Costs and Benefits of Bullying in the Context of the Peer Group: A Three Wave Longitudinal Analysis

Whereas previous research has shown that bullying in youth is predictive of a range of negative outcomes later in life, the more proximal consequences of bullying in the context of the peer group at school are not as clear. The present three-wave longitudinal study followed children (N?=?394; 53 % girls; M _age?=?10.3 at Time 1) from late childhood into early adolescence. Joint trajectory analyses were used to examine the dynamic prospective relations between bullying on the one hand, and indices tapping perceived popularity, peer-reported social acceptance, self-perceived social competence, and internalizing symptoms on the other. Results show that although young bullies may be on a developmental path that in the long run becomes problematic, from the bullies’ perspective in the shorter term personal advantages outweigh disadvantages. High bullying is highly positively related to high social status as indexed by perceived popularity. Although bullies are not very high in peer-rated social acceptance, most are not very low either. Moreover, bullies do not demonstrate elevated internalizing symptoms, or problems in the social domain as indexed by self-perceived social competence. As bullying yields clear personal benefits for the bullies without strong costs, the findings underscore the need for interventions targeting mechanisms that reward bullying (198 words).     

Effects of anonymous peer observation on adolescents' preference for immediate rewards

Research suggests that the presence of peers influences adolescent risk‐taking by increasing the perceived reward value of risky decisions. While prior work has involved observation of participants by their friends, the current study examined whether observation by an anonymous peer could elicit similarly increased reward sensitivity. Late adolescent participants completed a delay discounting task either alone or under the belief that performance was being observed from a neighboring room by an unknown viewer of the same gender and age. Even in this limited social context, participants demonstrated a significantly increased preference for smaller, immediate rewards when they believed that they were being watched. This outcome challenges several intuitive accounts of the peer effect on adolescent risk‐taking, and indicates that the peer influence on reward sensitivity during late adolescence is not dependent on familiarity with the observer. The findings have both theoretical and practical implications for our understanding of social influences on adolescents' risky behavior.     

Uncovering buried treasure: Henderson and Horgan on conceptual analysis

David Henderson and Terry Horgan offer a detailed account of the structure of conceptual analysis that is embedded within a more general account of a priori justification. Their account highlights an important feature of conceptual analysis that has been overlooked in the recent debate. Although it is generally recognized that conceptual analysis involves an inference from premises to the effect that some concept does (or does not) apply to a range of particular cases to a general conclusion about the nature of the concept itself, the details of that inference have not been fully articulated. Henderson and Horgan offer an articulation of the inferential connection which, taken in conjunction with their account of a priori justification, yields a startling conclusion about the epistemic status of the results of conceptual analysis. My view is that their account of a priori justification misses the mark and, as a consequence, they arrive at a conclusion about the epistemic status of the results of conceptual analysis that many will find implausible. Moreover, I fear that because many will find their overall conclusion implausible, they will either overlook or dismiss the important feature of the inferential connection that Henderson and Horgan correctly highlight. Hence, I have two goals. First, I want to track down the source of their mischaracterization of the a priori and to show why it is a mischaracterization. Second, I want to highlight the important feature of the inferential connection involved in conceptual analysis that they identify, articulate its bearing on the debate over the existence of a priori knowledge and assess its implications.     

Subjective organization in the episodic memory of individuals with Parkinson’s disease associated with mild cognitive impairment

Word clustering (i.e., the ability to reproduce the same word pairs in consecutive recall trials of an unrelated word list) has been extensively investigated as a proxy of subjective organization (SO) of memorandum. In healthy subjects and in groups of brain-damaged patients, the rate of SO generally predicts accuracy of word list recall. This study aimed at evaluating SO in the performance of patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) on a word list recall task in order to investigate the basic mechanisms of episodic memory impairment that are frequently observed in these patients. For this purpose, 56 PD patients, who were stratified according to the presence and quality of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and a group of healthy controls (HCs) were administered a word list task and an extensive battery of neuropsychological tests. Results showed that recall accuracy on the word list task progressively decreased passing from HC to PD patients without cognitive impairment, to patients with single-domain dysexecutive MCI and to patients with multiple-domain dysexecutive and amnesic MCI. Conversely, only the latter PD group showed a lower SO score than that achieved by the other groups. In the overall PD group, correlational and regression analyses demonstrated that SO scores and a composite score of executive functions were not reciprocally related, but both provided an independent and significant contribution to the prediction of word list recall accuracy. These data are discussed in terms of the contribution of executive functions and hippocampal storage processes to the onset of memory impairment in PD.