Same-sex sexual attraction does not spread in adolescent social networks

Peers have a powerful effect on adolescents' beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. Here, we examine the role of social networks in the spread of attitudes towards sexuality using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Although we found evidence that both sexual activity (OR = 1.79) and desire to have a romantic relationship (OR = 2.69) may spread from person to person, attraction to same sex partners did not spread (OR = 0.96). Analyses of comparable power to those that suggest positive and significant peer-to-peer influence in sexual behavior fail to demonstrate a significant relationship on sexual attraction between friends or siblings. These results suggest that peer influence has little or no effect on the tendency toward heterosexual or homosexual attraction in teens, and that sexual orientation is not transmitted via social networks

Forgive and forget: Differences between decisional and emotional forgiveness

To forgive and forget is a well-known idiom, which has rarely been looked at empirically. In the current experiment, we investigated differences between emotional and decisional forgiveness on forgetting. The present study provides the first empirical support that emotional forgiveness has a strong influence on subsequent incidental forgetting. Specifically, our results demonstrate that emotional forgiveness leads to substantially higher levels of forgetting in respect to offense relevant traits compared to both decisional forgiveness and no forgiveness. This provides evidence for our hypothesized effect that only individuals who have emotionally forgiven a transgression, and not those who just decided to forgive, subsequently forget offense relevant traits attributed to the transgressor