Risk aversion and physical prowess: Prediction,choice and bias

This paper reports on experiments where individuals are asked to make risky decisions for themselves, and to predict the risky decisions of others. Prior research shows that people predict women to be more risk averse than men, a result we confirm. We investigate whether differences in physical prowess underlie actual and perceived gender differences, a hypothesis suggested by both evolutionary and economic theories. Overall we find that perceptions of others’ risk attitudes reflect stereotypes about gender and strength but tend to exaggerate the underlying relationships. Physically stronger and taller people and those perceived as attractive are predicted to be more risk tolerant, while women are perceived to be more risk averse. The impact of gender and physical prowess measures on actual gamble choices is much weaker. Sources of prediction bias are examined, showing that specific characteristics of the target and predictor lead to systematic over-prediction or under-prediction of risk aversion.     

Temperature, routine activities, and domestic violence: a reanalysis

It was hypothesized that base rate differences in the number of complaints made during daylight and nighttime hours were responsible for a previously reported, nonlinear relationship between temperature and domestic violence. This hypothesis was tested by subjecting calls for service in 1987 and 1988 in Minneapolis, to moderator-variable regression analyses with controls for time of day, day of the week, season, and their interactions as well as linear trend, major holidays, public school closings, the first day of the month, and other weather variables. Temporal variables explained 75% of the variance in calls for service. As hypothesized, the base rate artifact was responsible for an apparent downturn in violence at high temperatures: Fewer complaints were received during afternoon hours, because they happen to be the warmest time of the day. The results were interpreted in terms of routine activity theory.     

Unwanted sexual contact on campus: a comparison of women's and men's experiences

While sexual victimization continues to be a problem on college campuses, recent attention has been drawn to understanding gender differences in victimization rates and consequences. To date, these studies remain relatively few in number. The current study surveyed 651 male and female undergraduate students about unwanted sexual experiences during 1 academic year. Comparison of men and women revealed expected differences in incidence rates, with women reporting higher rates of unwanted contact. Within the subsample of reported victims, however, there was gender similarity in terms of the context of unwanted sexual experiences. Analyses also revealed the negative consequences of these experiences for both men and women and low rates of disclosure regardless of gender. Across the full sample of students surveyed, there were interesting gender differences in knowledge of campus support services, with women more likely to have attended a prevention program and to have indicated greater knowledge of rape crisis services.     

Rituals of intimate legal touch: regulating the end-of-game handshake in pandemic culture

This article situates recent attempts to regulate the end-of-game handshake in youth team sports within a broader context of the troubling of touch within pandemic culture. It suggests that the end-of-game handshake is most productively understood as simultaneously: embodied ritual, form of intimate touch, and legal gesture. The analysis invites readers not only to understand the handshake as a complex and meaningful quotidian ritual, but also to see it as an increasingly unstable mode of handwork. The end-of-game handshake, in particular, highlights the clash of values between sport’s imperative to re-establish the normative hetero-masculine haptic order between players at the conclusion of the match, and pandemic culture’s framing of the skin of the palms as dirty and its corresponding requirement, asked of all prudent subjects, that we hygienically manage our everyday haptic contact. In this way, the contested fate of the end-of-game handshake in pandemic culture highlights the multiple ways that touch is understood as a volatile practice demanding regulation.     

Financial exploitation of older persons in adult care settings: comparisons to physical abuse and the justice system's response

The current study uses a sample of 242 elder financial abuse cases and 314 elder physical abuse cases handled by fraud control units to shed some light on the dynamics of elder financial exploitation and the way the justice system processes these cases. Attention also is given to the way that the processing of elder financial exploitation cases can be distinguished from the processing of elder physical abuse cases. Results show that a wide range of elder financial exploitations cases are committed, and these cases should be broadly defined. Implications are provided.     

Implications of welfare reform on the elderly: a case study of provider, advocate, and consumer perspectives

Whereas many studies of welfare reform have focused on effects on children and families, little research has examined the implications of welfare reform for the elderly. This case study incorporates interviews with service providers for the aging, members of advocacy organizations, and two focus groups of older consumers conducted in the multi-ethnic urban community of San Francisco. Study findings suggest that welfare reform has had both direct and indirect effects on the elderly and their services in the study community. Direct effects derive primarily from changes in the welfare reform legislation that had the effect of undermining both immigrants' eligibility for and claiming of public assistance benefits. Indirect effects on older persons include increased child-care demands upon grandparents. The case study data bear on a significant policy change within the broader trend of devolution at a historical point when anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States was running high.     

Perceived Community Cohesion and the Stress Process in Youth

Using survey data from two youth samples, one rural and one urban, we examine the role and significance of perceived community cohesion in the stress process. In particular, we assess the extent to which community attachment and detachment are related to depressed mood, problem substance use, and delinquency net of social statuses, stress exposure, and personal attributes. In addition, we explore the degree to which those dimensions of community cohesion explain or condition the links between the above stress‐process components (e.g., social statuses, stress exposure, and personal attributes) and well‐being. We find remarkably similar results across samples: community attachment is related to lower odds of problem substance use and delinquency; community detachment is related to higher levels of depressed mood, problem substance use, and delinquency; and community attachment buffers the link between stress and problem substance use. With respect to depressed mood, however, the rural youth show greater vulnerability to stress than the urban youth and unique benefits from community attachment compared to the latter. Our findings highlight the roles of community attachment and detachment in the stress process and underscore the importance of each for youth well‐being in rural and urban settings.     

Adult Perceptions of Positive and Negative Infant Emotional Expressions

Adults' perceptions provide information about the emotional meaning of infant facial expressions. This study asks whether similar facial movements influence adult perceptions of emotional intensity in both infant positive (smile) and negative (cry face) facial expressions. Ninety‐five college students rated a series of naturally occurring and digitally edited images of infant facial expressions. Naturally occurring smiles and cry faces involving the co‐occurrence of greater lip movement, mouth opening, and eye constriction, were rated as expressing stronger positive and negative emotion, respectively, than expressions without these 3 features. Ratings of digitally edited expressions indicated that eye constriction contributed to higher ratings of positive emotion in smiles (i.e., in Duchenne smiles) and greater eye constriction contributed to higher ratings of negative emotion in cry faces. Stronger mouth opening contributed to higher ratings of arousal in both smiles and cry faces. These findings indicate a set of similar facial movements are linked to perceptions of greater emotional intensity, whether the movements occur in positive or negative infant emotional expressions. This proposal is discussed with reference to discrete, componential, and dynamic systems theories of emotion.     

Modeling urban landscape dynamics: A case study in Phoenix,USA

Urbanization has profoundly transformed many landscapes throughout the world, and the ecological consequences of this transformation are yet to be fully understood. To understand the ecology of urban systems, it is necessary to quantify the spatial and temporal patterns of urbanization, which often requires dynamic modeling and spatial analysis. In this paper, we describe an urban growth model, the Phoenix Urban Growth Model (PHX-UGM), illustrate a series of model calibration and evaluation methods, and present scenario-based simulation analyses of the future development patterns of the Phoenix metropolitan region. PHX-UGM is a spatially explicit urban landscape model and is a modified version of the Human-Induced Land Transformations (HILT) model originally developed for the San Francisco Bay Area. Using land use and other data collected for the Phoenix area, existing growth rules were selectively modified and new rules were added to help examine key ecological and social factors. We used multiple methods and a multi-scale approach for model calibration and evaluation. The results of the different evaluation methods showed that the model performed reasonably well at a certain range of spatial resolutions (120–480 m). When fine-scale data are available and when landscape structural details are desirable, the 120-m grain size should be used. However, at finer levels the noise and uncertainty in input data and the exponentially increased computational requirements would considerably reduce the usefulness and accuracy of the model. At the other extreme, model projections with too coarse a spatial resolution would be of little use at the local and regional scales. A series of scenario analyses suggest that the Metropolitan Phoenix area will soon be densely populated demographically and highly fragmented ecologically unless dramatic actions are to be taken soon to significantly slow down the population growth. Also, there will be an urban morphological threshold over which drastic changes in certain aspects of landscape pattern occur. Specifically, the scenarios indicate that, as large patches of open lands (including protected lands, parks and available desert lands) begin to break up, patch diversity declines due partly to the loss of agricultural lands, and the overall landscape shape complexity also decreases because of the predominance of urban lands. It seems that reaching such a threshold can be delayed, but not avoided, if the population in the Phoenix metropolitan region continues to grow. PHX-UGM can be used as a tool for exploring the outcome of different urban planning strategies, and the methods illustrated in this paper can be used for evaluating other urban models.     

Movement Differences between Deliberate and Spontaneous Facial Expressions: Zygomaticus Major Action in Smiling

Previous research suggests differences in lip movement between deliberate and spontaneous facial expressions. We investigated within participant differences between deliberately posed and spontaneously occurring smiles during a directed facial action task. Using automated facial image analysis, we quantified lip corner movement during periods of visible Zygomaticus major activity. Onset and offset speed, amplitude of movement, and offset duration were greater in deliberate smiles. In contrast to previous results, however, lip corner movement asymmetry was not greater in deliberate smiles. Observed characteristics of deliberate and spontaneous smiling may be related to differences in the typical context and purpose of the facial signal. Karen L. Schmidt, Zara Ambadar, Jeffrey F. Cohn, and L. Ian Reed are affiliated with the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA. Jeffrey F. Cohn is also affiliated with the Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA. This research was supported by NIMH Grants MH15279 and 167376 to Karen L. Schmidt, and NIMH Grant MH 51435 to Jeffrey F. Cohn. We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Adena Zlochower in digitizing videotape used in this analysis and Rachel Levenstein in the analysis of data described in this paper. Address correspondence to Karen L. Schmidt, University of Pittsburgh, 121 University Pl, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA; E-mail: kschmidt@pitt.edu