Bringing out the agreeableness in everyone: Using a cognitive self-regulation model to reduce aggression

Research has shown that those individuals high in agreeableness recruit helpful thoughts in hostile contexts, presumably in the service of controlling aggressive behavior. The present experiment follows from such work, but importantly does so in a manner seeking to support causal conclusions. Participants were randomly assigned to an experimental training condition, in which hostile prime words were followed by helpful target words, or to a control condition that did not involve such pairings. Those assigned to the experimental condition subsequently exhibited lower levels of aggression in a laboratory task. Additional considerations and findings support the potential involvement of self-regulation processes. In general terms, the experiment reveals that a brief cognitive manipulation targeting processes thought to underlie aggression control was in fact causally effective in reducing subsequent levels of aggressive behavior.     

The effects of list-method directed forgetting on recognition memory

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois It is an almost universally accepted claim that the list-method procedure of inducing directed forgetting does not affect recognition. However, previous studies have omitted a critical comparison in reaching this conclusion. This article reports evidence that recognition of material learnedafter cue presentation is superior for conditions in which the material that preceded cue presentation was designated as to-be-forgotten. Because the absence of an effect of directed-forgetting instructions on recognition is the linchpin of the theoretical claim that retrieval inhibition and not selective rehearsal underlies that effect, the present results call into question the need to postulate a role for inhibition in directed forgetting.     

Defining and diagnosing involuntary emotional expression disorder

Uncontrollable episodes of emotional expression occur in a variety of neurological conditions. This emotional disinhibition syndrome is characterized by episodes of crying or laughing that are unrelated to or out of proportion to the eliciting stimulus. This syndrome is common among patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, multiple sclerosis, stroke, and traumatic brain injury and a variety of terms and definitions have been used to describe it. The confusing nomenclature has been a barrier to understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of this disorder. The authors propose a unifying term, involuntary emotional expression disorder (IEED), and provide diagnostic criteria for this disorder.     

Personality and aggressive behavior under provoking and neutral conditions: a meta-analytic review

The authors conducted a comprehensive review to understand the relation between personality and aggressive behavior, under provoking and nonprovoking conditions. The qualitative review revealed that some personality variables influenced aggressive behavior under both neutral and provocation conditions, whereas others influenced aggressive behavior only under provocation. Studies that assessed personality variables and that directly measured aggressive behavior were included in the quantitative review. Analyses revealed that trait aggressiveness and trait irritability influenced aggressive behavior under both provoking and neutral conditions but that other personality variables (e.g., trait anger, Type A personality, dissipation-rumination) influenced aggressive behavior only under provoking conditions. The authors discuss possible relations between these patterns of aggressive behavior and the personality dimensions of Agreeableness and Neuroticism and consider implications for theories of aggression.