Overestimating Self-Blame for Stressful Life Events and Adolescents’ Latent Trait Cortisol: The Moderating Role of Parental Warmth

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Cognitive interpretations of stressful events impact their implications for physiological stress processes. However, whether such interpretations are related to...     

A second survey of high explosives traces in public places

This survey was carried out as a follow-up to a 1994 survey carried out by this laboratory (1) in order to determine the background levels of explosives traces in public places. The first survey concentrated on transport areas and police stations in and around London. This second study examines levels in four of the United Kingdom's major cities: Birmingham, Cardiff, Glasgow, and Manchester. Samples were taken at various transport sites and from hotels, private houses, private vehicles, and clothing. The survey showed that traces of the high explosives nitroglycerine (NG), trinitrotoluene (TNT), pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN), and cyclotrimethylene trinitramine (RDX) are rare within the general public environment. Only one low-level trace of RDX was detected. NG, possibly associated with the use of firearms, was detected at low levels in two samples and 2,4-DNT was detected in a separate sample. No PETN was detected in any of the samples. The results of the survey indicate that it is unlikely that persons visiting public areas could become significantly contaminated with explosives. The analytical procedures employed would also have detected ethylene glycol dinitrate (EGDN) if present at levels greater than 2 ng, nitrobenzene (NB) if present at levels greater than 50 ng, mononitrotoluenes if present at levels greater than 50 ng, and the other common isomers of dinitrotoluene if these had been present at levels in excess of 10 ng. None of these were detected. The relatively high volatility of EGDN, NB, and the mononitrotoluenes would, however, cause traces of these compounds to disperse rapidly. A proportion of the samples (approximately 7%) were analyzed for the presence of HMX. No HMX was detected.     

Age Differences in Lineup Identification Accuracy: People Are Better with Their Own Age

Previous research has reported that young adults are better at eyewitness face recognition than are older adults. However, these studies have used young adults as culprits and fillers. We explore how the relative ages of the witness and the culprit influence eyewitness accuracy in 2 experiments. In the first experiment, young (18–25 years old) and older (35–55 years old) adults each saw 4 crime videos. In 2 the culprit was a young adult and in 2 the culprit was an older adult. Participants were more accurate at identifying the culprit when viewing culprit present lineups comprising people of their own age: an own age bias analogous to the own race bias. In the 2nd experiment, using a similar procedure, young (18–33 years old) and older (40–55 years old) adults viewed both culprit present and culprit absent lineups. The results of the first experiment were replicated for the culprit present lineups. However, no own age bias was found for the culprit absent lineups. Implications for police procedures dealing with cross-generation identifications are discussed.     

Attention as a Valuable Resource

Keeping up with the news and monitoring public affairs are typically considered civic obligations. Yet there is a great deal of competition for people’s limited attention. Some studies explore when people tune in to the news and what sorts of public affairs content attract our time, but these topics warrant more research. Scholars concerned with the news media’s political role must better understand what leads people to the news in the first place. The practical import of this work is pronounced in an era where news organizations struggle to make ends meet. The purpose of this essay is to categorize what we know about what motivates people to tune in to news and then to propose a research agenda for analyzing attention to public affairs content.     

Multilingual signage: a multimodal approach to discourses of consumption in a South African township

The paper explores how global commercial discourses and the politics of aspiration in post-apartheid South Africa may be seen as contributing to the restructuring of spaces of multilingualism and the refiguring of indexical values of English and South African languages. The analysis takes its point of departure in how late-modern lifestyles, identities, aspirations and imaginations are represented across local and transnational commercial signage in the Western Cape township of Khayelitsha, focusing in particular on how different languages are multimodally constituted and differentially represented in two different sub-genres of commercial billboards. We suggest that new late-modern multimodal representations of identity, and the way multilingual resources are configured into new repertoires and genres of subjectivity, may be one important factor in how social transformation is mediated in changing perceptions and practices of language, while simultaneously and paradoxically reinforcing traditional conceptions of cultural authenticity and self-representation.     

Partisan News and Political Participation: Exploring Mediated Relationships

This study examines mediators of the relationship between news consumption and political participation in the contemporary news environment. We test the differential effects exerted by pro- and counter-attitudinal news compared with balanced news on intended participation. Our primary objective is to model three paths that may link news exposure and participation: cognitive (i.e., perceived issue understanding), affective (i.e., emotions evoked by a news story), and attitudinal (i.e., attitude strength). We compare these paths across four issues, testing which is strongest. Relying on a large survey-based experiment on a representative sample of the American population (N = 2,300), we find that pro-attitudinal exposure increases intended participation relative to balanced news exposure, while the effects of counter-attitudinal news do not differ from those exerted by balanced news. Issue understanding, anger, positive emotions, and attitude strength all mediate the relationship between pro-attitudinal exposure and intended participation, with the route via attitude strength being strongest. These effects do not depend on whether exposure is self-selected or experimentally assigned.     

(Re)Claiming Our Expertise: Parsing Large Text Corpora With Manually Validated and Organic Dictionaries

Content analysis of large-scale textual data sets poses myriad problems, particularly when researchers seek to analyze content that is both theoretically derived and context dependent. In this piece, we detail the approach we developed to tackle the analysis of the context-dependent content of political incivility. After describing our manually validated organic dictionaries approach, we compare the method to others we could have used and then replicate the method in a different—but still context-dependent—project examining political issue content on social media. We conclude by summarizing the strengths and weaknesses of the approach and offering suggestions for future research that can refine and expand the method.