Group membership and racial bias modulate the temporal estimation of in-group/out-group body movements

Social group categorization has been mainly studied in relation to ownership manipulations involving highly-salient multisensory cues. Here, we propose a novel paradigm that can implicitly activate the embodiment process in the presence of group affiliation information, whilst participants complete a task irrelevant to social categorization. Ethnically White participants watched videos of White- and Black-skinned models writing a proverb. The writing was interrupted 7, 4 or 1 s before completion. Participants were tasked with estimating the residual duration following interruption. A video showing only hand kinematic traces acted as a control condition. Residual duration estimates for out-group and control videos were significantly lower than those for in-group videos only for the longest duration. Moreover, stronger implicit racial bias was negatively correlated to estimates of residual duration for out-group videos. The underestimation bias for the out-group condition might be mediated by implicit embodiment, affective and attentional processes, and finalized to a rapid out-group categorization

Effective prevention of adolescent substance abuse - Educational versus deterrent approaches

Substance abuse, especially among adolescents, has long been an important issue in society. In light of the adverse impact of substance abuse, scholars, educators, and policy-makers have proposed different approaches to prevent and reduce such abuse. This paper investigates the effectiveness of the two prominent approaches-educational and deterrent-in preventing and reducing adolescent substance abuse. The educational approach (e.g., school-based prevention programming) tends to be more comprehensive and better grounded in theories than the deterrent approach (e.g., drug testing). The educational approach not only targets multiple psychosocial factors contributing to substance abuse, but it is also supported by empirical studies showing that school-based prevention programming is effective in preventing substance abuse and has long-lasting positive influences on adolescent development. Practical implications of implementing school-based prevention programming are also discussed. © 2012 The Governors of the University of Alberta.link_to_subscribed_fulltex

Canadian and Chinese university students' approaches to coping with academic boredom

Although past research has shown the benefits of using approach coping in dealing with negative emotions, little is known about how students cope with a common negative achievement emotion, boredom, across cultures. Therefore, the goals of this study were to validate the Boredom Coping Scale (BCS) in Canada (n = 151, mean age = 23.29) and China (n = 254, mean age = 21.03), to identify boredom coping profiles within individual settings, and to examine the effectiveness of the profiles in decreasing boredom, and increasing self-efficacy for self-regulated learning, motivation, and achievement. The factor structure of the BCS was comparable across the two samples; however, the two groups responded to five items differently, contributing to the overall variation. We identified two coping profiles among Canadian students and three profiles among Chinese students. Our results indicated that Canadian students predominantly endorsed cognitive-approach coping, whereas the majority of Chinese students endorsed avoidance coping. Additionally, our results found significant differences in coping effectiveness among different profiles. © 2012 Elsevier Inc.link_to_subscribed_fulltex