Since the beginning of the HIV epidemic, school-based HIV prevention education targeting youth has taken many forms. Although there has been some success, educators continue to be challenged by situations in which youth are knowledgeable about HIV but continue to engage in risky sexual behavior. In this article, the authors propose that the underlying or implicit theories about teenagers' sexual risk behavior that guide most of these prevention activities are not accurate descriptions or valid explanations of sexual risk in this population. The article is divided into three major sections. First, the authors articulate the theories underlying HIV prevention activities that are typically found in standard school-based prevention curricula, discussing both their limitations and strengths. Second, they discuss their increased awareness of the role of gender ideologies and sexual scripts in the sexual lives of youth. Finally, the authors describe their current HIV prevention activity ("The Game") as it emerges and is shaped by their increasing understanding of the critical role of gender-based ideologies and sexual scripts in young people's sexual risk behavior.
The cross-race effect (CRE) is the tendency for eyewitnesses to be better at recognizing members of their own race/ethnicity than members of other races/ethnicities. It manifests in terms of both better discrimination (i.e., telling apart previously seen from new targets) and a more conservative response criterion for own-race than for other-race faces. The CRE is quite robust and generally resistant to change. Two studies examined the effectiveness of reducing the CRE with special instructions given prior to retrieval. Although instructions at retrieval did change participants’ response criterion—making them less likely to identify test faces as previously seen—they did not shift their response criterion selectively for other-race faces. The findings indirectly support the importance of encoding processes in producing the CRE.
Students in an undergraduate psychology and law course and an introductory psychology course completed a variety of measures, at both the beginning and end of the semester, to assess their knowledge of and attitudes toward psycholegal topics. The psychology and law course improved students' knowledge of psychological topics concerning the legal system, but it also made them more pessimistic in their attitudes and beliefs. Introductory psychology students did not show similar changes. In both classes, students' attitudes were associated with their political orientation. Results demonstrated that a psychology and law course can alter students' views of psychological topics in the legal system.
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