The buffering effects of rejection-inhibiting attentional training on social and performance threat among adult students

Concerns about social rejection can be disruptive in an academic context. We set out to train a positive cognitive habit that would buffer against social and performance threat thereby making students less vulnerable and more resilient to rejection. Participants from adult education centers (n = 150) were first trained to inhibit rejection using a specially designed computer task, and were then taken through a rejection and failure manipulation. Results showed that of the most vulnerable participants with low explicit and low implicit self-esteem, those in the experimental condition exhibited significantly less vigilance for rejection compared to their counterparts in the control condition. The attentional training also made participants with low explicit self-esteem feel less rejected after a rejection manipulation and less willing to persevere on a virtually impossible anagrams task. Finally, participants in the experimental condition reported less interfering thoughts of being rejected while completing the anagrams task, and overall higher state self-esteem after having been rejected and experiencing failure. The results show that training positive social cognitions can have beneficial self-regulatory outcomes in response to social and performance threat in a school context.     

Rivers of reading: Using critical incident collages to learn about adolescent readers and their readership

This article arises from a study of 12–13 year-old habitual and committed readers. The research foregrounds the sociocultural and spatial dimensions of their reading, exploring how encounters with other readers and different reading practices contribute to their readership. Many reading researchers favour survey-style methodology, whilst acknowledging the need to explore young people’s reading in greater depth. The design of this research therefore involves different research methods. The article focuses on one of these methods which requires readers to create critical incident collages of their reading histories. I argue that it generates valuable data for both researchers and teachers and encourages a more intricate view of the complexity of reading.     

Magic memories: young children's verbal recall after a 6-year delay

This report describes the first prospective study specifically designed to assess children's verbal memory for a unique event 6 years after it occurred. Forty-six 27- to 51-month-old children took part in a unique event and were interviewed about it twice, after 24-hr and 6-year delays. During the 6-year interview, 9 children verbally recalled the event, including 2 who were under 3 years old when the event occurred. This may be the most convincing evidence to date that such early experiences can be verbally recalled after long delays. These data have important implications for current theories of memory development and childhood amnesia and underscore some of the problems associated with evaluating the veracity of early memories under less controlled conditions.     

Skills in motion: boys' trail motorbiking activities as transitions into working-class masculinity in a post-industrial locale

During an ethnographic research project exploring young people's perceptions of living in a post-industrial semi-rural place, boys aged 13/14 years revealed their semi-clandestine motorbiking activities across mountains trails. It was found that riding motorbikes and fixing engines were potential resources for young boys' transitions into adult working-class masculinity and sources of competence, pride and enjoyment that mimetically referenced the industrial past. The study engages with Deleuze and Guattari's theory to explore relations among rider–machine–territory as dynamic Assemblages that fuse elements from technical, psychological and cultural media to show how motorbiking in different situations afforded boys more or less autonomy. The study argues that an epochal shift in the UK from an industrial to post-industrial base has changed the value attached to motorbike riding on mountain trails creating biking Assemblages that territorialise boys as social nuisances and potential criminals under police surveillance.     

Pedagogic discourse and sex education: myths,science and subversion

This paper elaborates possibilities and limitations for sex education in schools by mapping the consequence of introducing the topic ‘sex’ within a range of scientific and informal discursive settings. The organising and regulating structures of the school maintain the boundaries between common‐sense and scientific discourses. Bernstein made a distinction between vertical discourse and horizontal discourses. Vertical discourses characterise scientific discourses that are coherent, explicit and systematically principled structures. Horizontal discourses characterise common‐sense discourses that are local, segmented and context‐dependent. The implications for teaching sex education through vertical discourses such as science, English and art as opposed to personal and social education, which is a horizontal discourse, are discussed. Yet, all discourses are unstable, and the notion of a ‘tipping point’ is introduced to demonstrate the potential for sex education when vertical discourses collapse.     

Program exclusivity and competition in the cable television industry

The authors argue that program exclusivity will be an important factor in the future of the cable television industry. They assert that prohibiting cable program exclusivity may limit the First Amendment rights of cable programmers and operators. The authors conclude that the best chance for increasing competition if program exclusivity continues is to increase the number of market participants.     

Books in review

LIVING ROOM WAR. By Michael J. Arlen. New York: The Viking Press, 1969. xiv+ 242 pp. $5.95.

PROPAGANDA AND PROMOTIONAL ACTIVITIES, An Annotated Bibliography. Edited by Harold D. Lasswell, Ralph D. Casey and Bruce Lannes Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. xxiii+ 450 pp. $10.00.

COLOR TELEVISION, The Business of Colorcasting. Edited by Howard W. Coleman. New York: Hastings House, Publishers, 1968. 287 pp. $8.95.