Prediction of overt aggression experienced by college students

We sought to predict overt aggression among college students from their intra- and interpersonal relationships self-perceptions. Respondents were 311 students (females = 69.8%; black = 65.9%, white = 16.7%; mean age = 26.38 years, SD = 9.57 years) from a large South African university. Results following multivariate inferential analysis indicated Negative, destructive interpersonal relationships; Negative, destructive self-concept; and Positive inclination towards others to predict overt aggression among the university students. By contrast, Positive interaction with self and others; and Submissiveness towards others can be used to predict overt aggression among the university students. Our hypothesis that the more constructive (higher) students’ self-concept and intrapersonal relationships, interpersonal relationships, the lower will their levels of overt aggression, physical aggression and verbal aggression become was supported. As such, the finding was that: Overt Aggression = a(Negative destructive interpersonal relationships) + b(Negative destructive self-concept) ? c(Positive inclination towards others).     

Femininity, Mental Weakness, and Difference: Male Students Account for Anorexia Nervosa in Men

The purpose of this study was to examine how men account for the diagnosis in men of anorexia nervosa (AN), a condition commonly associated with women. Male students participated in focus group discussions of topics related to AN. Discussions were tape-recorded with participants' consent, transcribed, and then analyzed using discourse analysis. The participants spontaneously constructed AN as a female-specific condition. When asked to account for AN in men, they distanced AN from hegemonic masculinities in ways that sustained both dominant masculine identities and gender-specific constructions of AN. These findings show how issues of health and gender are interlinked in everyday understandings of AN. Future researchers might usefully consider how the construction of gender-specific illness implicates wider notions of both feminine and masculine gender identities.     

Benefit System Effects on Employees’ Benefit Knowledge,Use, and Organizational Commitment

We identified four attributes of benefit systems thought to influence employee attitudes and behavior: employee participation, system quality, communication quality, and benefit importance. Survey data from 974 employees of a Fortune 500 energy industry firm supported a partially mediated model in which these benefit system features exerted both indirect and direct effects on benefit knowledge and use, as well as on affective and continuance commitment. However, the findings differed across benefit system features and across types of benefits. Specifically, improving organizational communications about benefits appears more useful than increasing employee participation or improving benefit system service quality.     

The self in action: lessons from delusions of control

Patients with delusions of control are abnormally aware of the sensory consequences of their actions and have difficulty with on-line corrections of movement. As a result they do not feel in control of their movements. At the same time they are strongly aware of the action being intentional. This leads them to believe that their actions are being controlled by an external agent. In contrast, the normal mark of the self in action is that we have very little experience of it. Most of the time we are not aware of the sensory consequences of our actions or of the various subtle corrections that we make during the course of goal-directed actions. We know that we are agents and that we are successfully causing the world to change. But as actors we move through the world like shadows glimpsed only occasional from the corner of an eye.     

A vocal response time system for use with sentence verification tasks

A software system for the reliable detection of vocal response onset is described. The system was designed specifically for the measurement of vocal response times to speech stimuli presented aurally in a sound field in the presence of some background noise. The response time extraction method described here is robust to masking noise and extraneous sounds that may be included in the subject’s recorded response. In addition, the response words do not have to be limited to a small set because the system is able to differentiate the onset of any speech sounds, including low-energy fricatives. The method described here may be implemented with any computer sound system because it relies only on the sound conversion clock for timing accuracy and uses postprocessing of the signal after acquisition for response extraction. The response time extraction technique as currently implemented does not recognize subject’s responses but could be incorporated into an automatic speech recognition system.     

The soft constraints hypothesis: a rational analysis approach to resource allocation for interactive behavior

Soft constraints hypothesis (SCH) is a rational analysis approach that holds that the mixture of perceptual-motor and cognitive resources allocated for interactive behavior is adjusted based on temporal cost-benefit tradeoffs. Alternative approaches maintain that cognitive resources are in some sense protected or conserved in that greater amounts of perceptual-motor effort will be expended to conserve lesser amounts of cognitive effort. One alternative, the minimum memory hypothesis (MMH), holds that people favor strategies that minimize the use of memory. SCH is compared with MMH across 3 experiments and with predictions of an Ideal Performer Model that uses ACT-R's memory system in a reinforcement learning approach that maximizes expected utility by minimizing time. Model and data support the SCH view of resource allocation; at the under 1000-ms level of analysis, mixtures of cognitive and perceptual-motor resources are adjusted based on their cost-benefit tradeoffs for interactive behavior.     

Is Theory of Mind Understanding Impaired in Males with Fragile X Syndrome?

Males with fragile X syndrome (FXS) have difficulties with social interaction and many show autistic features. This study examined whether the social deficits characteristic of FXS are associated with theory of mind difficulties. Two groups of boys with FXS participated: a group with few autistic features and a group with many autistic features. An intellectual disability control group also participated. In addition to using standard theory of mind tasks, new techniques were used that were able to separate out the various processing demands of the task (e.g., memory, inhibitory control). Overall, the findings indicate that both groups of boys with FXS have difficulty with theory of mind tasks compared to an intellectual disability control group. However, both groups with FXS also performed worse on comparison trials that required working memory but not theory of mind. Theory of mind difficulties are likely to be an important aspect of the FXS clinical profile, but are most likely the result from a more basic difficulty with working memory.