Effects of Dynamic Attributes of Smiles in Human and Synthetic Faces: A Simulated Job Interview Setting

We examined the effects of the temporal quality of smile displays on impressions and decisions made in a simulated job interview. We also investigated whether similar judgments were made in response to synthetic (Study 1) and human facial stimuli (Study 2). Participants viewed short video excerpts of female interviewees exhibiting dynamic authentic smiles, dynamic fake smiles, or neutral expressions, and rated them with respect to a number of attributes. In both studies, perceivers’ judgments and employment decisions were significantly shaped by the temporal quality of smiles, with dynamic authentic smiles generally leading to more favorable job, person, and expression ratings than dynamic fake smiles or neutral expressions. Furthermore, authentically smiling interviewees were judged to be more suitable and were more likely to be short-listed and selected for the job. The findings show a high degree of correspondence in the effects created by synthetic and human facial stimuli, suggesting that temporal features of smiles similarly influence perceivers’ judgments and decisions across the two types of stimulus.

Harold Silverstone: A Perspective

This paper is a perspective on the scientific contributions of the politically controversial New Zealand-born statistician Harold Silverstone (1915-74). His scientific work — including a classic paper on minimum variance with A.C. Aitken — produced some key results in estimation theory. He also contributed significantly to the practical application of statistics, particularly the development of statistical consulting services in medicine.     

Disabled Children,Parents and Professionals: Partnership on whose terms?

Taking a parental perspective, this paper explores the experience of partnership between parents of disabled children with learning difficulties and educational professionals. It is argued that until policy, legislation and practice moves from its present perspective of viewing disability as the failure of the individual to that of a perspective embracing equality of value for all, relationships between parents and professionals will be fraught with difficulties. Furthermore, it is argued that until disabled children are centrally and positively placed within the relationship between parents and professionals, the existing prejudice and oppression experienced by disabled children will dominate the relationship.     

Random coefficient models for binary longitudinal responses with attrition

We extend the approach introduced by Aitkin and Alfò (1998, Statistics and Computing, 4, pp. 289–307) to the general framework of random coefficient models and propose a class of conditional models to deal with binary longitudinal responses, including unknown sources of heterogeneity in the regression parameters as well as serial dependence of Markovian form.Furthermore, we discuss the extension of the proposed approach to the analysis of informative drop-outs, which represent a central problem in longitudinal studies, and define, as suggested by Follmann and Wu (1995, Biometrics, 51, pp. 151–168), a conditional specification of the full shared parameter model for the primary response and the missingness indicator. The model is applied to a dataset from a methadone maintenance treatment programme held in Sydney in 1986 and previously analysed by Chan et al. (1998, Australian & New Zealand Journal of Statistics, 40, pp. 1–10).All of the proposed models are estimated by means of an EM algorithm for nonparametric maximum likelihood, without assuming any specific parametric distribution for the random coefficients and for the drop-out process.A small scale simulation work is described to explore the behaviour of the extended approach in a number of different situations where informative drop-outs are present.     

Effects of Welfare Reform on Education Acquisition of Adult Women

Education beyond traditional ages for schooling is an important source of human capital acquisition among adult women. Welfare reform, which began in the early 1990s and culminated in the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996, promoted work rather than education acquisition for this group. Exploiting variation in welfare reform across states and over time and using relevant comparison groups, we undertake a comprehensive study of the effects of welfare reform on adult women’s education acquisition. We first estimate effects of welfare reform on high school drop-out of teenage girls, both to improve upon past research on this issue and to explore compositional changes that may be relevant for our primary analyses of the effects of welfare reform on education acquisition among adult women. We find that welfare reform significantly reduced the probability that teens from disadvantaged families dropped out of high school, by about 15%. We then estimate the effects of welfare reform on adult women's school enrollment and conduct numerous specification checks, investigate compositional selection and policy endogeneity, explore lagged effects, stratify by TANF work incentives and education policies, consider alternative comparison groups, and explore the mediating role of work. We find robust and convincing evidence that welfare reform significantly decreased the probability of college enrollment among adult women at risk of welfare receipt, by at least 20%. It also appears to have decreased the probability of high school enrollment among this group, on the same order of magnitude. Future research is needed to determine the extent to which this behavioral change translates to future economic outcomes.     

Multiple Measures of Fixation on Social Content in Infancy: Evidence for a Single Social Cognitive Construct?

The preference of infants to fixate on social information in a stimulus is well known. We examine how this preference manifests across a series of free‐viewing tasks using different stimulus types. Participants were thirty typically developing infants. We measured eye movements when viewing isolated faces, faces alongside objects in a grid, and faces naturally presented in photographed scenes. In each task, infants fixated social content for longer than nonsocial content. Social preference scores representing distribution of fixation to social versus general image content were highly correlated and thus combined into a single composite measure, which was independent of demographic and behavioral measures. We infer that multiple eye‐tracking tasks can be used to generate a composite measure of social preference in infancy. This approach may prove useful in the early characterization of developmental disabilities.     

Kinship Caregiver Perception of a State-Supervised Kinship Navigator Program

This study evaluated a state-administered Kinship Navigator (KN) program providing information and support to grandparents and other relatives caring for children who are not in child welfare custody. Caregivers’ perceptions of types of services, impact, satisfaction, and areas for improvement were examined. Caregivers (N = 92) reported feeling supported, gaining knowledge about services, and feeling highly satisfied with the program. Caregivers expressed needs for additional financial assistance and more time with their KN. Findings suggest that the KN program may meet key service needs of informal kinship caregivers, but additional staff time and financial resource advocacy would improve the program.