Richard M. McFall

A comparison of social skills in delinquent and nondelinquent adolescent girls using a behavioral role-playing inventory.

Delinquent behavior in adolescent girls may be related to deficits in social skills; that is, some girls may behave maladaptively because they lack the skills to perform more competently. During the 1st phase of this research, the Problem Inventory for Adolescent Girls (PIAG) was developed to measure competence in social situations. The 2nd phase of the research compared the performance of carefully matched groups of 29 delinquent and 29 nondelinquent girls (mean age 16.25 yrs) on the inventory. The PIAG significantly discriminated between the groups; 40 of the 52 individual items also discriminated between the delinquent and nondelinquent Ss. 10 of the 12 nondiscriminating items were those for which the criteria had been developed by teenagers. This suggests that delinquency is more closely related to skill deficits in interacting with adult authority figures than to skill deficits with peers. Items on the inventory generally were independent of one another and lacked an interpretable clustering pattern. A discriminant analysis yielded a function that resulted in 85% of the Ss being correctly assigned to their appropriate delinquent or nondelinquent group on the basis of their performance on the inventory. (9 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).

Sexual coercion and the misperception of sexual intent

Misperceiving a womans platonic interest as sexual interest has been implicated in a sexual bargaining process that leads to sexual coercion. This paper provides a comprehensive review of sexual misperception, including gender differences in perception of womens sexual intent, the relationship between sexual coercion and misperception, and situational factors that increase the risk that sexual misperception will occur. Compared to women, men consistently perceive a greater degree of sexual intent in womens behavior. However, there is evidence to suggest that this gender effect may be driven largely by a sub-group of men who are particularly prone to perceive sexual intent in womens behavior, such as sexually coercive men and men who endorse sex-role stereotypes. Situational factors, such as alcohol use by the man or woman, provocative clothing, and dating behaviors (e.g., initiating the date or making eye contact), are all associated with increased estimates of womens sexual interest. We also critique the current measurement strategies and introduce a model of perception that more closely maps on to important theoretical questions in this area. A clearer understanding of sexual perception errors and the etiology of these errors may serve to guide sexual-assault prevention programs toward more effective strategies.

Perceptual Mechanisms That Characterize Gender Differences in Decoding Women's Sexual Intent

Men and women often disagree about the meaning of womens nonverbal cues, particularly those conveying dating-relevant information. Men perceive more sexual intent in womens behavior than women perceive or report intending to convey. Although this finding has been attributed to gender differences in the threshold for labeling ambiguous cues as sexual in nature, little research has been conducted to determine etiology. Using a model that differentiates perceptual sensitivity from decisional bias, we found no evidence that men have lenient thresholds for perceiving womens nonverbal behavior as indicating sexual interest. Rather, gender differences were captured by a relative perceptual insensitivity among men. Just as in previous studies, men were more likely than women to misperceive friendliness as sexual interest, but they also were quite likely to misperceive sexual interest as friendliness. The results point to the promise of computational models of perception in increasing the understanding of clinically relevant social processes.

Modeling individual differences in perceptual and attentional processes related to bulimic symptoms.

Attentional and perceptual differences between women with high and low levels of bulimic symptoms were studied with techniques adapted from cognitive science. Stimuli were pictures of young women varying in body size and facial affect. A multidimensional scaling analysis showed that the high-symptom women were significantly more attentive to information about body size and significantly less attentive to information about affect. In prototype classification tasks, the high-symptom women used significantly more information about body size and significantly less information about affect. There were strong associations between individual differences in attention in the similarity task and decision making in the classification tasks. The study shows the potential utility of cognitive science methods for the study of cognitive factors in psychopathology.

Construct Validity of Two Heterosocial Perception Skill Measures for Assessing Rape Proclivity

Rape-supportive attitudes and self-reported rape proclivity (using a measure by Malamuth, Haber, & Feshbach, 1980) were negatively correlated with decoding accuracy of women’s negative cues (measured by the TRAC-D; McDonel, McFall, Schlundt, & Levenson, 1985) in an unselected sample of male college students. Better decoders of negative female cues on the TRAC-D, as well as subjects expressing fewer rape-supportive beliefs and less rape proclivity, were more conservative in their estimates of a man’s justification in continuing to make sexual advances in the face of a woman’s negative cues on the Heterosocial Perception Survey (HPS; McDonel, 1986). Ability to decode men’s interpersonal cues was not correlated with responses on the HPS or rape attitude and proclivity measures, suggesting that specific rather than global decoding deficits were useful predictors of rape correlates. These results support the construct validity of the two social perception measures, the TRAC-D, and the HPS, as measures of rape proclivity.

Foundations of psychological assessment: Implications for cognitive assessment in clinical science.

We examine psychological assessment within the broader framework of psychologys efforts to build and test useful scientific theories. In the first section, we consider in detail a number of fundamental epistemological, conceptual, and methodological issues that tend either to inhibit or to foster theoretical progress in psychology. In light of these issues, we then recommend that psychology adopt an information-based, quantitative approach to theory building and testing. This approach should help us model the dynamic, stochastic processes underlying human behavior. In the second section, we explore the implications of the issues and strategies that we outlined in the first section for the future of clinical assessment, with a particular focus on the clinical assessment of cognitive processes. We conclude by advocating a conceptual and methodological integration of clinical and cognitive neuroscience in psychology.

Cognitive processes underlying women's risk judgments: associations with sexual victimization history and rape myth acceptance.

OBJECTIVE This study evaluated the effects of sexual victimization history, rape myth acceptance, implicit attention, and recent learning on the cognitive processes underlying undergraduate womens explicit risk judgments. METHOD Participants were 194 undergraduate women between 18 and 24 years of age. The sample was ethnically diverse and composed primarily of freshman, heterosexual, and single women. Stimuli were written vignettes describing social situations that varied on dimensions of sexual victimization risk and potential impact on womens popularity. Participants completed cognitive tasks assessing relative attention to victimization risk versus popularity impact, learning about either risk or popularity impact, and explicit classification of victimization risk. Participants then completed the Sexual Experiences Survey (SES) and the Rape Myth Acceptance Scale; SES responses were used to quantify the severity of victimization experiences. RESULTS More severe victimization history predicted use of higher thresholds for judging situations as risky, as well as lower sensitivity to risk and greater sensitivity to popularity impact when judging risk. Greater rape myth acceptance also predicted lower sensitivity to risk information. Higher relative attention to victimization risk predicted greater sensitivity to risk information when judging risk. Recent learning about either the risk or the popularity impact aspects of social situations modified sensitivity to risk versus popularity when making risk judgments. CONCLUSION The study emphasizes the importance of distinguishing the threshold for judging situations as risky from sensitivity to risk-relevant information in understanding individual differences in womens risk judgments. Both processes may be important to consider when developing interventions to reduce womens risk for sexual victimization.

Theory and Utility-Key Themes in Evidence-Based Assessment: Comment on the Special Section.

This article focuses on two key themes in the four featured reviews on evidence-based assessment. The first theme is the essential role of theory in psychological assessment. An overview of this complex, multilayered role is presented. The second theme is the need for a common metric with which to gauge the utility of specific psychological tests and measures for specific purposes. A metric from information theory is recommended. The implications of these themes for the four reviews and for the future of psychological assessment in general are discussed.

Using cognitive science methods to assess the role of social information processing in sexually coercive behavior

Seventy-four undergraduate men completed cognitive performance tasks assessing perceptual organization, classification, and category learning, as well as self-report measures relevant to sexual coercion. The stimuli were slides of Caucasian women who varied along affect and physical exposure (i.e., sensuality) dimensions. Data were analyzed using a weighted multidimensional scaling model, signal-detection theory analyses, and a connectionist learning model (RASHNL; J. K. Kruschke & M. K. Johansen, 1999). Individual differences in performance on the classification and category-learning tasks were congruent with individual differences in perceptual organization. Additionally, participants who showed relatively more attention to exposure than to affect were less sensitive to womens negative responses to unwanted sexual advances. Overall, the study demonstrates the feasibility and utility of cognitive science methods for studying information processing in psychopathology.

Heterosocial Avoidance in College Males Four Studies

The heterosocial skill deficits of nondating college men were explored in four separate assessment studies. The first two experiments compared dating and nondating men on numerous self-report, observational, and performance measures. The third study empirically established what social norms govern the initiation of conversations with strangers, and assessed the relative knowledge of these norms among daters and nondaters. The final study obtained naturalistic samples of heterosocial avoidance behaviors among daters and nondaters. Overall, nondaters were primarily characterized by the avoidance of interactions; by low self-ratings of skill, confidence, and approach behaviors; and by less knowledge about social cues and norms. The Survey of Heterosexual Interactions—a self-report measure employed throughout the studies is also presented in an appendix, along with normative data.