The biological concept of race has long been controversial in psychology. Although many psychologists have challenged the concept of race, others have espoused it as a deductive premise and applied it as an inferential and research factor and variable, especially regarding Black-White IQ differences. Although race and its use have been polemically disputed for decades, no disciplinewide, concerted action within psychology has been taken to ascertain the scientific meaning of race and to determine its proper application. Psychology's inaction contrasts with deliberate steps taken by other national and international scientific groups. This article examines a variety of problems concerning race in psychology: (a) definition, (b) application, (c) invoking authority and references for genetic knowledge, and (d) passive inaction by psychologists and professional associations.
East Asians have been found to allocate relatively greater attention to background objects, whereas European Americans have been found to allocate relatively greater attention to foreground objects. This is well documented across a variety of cognitive measures. We used a modification of the Ganis and Kutas (2003) N400 event-related potential design to measure the degree to which Asian Americans and European Americans responded to semantic incongruity between target objects and background scenes. As predicted, Asian Americans showed a greater negativity to incongruent trials than to congruent trials. In contrast, European Americans showed no difference in amplitude across the two conditions. Furthermore, smaller magnitude N400 incongruity effects were associated with higher independent self-construal scores. These data suggest that Asian Americans are processing the relationship between foreground and background objects to a greater degree than European Americans, which is consistent with hypothesized greater holistic processing among East Asians. Implications for using neural measures, the role of semantic processing to understand cultural differences in cognition, and the relationship between self construal and neural measures of cognition are discussed.
The hypothesis that cooperating teachers influence the teaching behavior of their student teachers is tested with the frequency-of-changein-product-moment (FCP) technique. Past investigations to test the hypothesis have overlooked the possibility of incongruent influence leading to less positive relationships of behavior in student teaching dyads. Also, the rival hypothesis that the direction of influence is from student to cooperating teacher has not been given consideration in past research designs. The FCP results for a total sample of 124 teacher-student dyads and subsamples of 43 in elementary schools and of 81 in secondary schools indicate cooperating teachers' Minnesota Teacher Attitude Inventory attitudes toward young people cause similar attitudes of student teachers to shift in the congruent direction.Consensus is rare in teacher education. Nevertheless, teacher educators, critics, psychologists, state officials, and students agree that student teaching is the most significant aspect of teacher preparation (e.g.,
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