In this study, the utility and validity of three behavioral milestones, initial abstinence, lapse, and relapse, were investigated as an organizational framework for assessing and reporting outcomes in smoking cessation research. Tests of the framework were twofold: First, to establish that each milestone represented a significant barrier to successful smoking cessation, the proportion of participants failing to meet abstinence criteria at each milestone was investigated. Second, differences in variables that predicted outcomes between the milestones were examined. Changes in the importance of factors that predicted outcomes between the milestones were to suggest differences in the processes contributing to changes in trajectory towards end-state failure or success. The utility and validity of the milestones as an organizational framework was partially supported insofar as all of the milestones represented significant barriers to successful smoking cessation. However, few predictors of any outcome were identified. As a consequence, few instances of differential prediction between outcomes were found. This study, therefore, did not provide support for the utility of the milestones framework because preliminary findings did not provide an appropriate context in which it could be tested as a tool for identifying differential predictors of initial abstinence, lapse, and relapse.

Several studies have investigated the effects of depression on the intensity and frequency of facial displays. Comparativly little research has investigated dynamic aspects of facial displays in depression such as timing. The aim of the study was to investigate the effects of depression on the timing of smiles by measuring latency and related timing characteristics in the production of positive facial displays in response to stimuli intended to elicit positive emotion. Results represent the first evidence fo the effects of bipolar disorder on the timing characteristics of smiles. Results also suggest that the presence of dampening actions during smiles is related to depressive symptomatology.

When people communicate to an audience about a target, they tune their message to the audiences opinion. Moreover, their memory for and impressions of the target conform to the audiences opinion, and these effects are mediated by the degree of tuning. This saying-is-believing (SIB) effect has been explained in terms of communicators developing a shared reality about the target with their audience. The current research extends the SIB effect by (1) demonstrating that the SIB effect occurs when the topic of communication is a group rather than an individual, and (2) exploring the effect of audience size on the SIB effect. In Experiment 1, participants communicated about a target group to audiences consisting of either one person or three people who either liked or disliked the target group. Audience opinion about the target group affected participants subsequent memories and impressions of the group through different paths, depending on audience size. In the one-person case, the effects of audience opinion on participants memories and impressions of the target group were mediated by the favorability of participants messages to the audience (the SIB effect). In contrast, in the three-person case, audience opinion had direct (i.e., unmediated) effects on participants memories and impressions. The goal of Experiment 2 was to test whether the SIB effect would occur with a three-person audience under conditions designed to maximize emphasis on communicators own messages and decrease the influence of the audience. When communicators received validation for their message from the three-person audience, the SIB effect occurred for impressions, but not for memories. When communicators received validation for their message and the three-person audience consisted of an interdependent group rather than three individuals, however, the SIB effect occurred for both memories and impressions. Implications of these findings for a shared reality interpretation of the SIB effect are discussed.

Text comprehension in adults is correlated with a number of other abilities including working memory span, inference making, and reading experience. There are fewer studies reporting correlations between lexical and sublexical skill and comprehension skill in adults. Comprehension skill in adults may constitute (1) a basic comprehension skill, like lexical skill, that drives the ability to construct representations of text and analyze them; (2) a more sensitive measure of lexical skill, for which it is difficult to measure sufficient variability in competent readers; or (3) a learned skill, derived from an individuals reading experience. Reading a greater quantity and more varied texts increases the size of the knowledge base, the efficiency with which information can be accessed, the likelihood that effective reading strategies will be developed, and with these the enjoyment of reading and the desire to read more. These possibilities are explored in this experiment. We developed sensitive tests of lexical skill and measured comprehension skill and lexical skill using multiple tests in a large number of college students. In order to determine the effect of lexical skill on comprehension skill we divided participants into groups based on both variables in a two by two design. Using an artificial orthography allowed us to control reading experience. Patterns of responses to homophones and nonhomophones and to high and low frequency words indicate that differences in lexical skill affect not only the extent and time course of lexical activation but also the direction of the effect. There is some evidence for an interaction with comprehension ability. Lexical skill affected speed of learning and degree of learning success. Comprehension skill affected the ability to use the artificial orthography in other tasks, including ERP tasks. Effects were not mediated by working memory, inferencing, or lexical skill, suggesting the influence of a basic comprehension skill and an ability to assess the needs of new tasks and adapt their performance appropriately. Both lexical and comprehension skill affected performance on tasks in English, suggesting an influence of reading experience.

This study examined the joint effects of lifetime exposure to violence within the home and community and acute exposure to media violence on hostility, physiological arousal, and attitudes toward health risk behaviors. One hundred male undergraduates aged 18-21 who had previously reported low or high lifetime amounts of violence were randomly assigned to play a videogame low (The Simpsons: Hit and Run) or high (Grand Theft Auto III; GTA III) in violent content. Participants randomly assigned to GTA III exhibited greater changes in systolic (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure from the initial rest period to game play, and greater negative affect subsequent to game play, in comparison to adolescents randomly assigned to The Simpsons. Participants randomly assigned to GTA III also exhibited more permissive attitudes towards drinking alcohol and using marijuana and were more competitive during a subsequent task. Greater lifetime violence exposure was associated with greater changes in SBP and pulse rate from the initial rest period to game play and with more permissive attitudes towards violence and drinking alcohol. Two interactions between lifetime violence exposure and laboratory media violence condition were found. Within the low lifetime violence exposure group, videogame condition was not associated with change in SBP from the initial rest period to game play, while within the high lifetime violence exposure group, play of Grand Theft Auto III predicted greater changes in SBP. Lifetime community violence exposure interacted with laboratory media violence condition in predicting hostile attributions. Within the high community violence exposure group, play of GTA III was associated with greater likelihood that participants would think a teacher would accuse them of cheating. The present study is the first experimental study to show that media violence is associated with permissive attitudes towards health risk behaviors that do not directly involve hostility or aggression, such as alcohol and marijuana use. Media violence effects observed in the laboratory may be representative of how any type of violence exposure influences youth, including real-world violence within homes and communities. One consequence of acute or chronic violence exposure among young men may be a greater willingness to engage in generally risky behavior.

Recent research on learning individual monologs and collaborative problem solving suggests that students learn best when they are required to be active participants in interactive dialogs. However, some interactive dialogs are more conducive to learning than others. Two dialog patterns that seem to be effective in producing successful problem solving and deep learning are elaborative and critical interactions. The goal of the present study is to evaluate the relative impact of each dialog on learning and problem solving by experimentally manipulating the types of conversations in which dyads engage. Undergraduate participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: a singleton control, a dyadic control, an elaborative dyad, or a critical dyad. The domain chosen for the experiment was a bridge optimization task in which individuals or dyads modified a simulated bridge, with the goal of making it as inexpensive as possible. Both problem solving and learning from the simulation were assessed. Performance on the task included a combination of two factors: the quality of the design and the price. Overall learning was measured by the gain from pre- to posttest on isomorphic evaluations, and was further decomposed into text-explicit and inferential knowledge. The results suggest elaboration is easier to train and led to stronger problem solving and learning than the control condition, whereas the critical interactions were more difficult to instruct and led to problem solving and learning equal to the control condition.

This study had three aims. The first was to examine whether there is a relationship between childrens developmental histories of conduct problems (CP) and neighborhood risk. A second aim was to examine whether children from poorer neighborhoods are exposed to more environmentally-based CP risk factors (e.g., peer deviance, rejecting parenting) than children from more prosperous neighborhoods. Finally, a third aim was to compare the developmental histories of CP youth across communities that varied in SES (e.g., lower-middle-class and more deprived neighborhoods) and within such communities (e.g., high-CP vs. low-CP boys from lower-middle-class communities). Raines (Raine & Venables, 1984) social push hypothesis proposes that CP youth from more prosperous communities are more likely to demonstrate biologically-based risk factors for CP (e.g., ADHD) and less likely to be exposed to environmentally-based risk factors. These issues were investigated in two samples of ethnically diverse boys, one that included younger children and another that included adolescents. Children were assigned to groups based on their trajectories of CP and neighborhood SES using Nagins (1999, 2005) semiparametric group based approach to modeling trajectories. Results revealed weak support for a relationship between childrens trajectories of CP and neighborhood SES. Also, children from poorer neighborhoods were consistently found to have greater exposure to environmentally-based CP risk factors than children from more prosperous communities. However, contrary to the social push hypothesis, the results did not generally support the notion that CP youth from more prosperous communities had less exposure to environmentally-based CP risk factors or demonstrate more biologically-based risk factors for CP.

Theorists of reading comprehension failure are split between two groups: those that posit low-level word reading skills and phonological awareness as underlying factors of poor comprehension ability and those that consider poor comprehension as partially independent of these low-level skills. Several studies with children have now demonstrated that poor comprehenders with adequate decoding skills make up a small but significant proportion of poor readers. One promising hypothesis posits that semantic processing deficits underlie these children's comprehension difficulties. This hypothesis was supported by findings that demonstrated less-skilled comprehenders to show poorer than average performance on a variety of semantic tasks. In order to test whether these findings would generalize to adult poor comprehenders, we evaluated the dissociability of high-level and low-level skills in adults. In addition, we evaluated whether adult less-skilled comprehenders (with adequate decoding abilities) have semantic processing difficulties. A PCA compared the reading skills of large group of college aged readers and found that high level skills such as reading comprehension and vocabulary were partly dissociable from low-level reading skills such as decoding ability. Furthermore, in order to evaluate the semantic processing deficit hypothesis, adult skilled and less-skilled comprehenders were compared on several behavioral and electrophysiological tests of semantic and phonological processing. The findings from these studies revealed that less-skilled comprehenders generated fewer semantic associates in a verbal fluency task and showed reduced categorical priming in an automatic semantic priming task. Additionally, electrophysiological records of less-skilled comprehenders differed from skilled readers during a semantic processing task but no during a phonological processing task. Taken together these findings provide evidence that supports semantic knowledge/semantic processing differences between skilled and less-skilled comprehenders. Implications of these findings are discussed within the construct of an experience based model of semantic knowledge acquisition.

Psychological reactance occurs when an individuals freedom to engage in a particular behavior is compromised, resulting in a greater urge to engage in that behavior (Brehm, 1966). The current study examined the role of reactance in the divergence between implicit and explicit attitudes, and considered the possibility that reactance itself may be experienced either implicitly or explicitly. Participants (N = 162) watched a cultural sensitivity video or control video in a study administered by a White or Black experimenter. It was found that the cultural sensitivity video elicited implicit reactance, but only for participants whose motivation to appear non-prejudiced was internal. Participants whose motivation to appear non-prejudiced was external had the highest levels of implicit racism with the White experimenter and the control video. Finally, participants showed higher scores on the Modern Racism Scale when they had the White experimenter than when they had the Black experimenter. This study suggests that there are circumstances in which cultural sensitivity videos may backfire, and that the distinction between people who are internally versus externally motivated to appear non-prejudiced is an important one, with regard to the effects of such videos.

Victims often do not receive the social support they need or expect from their peers. Explanations have focused on the just world hypothesis and defensive attribution, which involve two distinct motivational goals: harm avoidance and blame avoidance. It has been argued that similarity between victim and supporter is what determines which goal the supporter will adopt, but there may be other cues that can activate these motivational goals. The current study made use of mindset priming as a mechanism to increase the accessibility of these goals. Participants (N = 217) were either primed with harm avoidance, blame avoidance, or neutral priming and read vignettes describing a robbery victim who was either robbed once or twice, and either took preventative actions or did not. Results suggested that priming of motivational goals had only marginal effects on participants attributions, evaluations, and supportive intentions towards the victim. The data provided evidence of a defensive attribution effect, such that victims who took preventative actions were perceived as more similar, and blamed less than victims who took no actions. In addition, repeat victims were blamed more than single victims only when they were dissimilar.