To test a venerable explanation for artists' drawing ability, superior skill at visual selection, artists and nonartists traced a photograph of a face using 70 pieces of tape-not enough to depict everything. Artists and nonartists judged the drawings on accuracy. A mixed-model analysis of variance yielded a reliable advantage for artist drawers, no main effect of judge group, and a strong interaction, in which artist judges' ratings distinguished artist versus nonartist drawers, but nonartist judges' ratings did not. Thus, artists appear to make superior decisions about what to include in drawings and are also more sensitive to others' decisions. In a second study, using the same task, nonartists drew upright or inverted faces. An interaction was found in which artist judges rated faces drawn inverted as more accurate than faces drawn upright, but nonartist judges' ratings showed no differences. Results are discussed in terms of reconciling top-down and bottom-up accounts of skilled drawing.

Students in Bedouin schools in Israel completed a survey in which they indicated how frequent abusive teacher behaviors occurred in their classrooms; responses indicated that abusive teacher behaviors occur often. Female students tended to register higher levels of punitive teacher behaviors than male students and secondary school students tended to register higher levels of punitive teacher behaviors than elementary school students. Also, the perceived frequencies of abusive teacher behaviors presented in this study tended to be significantly higher than perceived frequencies of similar teacher behaviors reported in a comparable 1997 study. This problem of school violence deserves attention and resolution.

In a now-classic study by Srull and Wyer (1979), people who were exposed to phrases with hostile content subsequently judged a man as being more hostile. And this “hostile priming effect” has had a significant influence on the field of social cognition over the subsequent decades. However, a recent multi-lab collaborative study (McCarthy et al., 2018) that closely followed the methods described by Srull and Wyer (1979) found a hostile priming effect that was nearly zero, which casts doubt on whether these methods reliably produce an effect. To address some limitations with McCarthy et al. (2018), the current multi-site collaborative study included data collected from 29 labs. Each lab conducted a close replication (total N = 2,123) and a conceptual replication (total N = 2,579) of Srull and Wyer’s methods. The hostile priming effect for both the close replication (d = 0.09, 95% CI [-0.04, 0.22], z = 1.34, p = .16) and the conceptual replication (d = 0.05, 95% CI [-0.04, 0.15], z = 1.15, p = .58) were not significantly different from zero and, if the true effects are non-zero, were smaller than what most labs could feasibly and routinely detect. Despite our best efforts to produce favorable conditions for the effect to emerge, we did not detect a hostile priming effect. We suggest that researchers should not invest more resources into trying to detect a hostile priming effect using methods like those described in Srull and Wyer (1979).

No abstract