Stemming retail leakage with a sense of community: Leveraging the links between communal ties and shopping decisions

Retail business development is a broad goal for both private business interests as well as local policymakers, yet the goal of retail opportunities for local residents themselves is often seen as secondary. This paper considers the argument that retail opportunities and sense of community are in fact linked in important ways, links that reinforce the social fabric of a community and/or neighborhood. The paper first briefly reviews the inherent linkages between retail shopping and local development patterns, and then considers the sense of community in the context of Garfield County in western Colorado. Based on the key questions derived from this background, we formally test the inter-relationship between local retail spending and sense of community from detailed survey data, then more broadly consider the factors that critically shape a locality's “sense of community.” These findings shape several important policy implications.     

At 10–12 Months,Pointing Gesture Handedness Predicts the Size of Receptive Vocabularies

The close association between language and gesture has been widely studied (McNeill, Psychological Review, 92, 1985, 350). It remains unclear, however, when and how this relationship originates ontogenetically. This study investigated the relationship between vocabulary development and pointing handedness in 10‐ to 12‐month‐old infants. The study used cross‐sectional data from 16 infants. Infants took part in a pointing elicitation task and a grasping task to assess their pointing and grasping handedness. Further, parents filled out the Oxford Communicative Development Inventory (Hamilton, Plunkett, & Schafer, Journal of Child Language, 27, 2000, 689) to assess infants’ receptive and productive vocabularies. The result showed a positive, significant correlation between receptive vocabulary development and right‐handed pointing. This relationship was not due to age or to vocalizations, which have not been ruled out by previous studies. Possible mechanisms behind this codevelopment are discussed.     

An Examination of the Communication Styles Associated with Psychopathy and Their Influence on Observer Impressions

Psychopathic individuals are characterized as “intra-species predators”—callous, impulsive, aggressive, and proficient at interpersonal manipulation. For example, despite their high risk for re-offending, psychopathic offenders often receive early release on parole. While reputed to be social chameleons, research suggests that even naive observers can accurately infer high levels of psychopathic traits in others with very brief exposures to behavior, but accuracy degrades with extended observation. We utilized a lens model approach to examine the communication styles (emotional facial expressions, body language, and verbal content) of offenders varying in levels of psychopathic traits using “thin slice” video clips of psychological assessment interviews and to reveal which cues observers use to inform their evaluations of psychopathy. Psychopathic traits were associated with more (a) Duchenne smiles, (b) negative (angry) emotional language, and (c) hand gestures (illustrators). Further, psychopathy was associated with a marked behavioral incongruence; when individuals scoring high in psychopathic traits engaged in Duchenne smiles they were also more likely to use angry language. Naïve observers relied on each of these valid behavioral signals to quickly and accurately detect psychopathic traits. These findings provide insight into psychopathic communication styles, opportunities for improving the detection of psychopathic personality traits, and may provide an avenue for understanding successful psychopathic manipulation.     

Learned Labels Shape Pre‐speech Infants’ Object Representations

Infants rapidly learn both linguistic and nonlinguistic representations of their environment and begin to link these from around 6 months. While there is an increasing body of evidence for the effect of labels heard in‐task on infants’ online processing, whether infants’ learned linguistic representations shape learned nonlinguistic representations is unclear. In this study 10‐month‐old infants were trained over the course of a week with two 3D objects, one labeled, and one unlabeled. Infants then took part in a looking time task in which 2D images of the objects were presented individually in a silent familiarization phase, followed by a preferential looking trial. During the critical familiarization phase, infants looked for longer at the previously labeled stimulus than the unlabeled stimulus, suggesting that learning a label for an object had shaped infants’ representations as indexed by looking times. We interpret these results in terms of label activation and novelty response accounts and discuss implications for our understanding of early representational development.     

A theory of unanimous jury voting with an ambiguous likelihood

Theory and Decision - We examine collective decision-making in a jury voting game under the unanimity rule when voters have ambiguous beliefs. Unlike in existing studies (Ellis in Theoretical...     

Context Matters: Differential Effects of Discrimination by Environmental Context on Depressive Symptoms Among College Students of Color

Clinical Social Work Journal - Experiences with more subtle racism – which have been called microaggressions – have a host of negative effects on health, mental health, educational...     

The demographic characteristics of populations living near oil and gas wells in the USA

Population and Environment - This study documents the prevalence of historically marginalized populations (across age, income, education, race-ethnicity, and language) living near active oil and...     

Abortion Underreporting in Add Health: Findings and Implications

Population Research and Policy Review - Well-documented, large-scale abortion underreporting on U.S. surveys raises questions about the use of abortion self-reports for statistical inference. This...     

A population sample registry for public health survey investigations: methods,lessons, and successes

Public health relies on sample surveys to monitor the health of populations and investigate factors that contribute to population health and illness. Such investigations require surveying individuals who are selected in ways that support statistical inference to the population. Faced with rising costs and declining participation, survey researchers are exploring economical ways to recruit samples that validly represent larger populations. The current report describes an innovative resource, the Colorado Adult Population Sample–Survey Research Registry, which maintains survey access to respondents from a probability-based state health survey. We describe recruitment and retention strategies, explore representativeness, report several studies that used the registry, and discuss future directions.