Does Volunteering With Children Affect Attitudes Toward Adults With Disabilities? A Prospective Study of Unequal Contact.

Objectives: Determine effects of volunteering with children with disabilities on attitudes toward adults with disabilities; examine predictors of social distance. Setting: Pediatric educational-rehabilitation center. Method: Seventy-one adult volunteers completed measures before and after volunteering for 4 to 10 months with children with physical or hearing impairments. Main outcome variables: Questionnaire measures of social distance, self- and other-focused attitudes, thoughts, and affect toward adults with disabilities. Results: Volunteering decreased social distance and had the greatest impact on comfort and ease, regardless of the group with which participants volunteered. There was little change in thoughts and beliefs about people with disabilities. Social distance was best predicted by an other-focused variable: thoughts about the person with a disability. Conclusions: Working with children with disabilities diminished social distance and improved self-focused aspects of attitudes, thoughts, and feelings. This experience generally did not affect other-focused views, which are important for interaction with peers with disabilities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The confirmability and disconfirmability of trait concepts revisited: Does content matter?

M. Rothbart and B. Park (1986) demonstrated that, consistent with the common negativity bias, positive traits are difficult to confirm and easy to disconfirm, whereas the opposite is true for negative traits. This article extends their analysis by showing that trait (dis-)confirmability is moderated by trait content (warmth vs. competence). Study 1 identifies a trait sample representative of warmth and competence. Study 2 shows a strong negativity effect for warmth and a reduced (or absent) negativity effect for competence. Study 3 examines trait properties related to the behavioral range of the trait possessor and to the motivational goals of the perceiver as predictors of trait (dis-)confirmability. The theoretical and practical implications of the authors' findings are discussed, and avenues for future research are suggested. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Distinguished Scientific Awards for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology: Kenneth A. Dodge.

The Early Career Awards recognize the large number of excellent young psychologists. Recipients of this award may not have held a PhD for more than eight years. Three areas of psychology are considered each year. The areas considered for awards in 1984 were human learning/cognition, psychopathological, and physiological. Kenneth A. Dodge was recognized for contributions to the study of childhood precursors of psychopathology; for theoretical and empirical analyses illuminating the development of social competencies in children; and for innovative research relating children's social-information-processing skills to their social status, peer interaction patterns, antisocial behavior, and risk for future deviance. His work's importance is enhanced by its promising implications for early identification and prevention. In addition to a citation, a biography and bibliography of Dodge's works are presented. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Partner's Stress Status Influences Social Buffering Effects in Rats.

The relationship between a social partner's stress status and the social buffering effect was examined in adult male Wistar rats. Fear-conditioned rats were exposed to the same context along with either a shocked or nonshocked conspecific partner. Changes in body temperature and behavioral responses were monitored in order to compare the effects of social buffering, and the Fos protein in the paraventricular nucleus was immunostained. The presence of the partner rat attenuated stress-induced hyperthermia, as well as behavioral responses and Fos expression in response to the fearful context, and nonshocked partners were more effective than shocked partners. These findings suggest that the social buffering effect depends on the stress status of the accompanying conspecific animal. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

构建多样化社会社区的初探

随着社会主义市场经济的建设和社区开发的市场化,目前新开发的社区大部分只有高收入阶层才能进入,低收入阶层因为房价超过了自己的支付能力而被排斥在外,因此社区有同质化的趋势。本文通过说明社区社会构成同质化的不利,指出社区开发社会构成应该是多样化的,最后提出构建社会多样化社区的对策:政府适当干预社区开发;社区住房的适应性设计;社区规划设计的贡献,如改变景观设计手法。     

World survey of computer-aided design

The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, iiasa, was established at the end of 1972 as a joint creation of countries from both East and West.iiasa is a nongovernmental, multinational autonomous scientific institution, founded for the purpose of research into problems which are either global (knowing no frontiers) or universal (applying to all nations), and into the application of systems analysis to their solution.iiasa is situated at Schloss Laxenburg, near Vienna, Austria, and scientists from all the member nations work together on various research projects, some of which tackle specific problem areas, and others of which develop methodologies in a general context.Early in 1974, the industrial-systems project identified computer-aided design as a developing technology which would be likely to influenced the development of industry considerably. In collaboration with the computer-systems project, the industrial-systems project commissioned a world-wide survey of cad. The survey covers many countries in both Eastern and Western Europe, and includes the USA and Japan.     

Actor-observer asymmetries in explanations of behavior: New answers to an old question.

Traditional attribution theory conceptualizes explanations of behavior as referring to either dispositional or situational causes. An alternative approach, the folk-conceptual theory of behavior explanation, distinguishes multiple discrete modes of explanation and specific features within each mode. Because attribution theory and the folk-conceptual theory carve up behavior explanations in distinct ways, they offer very different predictions about actor-observer asymmetries. Six studies, varying in contexts and methodologies, pit the 2 sets of predictions against each other. There was no evidence for the traditional actor-observer hypothesis, but systematic support was found for the actor-observer asymmetries hypothesized by the folk-conceptual theory. The studies also provide initial evidence for the processes that drive each of the asymmetries: impression management goals, general knowledge, and copresence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Incidental sadness biases social economic decisions in the Ultimatum Game.

Recent dual-process models of decision making have suggested that emotion plays an important role in decision making; however, the impact of incidental moods (i.e., emotions unrelated to the immediate situation) on decisions remains poorly explored. This question was investigated by inducing 2 basic emotional states (amusement or sadness) that were compared with a neutral-emotion control group. Decision making was assessed with a well-studied social task, the Ultimatum Game. In this task, participants had to make decisions to either accept or reject monetary offers from other players, offers that varied in their degree of unfairness. Emotion was induced with short movie clips. Induced sadness interacted with offer fairness, with higher sadness resulting in lower acceptance rates of unfair offers. Induced amusement was not associated with any significant biases in decision making. These results demonstrate that even subtle incidental moods can play an important role in biasing decision making. Implications of these results in regards to the emotion, cognitive neuroscience, and clinical literatures are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

No pain, no gain: The conditions under which upward comparisons lead to better performance.

In 3 studies, the authors explored the relation between threatening upward social comparisons and performance. In an initial study, participants were exposed to comparison targets who either threatened or boosted self-evaluations and then completed a performance task. Participants exposed to the threatening target performed better than those in a control group, whereas those exposed to the nonthreatening target performed worse. In Study 2, self-affirmation prior to comparison with threatening targets eliminated performance improvements. In Study 3, performance improvements were found only when the performance domain was different from the domain of success of the comparison target. These boundary conditions suggest that increases in performance following social comparison arise from individuals' motivations to maintain and repair self-evaluations. Implications for the study of the behavioral consequences of social comparison are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Personality dimensions, psychosocial-demographic variables, and English language competency in predicting level of acculturative stress among Turkish international students.

A sample of 229 Turkish international students studying in 17 universities throughout the United States participated in this online study. The main purpose of the study was to investigate acculturative stress based on students' demographics, personality, level of social connectedness, and English language competency. A hierarchical regression analysis indicated that marital status, English language competency, social connectedness, adjustment difficulties, neuroticism, and openness to experience were predictors of acculturative stress. Analysis of variance results showed that acculturative stress did not significantly differ by students' gender or age. Implications are discussed and suggestions for interventions and future research are provided. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)