Level of functioning and recidivism risk among adolescent offenders

The assessment of offending youth is important in determining the most appropriate disposition for adolescents involved in the justice system. Recent studies have found a relationship between justice system involvement and level-of-functioning (LOF). This study investigated the relationship between LOF and recidivism risk among adolescents involved in a community-based, juvenile justice treatment program. The results document that conceptually similar domains are substantively correlated; however, a range of functioning was found among youth considered to have the same risk of recidivism. Overall, the results suggest that LOF measures may be associated with risk measures due to a convergence of areas assessed and that the two constructs also may have a relationship analogous to LOF and clinical diagnosis.     

Chewing on it can chew you up: effects of rumination on triggered displaced aggression

Ruminating about a provocation increases the likelihood of displaced aggression following a minor annoyance (trigger). In Study 1, provoked participants who ruminated for 25 min were more aggressive toward a fumbling confederate than were distracted participants. Provocation-induced negative affect was positively related to aggression but only among those who ruminated. Study 2 conceptually replicated Study 1 and also found that the more negatively people reacted to the trigger, the more likely the trigger was to increase displaced aggression. Study 3 replicated the findings of Studies 1 and 2 by using an 8-hr rumination period. All 3 studies suggest that ruminating about a provocation increases the likelihood that a minor triggering annoyance will increase displaced aggression.     

Recognizing the un-real McCoy: priming and the modularity of face recognition

Fodor (1983) has proposed that face perception is carried out by an informationally encapsulated module, whose operation is unaffected by context or expectancies. We tested the modularity hypothesis by examining whether discriminations between normal and distorted versions of famous faces can be primed, either by the name of an associated person (semantic context) or by a valid cue as to the identity of the target face (expectancy). A preliminary experiment showed that, in the absence of priming, discriminations between normal and distorted versions of a face were unaffected by whether the target faces were familiar or not, confirming that these judgments tap perceptual, not postperceptual (semantic), coding processes. In Experiment 1, accuracy was significantly higher when target face pairs were preceded by related name primes, as compared with unrelated ones. In Experiment 2, reaction times were significantly faster for targets preceded by a valid identity cue than for targets preceded by an invalid one. Neither effect could be explained as a speed—accuracy tradeoff. These results fail to support Fodor’s conjecture that face processing is encapsulated.     

Theoretical accounts of Gulf War Syndrome: from environmental toxins to psychoneuroimmunology and neurodegeneration

Non-specific illness includes a wide variety of symptoms: behavioural (e.g., reduced food and water intake), cognitive (e.g., memory and concentration problems) and physiological (e.g., fever). This paper reviews evidence suggesting that such symptoms can be explained more parsimoniously as a single symptom cluster than as a set of separate illnesses such as Gulf War Syndrome (GWS) and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). This superordinate syndrome could have its biological basis in the activity of pro-inflammatory cytokines (in particular interleukin-1: IL-1), that give rise to what has become known as the 'sickness response'. It is further argued that the persistence of non-specific illness in chronic conditions like GWS may be (in part) attributable to a bio-associative mechanism (Ferguson and Cassaday, 1999). In the case of GWS, physiological challenges could have produced a non-specific sickness response that became associated with smells (e.g., petrol), coincidentally experienced in the Persian Gulf. On returning to the home environment, these same smells would act as associative triggers for the maintenance of (conditioned) sickness responses. Such associative mechanisms could be mediated through the hypothalamus and limbic system via vagal nerve innervation and would provide an explanation for the persistence of a set of symptoms (e.g., fever) that should normally be short lived and self-limiting. We also present evidence that the pattern of symptoms produced by the pro-inflammatory cytokines reflects a shift in immune system functioning towards a (T-helper-1) Th1 profile. This position contrasts with other immunological accounts of GWS that suggest that the immune system demonstrates a shift to a Th2 (allergy) profile. Evidence pertaining to these two contrasting positions is reviewed.     

James Drane's More Humane Medicine: a new foundation for twenty-first century bioethics?

James Drane's More Humane Medicine: A Liberal Catholic Bioethics is an outstanding contribution to the study of bioethics in our day. Catholics and others who are interested in the issues discussed here will benefit from this masterful treatment. The author opens with a set of definitions, starting with what he means by a "more humane medicine." Drane contends that a more humane medicine has become necessary and desired, but not because the traditional medical ethic as "a self-declared and self-imposed ethic, outlining what noble service to others entails" is no longer valid. Rather he defines it as an advance on the traditional ethic; a "new foundation" based on a "lived set of obligations derived from a felt commitment to other persons ... an ethics based on the relationship between doctors and patients and essentially an ethics of virtue." Drane's work is a "liberal Catholic Bioethics" in which he challenges his own faith tradition, the Roman Catholic Church, on such topics as sexuality, birth control, abortion, cloning, stem cell research, aging and dying, and euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. The present article is a critical essay that analyzes the author's statements and conclusions.     

How social perception can automatically influence behavior

Do we always know the reasons for our actions? Or is our behavior sometimes unknowingly and unintentionally influenced by what we have recently perceived? It has been traditionally assumed that the automatic influence of knowledge in memory is limited to people's interpretation of the world, and stops short of shaping their actual behavior. Researchers in experimental social psychology have begun to challenge this assumption by documenting how people's behaviors can be unknowingly influenced by knowledge that is incidentally activated in memory during social perception. We review findings that suggest that the social knowledge that is incidentally activated while reading words or imagining events subsequently affects participants' behaviors across a range of ostensibly unrelated domains.     

Violent Video Games Stress People Out and Make Them More Aggressive

It is well known that violent video games increase aggression, and that stress increases aggression. Many violent video games can be stressful because enemies are trying to kill players. The present study investigates whether violent games increase aggression by inducing stress in players. Stress was measured using cardiac coherence, defined as the synchronization of the rhythm of breathing to the rhythm of the heart. We predicted that cardiac coherence would mediate the link between exposure to violent video games and subsequent aggression. Specifically, we predicted that playing a violent video game would decrease cardiac coherence, and that cardiac coherence, in turn, would correlate negatively with aggression. Participants (N = 77) played a violent or nonviolent video game for 20 min. Cardiac coherence was measured before and during game play. After game play, participants had the opportunity to blast a confederate with loud noise through headphones during a reaction time task. The intensity and duration of noise blasts given to the confederate was used to measure aggression. As expected, violent video game players had lower cardiac coherence levels and higher aggression levels than did nonviolent game players. Cardiac coherence, in turn, was negatively related to aggression. This research offers another possible reason why violent games can increase aggression—by inducing stress. Cardiac coherence can be a useful tool to measure stress induced by violent video games. Cardiac coherence has several desirable methodological features as well: it is noninvasive, stable against environmental disturbances, relatively inexpensive, not subject to demand characteristics, and easy to use. Aggr. Behav. 39:64‐70, 2013. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Using Attitude Strength to Predict Registration and Voting Behavior in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Elections

This study examined attitude strength in the context of the 2004 U.S. presidential election. Surveys of 299 undergraduates assessed attitudes and attitude strength constructs toward Bush/Kerry. The results suggest that (a) attitude strength constructs, especially importance and value-relevance, predict political behavior, (b) indicators of attitude strength may represent two underlying factors, and (c) attitude strength moderates the attitude-candidate choice relationship. Additional results offered some support for the validity of two new attitude strength constructs: higher order attitudes (participants' attitudes about their attitudes) and polarization of candidate attitudes (the absolute value of the difference in attitudes toward Bush and Kerry).