Online Celebrity Bashing: Wrecking Ball or Good for You? Adolescent Girls’ Attitudes Toward the Media and Public Bashing of Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez

Journalists and readers of celebrity news regularly bash celebrities online, a behavior that is easily accepted among adolescents. This study investigates whether these attitudes of acceptance differ according to the perpetrator of the bashing (media versus public) and the likeability of the involved celebrity (liked versus disliked). Using a vignette study, we examine adolescent girls’ attitudes toward media (journalists’) and public (readers’) bashing of a generally disliked celebrity (Miley Cyrus) and a generally liked celebrity (Selena Gomez). All participants read an identical negative news story (media bashing) and two related negative reader comments (public bashing). Participants were randomly assigned to read this information about either Miley Cyrus or Selena Gomez. Results of a mixed-design ANOVA showed that the girls had less negative attitudes toward media bashing compared with public bashing. Moreover, they more easily accepted the bashing of a disliked celebrity than the bashing of a liked celebrity.     

1, 2, 3, 4: Infusing Quantitative Literacy into Introductory Biology

Biology of the twenty-first century is an increasingly quantitative science. Undergraduate biology education therefore needs to provide opportunities for students to develop fluency in the tools and language of quantitative disciplines. Quantitative literacy (QL) is important for future scientists as well as for citizens, who need to interpret numeric information and data-based claims regarding nearly every aspect of daily life. To address the need for QL in biology education, we incorporated quantitative concepts throughout a semester-long introductory biology course at a large research university. Early in the course, we assessed the quantitative skills that students bring to the introductory biology classroom and found that students had difficulties in performing simple calculations, representing data graphically, and articulating data-driven arguments. In response to students'' learning needs, we infused the course with quantitative concepts aligned with the existing course content and learning objectives. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated by significant improvement in the quality of students'' graphical representations of biological data. Infusing QL in introductory biology presents challenges. Our study, however, supports the conclusion that it is feasible in the context of an existing course, consistent with the goals of college biology education, and promotes students'' development of important quantitative skills.     

Teacher–child relationship quality: The roles of child temperament and teacher–child interactions

Young children's relationships with teachers predict social and academic success. This study examines contributions of child temperament (shyness, effortful control) and gender to teacher–child relationship quality both directly and indirectly through the frequency of teacher–child interactions in the classroom. Using an NICHD SECCYD sample of 819 first grade children, four findings emerged: (a) children's shyness, effortful control, and gender contributed directly to teacher–child conflict and closeness; (b) children's shyness contributed to the frequency of child-initiated teacher–child interactions, and children's effortful control contributed to the frequency of teacher-initiated teacher–child interactions; (c) shyness related to teacher–child closeness indirectly through the frequency of child-initiated teacher–child interactions; (d) the frequency of child- and teacher-initiated interactions contributed to each other. Results inform practitioners and researchers of characteristics that put children at risk for failure to form positive relationships with teachers.     

Disgust,Need for Affect,and Responses to Microbiome Research

Contributing to the literature on affective processing and attitude formation, this study investigates the effects of a discrete emotion (disgust) and an emotional disposition (need for affect [NFA]) on support for regulation in the context of microbiome research. Data from a web-based experiment (N = 1,005) showed that experienced disgust mediated the effect of disgust-eliciting information on support for regulation. This mediated relationship was moderated by NFA. More specifically, NFA moderated the path between experienced disgust and regulatory attitudes but not that between message exposure and experienced disgust. The two dimensions of NFA played different moderating roles: Emotional approach amplified the relationship between disgust and the attitudinal outcome, whereas emotional avoidance attenuated it. The study furthers understanding about how NFA influences emotional processing and contributes to research on disgust as a relatively understudied discrete emotion.