Big-Fish--Little-Pond effect on academic self-concept: A cross-cultural (26-country) test of the negative effects of academically selective schools.

Academically selective schools are intended to affect academic self-concept positively, but theoretical and empirical research demonstrates that the effects are negative. The big-fish--little-pond effect (BFLPE), an application of social comparison theory to educational settings, posits that a student will have a lower academic self-concept in an academically selective school than in a nonselective school. This study, the largest cross-cultural study of the BFLPE ever undertaken, tested theoretical predictions for nationally representative samples of approximately 4,000 15-year-olds from each of 26 countries (N=103,558) who completed the same self-concept instrument and achievement tests. Consistent with the BFLPE, the effects of school-average achievement were negative in all 26 countries (M beta=-.20, SD=.08), demonstrating the BFLPE's cross-cultural generalizability. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Contributions of Oral and Extraoral Facial Movement to Visual and Audiovisual Speech Perception.

Seeing a talker's face influences auditory speech recognition, but the visible input essential for this influence has yet to be established. Using a new seamless editing technique, the authors examined effects of restricting visible movement to oral or extraoral areas of a talking face. In Experiment 1, visual speech identification and visual influences on identifying auditory speech were compared across displays in which the whole face moved, the oral area moved, or the extraoral area moved. Visual speech influences on auditory speech recognition were substantial and unchanging across whole-face and oral-movement displays. However, extraoral movement also influenced identification of visual and audiovisual speech. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that these results are dependent on intact and upright facial contexts, but only with extraoral movement displays. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Risk Factors for Course of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Among Vietnam Veterans: A 14-Year Follow-Up of American Legionnaires.

Risk factors affecting the course of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are poorly understood. As part of a larger study on characterizing exposure to herbicides in Vietnam, the authors investigated this issue in a random sample of 1,377 American Legionnaires who had served in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War and were followed over a 14-year period. High combat exposure, perceived negative community attitudes at homecoming, minority race, depression symptoms at Time 1, and more anger at Time 1 predicted a more chronic course. Community involvement at Time 1 was protective and associated with decreased risk at Time 2. Discomfort in disclosing Vietnam experiences was associated with an increased risk for developing PTSD but did not predict its course. Combat exposure predicted PTSD course more strongly than any other risk factor. Findings suggest recovery from PTSD is significantly influenced by perceived social support. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Book review: Media violence and its effects on aggression: Assessing the scientific evidence.

Review of book: Media violence and its effects on aggression: Assessing the scientific evidence, by Jonathan L. Freedman. Toronto: ON: University of Toronto Press, 2002, 227 pp. Hardcover. ISBN 0-8020-3553-1. Reviewed by Claire Crooks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Behavioral Phenotype of the Reeler Mutant Mouse: Effects of Reln Gene Dosage and Social Isolation.

Reeler (rl/rl) and reeler/wild-type (+/rl) mice synthesize Reln at subnormal rates, as do patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and autism, thereby forming the basis for a Reln hypothesis for vulnerability to these psychopathologies and justifying attention to the behavioral phenotypes of Reln-deficient mice. Tests of gait, emotionality, social aggression, spatial working memory, novel-object detection, fear conditioning, and sensorimotor reflex modulation revealed the behavioral phenotype of rl/rl, but not +/rl, mice to be different from that of wild-type (+/+) mice. These results reveal no effect of Reln gene dosage and provide significant challenges to both the Reln and the neurodevelopmental hypotheses of the etiology of major psychopathologies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

One Hundred Years of Social Psychology Quantitatively Described.

This article compiles results from a century of social psychological research, more than 25,000 studies of 8 million people. A large number of social psychological conclusions are listed alongside meta-analytic information about the magnitude and variability of the corresponding effects. References to 322 meta-analyses of social psychological phenomena are presented, as well as statistical effect-size summaries. Analyses reveal that social psychological effects typically yield a value of r equal to .21 and that, in the typical research literature, effects vary from study to study in ways that produce a standard deviation in r of .15. Uses, limitations, and implications of this large-scale compilation are noted. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On the Subjective Quality of Social Justice: The Role of Affect as Information in the Psychology of Justice Judgments.

This article argues that it is not uncommon for people forming justice judgments to lack information that is most relevant in the particular situation. In information-uncertain conditions, people may therefore construct justice judgments by relying on how they feel about the events they have encountered, and justice judgments may hence be strongly influenced by affect information. Findings show that in information-uncertain conditions, the affective states that people had been in prior and unrelated to the justice event indeed strongly influenced their justice judgments. These findings thus reveal that in situations of information uncertainty, people's judgments of justice can be very subjective, susceptible to affective states that have no logical relationship with the justice judgments they are constructing. Implications for the social psychology of justice and the literature on social cognition and affect are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A Detection-Theoretic Model of Echo Inhibition.

A detection-theoretic analysis of the auditory localization of dual-impulse stimuli is described, and a model for the processing of spatial cues in the echo pulse is developed. Although for over 50 years "echo suppression" has been the topic of intense theoretical and empirical study within the hearing sciences, only a rudimentary understanding of its mechanisms has emerged. In this article, psychometric functions and results from matching studies are used in developing a model that specifies the perceived position of the echo pulse as a normal deviate, with an expectation that is a logistic function of the echo delay and a variance that depends on interaural time difference. Loss of information in the echo event is quantified as a decline in the efficiency with which the binaural system receives information from the lag impulse. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Biases in Social Comparative Judgments: The Role of Nonmotivated Factors in Above-Average and Comparative-Optimism Effects.

Biases in social comparative judgments, such as those illustrated by above-average and comparative-optimism effects, are often regarded as products of motivated reasoning (e.g., self-enhancement). These effects, however, can also be produced by information-processing limitations or aspects of judgment processes that are not necessarily biased by motivational factors. In this article, the authors briefly review motivational accounts of biased comparative judgments, introduce a 3-stage model for understanding how people make comparative judgments, and then describe how various nonmotivational factors can influence the 3 stages of the comparative judgment process. Finally, the authors discuss several unresolved issues highlighted by their analysis, such as the interrelation between motivated and nonmotivated sources of bias and the influence of nonmotivated sources of bias on behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Post-Event Rumination and Negative Self-Appraisal in Social Phobia Before and After Treatment.

This study investigated the relationship between self-appraisals of performance, symptom severity and post-event rumination in social phobia, and evaluated the effect of treatment on these variables. A socially phobic group and a nonanxious control group performed an impromptu speech and were told that their performance would be evaluated. Participants appraised their performance immediately after the speech and 1 week later, and the frequency of post-event rumination during the week following the speech was assessed. The socially phobic group maintained the negative appraisals of their speech over the week, whereas the nonclinical group showed increased positivity about their performance The socially phobic group also engaged in more negative rumination than controls. Treatment improved perceptions of performance and reduced negative rumination. These results are discussed in the light of cognitive models of social phobia. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)