Media Bias in Interviewers’ Nonverbal Behavior: Potential Remedies,Attitude Similarity and Meta-analysis

Previous research demonstrated that viewers’ judgments of an interviewee are influenced by the nonverbal behavior of the interviewer. In studies of this media bias effect, judges view a short political interview with a friendly or a hostile interviewer, and then rate their impressions of the interviewee, whose behavior remains identical in all conditions. The present research utilizes the same design and materials to explore potential cognitive remedies, to investigate the effect of attitude similarity on media bias, and to meta-analyze seven replications of the media bias effect. In Study 1, a cognitive remedy in the form of an instruction to ignore the interviewer neutralized and even reversed the media bias effect. In Study 2, insertion of a brief segment depicting a “beaming” and relaxed interviewee also reversed the media bias effect. Study 3 demonstrated that negative ratings of the interviewee due to interviewer’s hostility were intensified when respondents considered the interviewee as “one of them” politically, and disappeared when he was perceived as “one of us”. Study 4 demonstrated the consistency of the media bias effect by meta-analyzing seven replications in different countries. Implications for nonverbal research and for media research concerning the consistency of the media bias effect and its amenability to remedy are discussed.     

Childhood disadvantages and the timing of the onset of natural menopause in Latin America and the Caribbean

The aim of this study is to investigate the association of early life factors with the timing of the onset of natural menopause in Costa Rica and Puerto Rico. We use Cox proportional hazard models to estimate the risk of the onset of menopause. Our results suggest that socioeconomic disadvantages, as expressed by difficulties attending school due to economic hardships or parents never living together, increase the risk of the onset of natural menopause among Puerto Rican women. Among Costa Rican women, early life nutrition, estimated using anthropometric measures, is related to the timing of the onset of natural menopause.     

Resolving a Multi-Million Dollar Contract Dispute With a Latin Square

The City of New York negotiated a dispute over the performance of new garbage trucks purchased from a vehicle manufacturer. The dispute concerned the fulfillment of a specification in the purchase contract that the trucks load a minimum full-load of 12.5 tons of household refuse. On behalf of the City, but in cooperation with the manufacturer, the City's Department of Sanitation and consulting statisticians tested fulfillment of the contract specification, employing a Latin Square design for routing trucks. We present the classical analysis using a linear model and analysis of variance. We also show how fixed, mixed, and random effect models are useful in analyzing the results of the test. Finally, we take a Bayesian perspective to demonstrate how the information from the data overcomes the difference between the prior densities of the city and the manufacturer for the load capacities of the trucks to result in much closer posterior densities. This procedure might prove useful in similar negotiations. Supplementary material including the data and R code for computations in the article are available online.     

U.S. Transracial Adoption Trends in the 21st Century

A number of researchers have called attention to the lack of information available on transracial adoption at the national level. This project was a concerted effort to identify detailed informational about transracial adoption in the United States from nationally representative data sources. The 2000 U.S. Census and 2008–2012 American Community Survey data were analyzed to identify information about the number of young adoptees adopted transracially in the population, the proportion of transracial adoptions that are international, which racial groups adopt transracially, and which racial groups are transracially adopted in the 21st century.     

E-Racing together: How starbucks reshaped and deflected racial conversations on social media

In March 2015, Starbucks introduced its #RaceTogether campaign to encourage patrons to discuss race and ethnicity in global culture. Public reaction to #RaceTogether was largely critical and resulted in Starbucks' abandoning the campaign within a year. Through an analysis of 5000 #RaceTogether tweets, this study examines how users engaged the campaign and each other. This study draws three conclusions. First, most #RaceTogether posts featured extremist and racist positions. Second, #RaceTogether posts deflected race conversations and critiqued the organizations role in national racial discourses. Finally, posts in the digital space critiqued Starbucks as a location for inter-racial dialogue because of brand perception.This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.     

How beliefs about substance use differ by socio-demographic characteristics,individual experiences,and neighborhood environments among urban adolescents

In this article, we tested a series of Item Response Theory (IRT) models to examine the individual and neighborhood variation in perceived risk along dimensions of substance use (alcohol, marijuana, and hard drugs) and usage patterns (light/experimental use, moderate use, heavy/regular use). Data were gathered from 2266 adolescents aged 9, 12, and 15 residing in 79 Chicago neighborhoods. Developmental patterns for age and amount of use were observed whereby older respondents rated alcohol and marijuana as less harmful compared to the younger respondents, but rated hard drugs as more harmful. Risk perceptions were found to be more closely tied to one's direct experience with drugs rather than a general constellation of beliefs. Neighborhood variation in risk perceptions was also observed for hard drugs and three patterns of use, controlling for characteristics of individual residents. Neighborhoods did not vary in risk perceptions toward alcohol use. Individual-level factors rather than characteristics of the neighborhoods explained the observed neighborhood variation in perceptions toward marijuana use. These findings illustrate the complex links between individual and contextual factors in the development of beliefs about the health risks associated with substance use.     

Examining the Effects of Feedback Accuracy and Timing on Skill Acquisition

ABSTRACT

Feedback involves providing information about past performance and indicating how to improve future performance. Although the literature contains numerous examples of feedback as an effective method for improving performance across a range of organizational settings, much remains unknown about the specifics of how feedback acts to change behavior. This study evaluated the combined effects of feedback accuracy (100%, 80%, 20%) and timing (feedback following each trial or after a block of 25 trials) on skill acquisition in undergraduate students when presented with a computerized match-to-sample task that required participants to learn the names of shapes. Results reveal that feedback accuracy had a significantly greater effect on performance than the timing of the feedback.     

The Role of Attachment Behaviors in the Link between Relationship Satisfaction and Depression in Clinical Couples: Implications for Clinical Practice

Using dyadic, clinical data from 104 couples in committed relationships, the purpose of this study was to determine whether relationship satisfaction was associated with depression through perceived partner attachment behaviors—accessibility, responsiveness, and engagement—for both men and women. We found that one's satisfaction in the relationship was the lens through which they viewed their partner's attachment behaviors and—women's relationship satisfaction was the lens through which her male partner viewed her attachment behaviors. Finally, women's relationship satisfaction is associated with both individuals' depression through her perceived partner's accessibility, responsiveness, and engagement. The findings from this study are important because they provide clinically relevant and mutable constructs in which clinicians can intervene at an attachment level in distressed marriages with depressed partners.