variables in concept training materials. It also introduces a methodology, using log-linear models, for predicting concept structures on the basis of those relations. An experiment combined these methods to assess whether subjects abstracted relations among features, or whether they abstracted independent cues. A subsidiary aim was to assess how feedback, based on independent-cue information, during learning, affected the construction of the concept. The results came out strongly in favour of relational-coding and there was some evidence that feedback based on independent-cues retarded concept formation.     

Book reviews

Current Psychology -     

So you think you are an ally? Effects of (in)congruence between men's self-perceptions and women's perceptions of men's values and allyship on women's inclusion and vitality

As public consciousness of sexism is increasing in the workplace (e.g., #MeToo movement), labelling oneself as an ally (e.g., UN HeforShe campaign) is becoming more socially desirable for men. However, do women agree with such men in their assessments of being allies? Importantly, how does women's agreement (or not) with men's self-assessments of allyship affect women's inclusion-relevant outcomes? Using a multi-informant design and data from 101 men–women colleague pairs, this study considered men's self-perceptions and women's other-reports of men's key allyship-relevant characteristics—justice, moral courage, civility and allyship. Polynomial regression and response surface analyses revealed differential impacts of (in)congruence between men's and women's perceptions on women's sense of inclusion and vitality. Simply, when women perceived men as higher (or the same) in justice, moral courage and civility than men reported themselves, it positively predicted women's outcomes. This suggests that humble self-presentation by men on characteristics that are parallel to allyship (but not allyship) may be ideal. Yet, both under- and overestimation by men on allyship itself predicted poorer outcomes for women, suggesting that the ideal is for men to have an accurate assessment of their own strengths and weaknesses as an ally.     

Articulatory rehearsal and phonological storage in working memory

The theoretical distinction between an articulatory control process and a short-term phonological store was supported in five experiments on immediate serial recall. In Experiment 1, articulatory suppression during the presentation and recall of auditory material abolished the word length effect but not the phonemic similarity effect. In Experiment 2, the two latter effects were found to be independent with auditory presentation. In Experiment 3, the effects of irrelevant speech and word length were found to be independent with visual presentation. In Experiment 4, articulatory suppression during the presentation and recall of auditory material abolished the phonemic similarity effect with a slow presentation rate. Nevertheless, in Experiment 5, articulatory suppression with a conventional presentation rate did not reduce the effect of phonemic similarity, even when a 10-sec interval was interposed between presentation and recall. These results indicate that the encoding, maintenance, and retrieval of spoken material within the phonological store do not depend on a process of articulatory rehearsal.