Experimenter Affective Expression and Gaze Following in 7‐Month‐Olds

The study of gaze following in infants younger than 12 months of age has emphasized the effects of gesture, type of target, and its position or placement. This experiment extends this literature by examining the effects of adults' affective expression on 7‐month‐olds' gaze following. The effects of 3 affective expressions—happy, sad, and neutral—on 7‐month‐olds' frequency of gaze following were examined. The results indicated that infants more frequently followed the gaze of an adult posing a neutral expression than that of an adult posing either a happy or a sad expression. The infants also looked proportionately longer toward the indicated target when the adult's expression was neutral. The results are interpreted in terms of infants' flexibility of attention.     

毛泽东的自由观:他的早年与晚年

对毛泽东为什么抛弃自由主义而选择社会主义的问题,进行了深入的探讨。促成毛泽东思想上转变的主要因素有:从20世纪20年代到40年代,中国一直处于巨大的战争漩涡中,暴力活动遍布全国,讨论政治成为一种奢侈行为并受到特别镇压;在同一时期中国的民族主义运动正处于高潮阶段,民族救亡的呐喊超过了"个人主义的自我实现"的呼声;毛泽东接受了马克思主义的阶级、集中的经济计划和共产党组织等思想;毛泽东的思想受到中国帝王思想的影响,这种思想当时广泛存在于中国社会中。     

An investigation of the endowment effect using a factorial design

The endowment effect is interpreted as evidence that we may ‘over value’ objects we already own. In this study we introduce a novel approach to investigating the endowment effect, the factorial survey design, which enables manipulation of variables potentially influencing the endowment effect. We consider the value and uniqueness of the possession, whether it is a gift from a close friend and whether the trade is with a stranger. We find a higher endowment effect for possessions received as gifts from a close friend and this effect is entirely due to responses from women. Furthermore, we find significantly higher endowment effects for valuable possessions. Our results suggest there is ample scope for broadening the range of methods applied to this area of economic research.     

The Road Not Taken? Changes in Welfare Entry During the 1990s*

Objective. This article examines how welfare entry rates changed during the 1990s, and also assesses whether changes in entry rates are accompanied by improvements in the circumstances of families that choose not to receive welfare. Methods. This analysis uses data from the 1990 and 1996 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation to identify three cohorts of low‐income single mothers who are potentially eligible for welfare but are not receiving benefits. Multivariate (competing risk) regression models and decomposition techniques are used to identify the factors responsible for changes in welfare entry patterns over the 1990s. Results. We find that welfare entry rates declined during the 1990s with the largest declines coming toward the end of the decade. Neither changes in the characteristics of low‐income single mothers nor improvements in the economy directly account for this shift. Rather, the introduction of new policies like time limits, full‐family sanctions, and family caps under welfare reform, along with unmeasured factors such as changes in attitudes toward work and welfare, account for the drop in welfare entry rates. The analysis also shows that declining entry rates are not accompanied by substantial improvements in the circumstances of low‐income single mothers who are not on welfare. Conclusions. Welfare reform policies adopted during the 1990s reduced entry into welfare, but single mothers who stayed off welfare remained in precarious economic circumstances.     

AN EPIDEMIC OF VIOLENCE?: CHANGING PATTERNS IN REPORTED RAPES IN VICTORIA

Victoria Police statistics show that, since the late 1980s, there has been a significant increase in reported rapes in that State. One interpretation of this trend is that there has been an increase in the underlying incidence of sexual violence in the community. An alternative explanation is that rape victims have become more willing to report to the police, in response to factors such as improved provision of support services to sexual assault victims, reforms to substantive and procedural law, and changes in police attitudes and procedures. In order to test these competing interpretations data were collected and analysed on the characteristics of rapes reported to the Victoria Police in the late 1980s/early 1990s. This analysis showed that: (1) most of the additional offences reported in the early 1990s were allegations of rapes committed by family members, spouses and other intimates; and (2) an increasing number of reports related to offences which had been committed at least one year prior to a report being made to the police. It is argued that these changing patterns are co nsistent with a significant increase in the reporting rate for rape. More generally, the research reported in this paper highlights the limitations of reported crime statistics as measures of the level of social violence, and points to the need for crime researchers to develop alternative methodologies for measuring and interpreting trends.     

Gay Community Involvement: Its Interrelationships and Associations With Internet Use and HIV Risk Behaviors in Swedish Men Who Have Sex With Men

We measured aspects of “community involvement” chosen for men who have sex with men (MSM) in Sweden (gay places, media accessed, Internet, gay festivals, and social engagement, measured as proportion of gay friends) in two Swedish Internet-based samples from 2006 (n?=?3,202) and 2008 (n?=?4,715). Data showed low to moderate reliability with a moderate (0.57) alpha coefficient. While there is moderate internal consistency, as might be anticipated from measures of actual community involvement, they can be treated as scales. The Internet scale indicated the lowest reliability, perhaps due to respondents having Internet sites of primary choice, rather than a high level of usage across several sites. A hypothesized lack of correlation between traditional domains of the gay community and the Internet did not appear: correlations between the Internet measure and the other measures were positive and significant, but among the lowest correlations obtained between the community measures, ranging from 0.06 to 0.24. Those who use the Internet extensively are less likely to be involved in other aspects of the community. Sexual risk was associated with high social engagement at sexual meeting sites and with Internet use. Gay community involvement, including the Internet community, may be complex and associated with both increase in HIV sexual risk behaviors (by measuring use of sexual risk sites) and preventive measures (HIV testing).     

Young Children's Apologies to their Siblings

When children apologize, they accept responsibility for wrongdoings and act to reconcile social relationships. Apologies to siblings were coded in 40 families that were observed for 9 h when children were 2½ and 4½ years old, and again 2 years later. We found that sibling apologies were rare, generally simple in form, and more frequent after physical harm than after rights violations or verbal harms. Spontaneous apologies were more frequent than apologies mandated by parents, and spontaneous apologies increased with age, as did reconciliation following apologies. By 6 years of age, children reacted more favorably to spontaneous than to parent-mandated apologies, demonstrating their sensitivity to this one index of the apologizer's sincerity.     

Reparameterization of nonlinear statistical models: a case study

The importance of finding appropriate parameterizations for nonlinear statistical models is highlighted. The purpose of this paper is to explore the principles of reparameterization, using an example from real data. It is shown that stable parameterizations allow likelihood-based confidence intervals to be computed. Further, it is noted that the choice of error distribution may seriously affect the estimates and confidence intervals of quantities of interest. The influence of each observation on the estimation of each parameter is displayed for each error model. Multidimensional likelihood contours may be displayed pairwise using profile likelihood computations.