Suicidal ideation,parenting style,and family climate among Hong Kong adolescents

The prevalence of suicidal ideation and its relations with perceived parenting treatment and family climate was examined in 120 Hong Kong students aged 15–19 years. Fifty‐two per cent of the participants reported suicide ideation. Suicide ideation was found to be significantly associated with perceived authoritarian parenting, low parental warmth, high maternal over‐control, negative child‐rearing practices, and a negative family climate. A positive family climate may act as a buffer against developing suicide ideation in adolescents.     

Examination of individual differences in participation in outplacement program activities after a job loss

This study investigated the relationship among age, gender, and race relative to participation in self‐awareness, action‐oriented, and training activities after a job loss. The 156 respondents in this study were part of a larger, longitudinal study that collected data using questionnaires from outplacement program participants at 6 months and at 1 year following a company closing. Main effects were found for gender and for Age × Employment status. Implications of the study for outplacement programs, along with study limitations and future research directions, are discussed.     

Personal Responsibility for Tornado Preparedness: Commitment or Choice?1

A review of the literature reveals that personal responsibility assumed for one's behavior clearly affects behavioral outcomes for a variety of situations, and that personal responsibility is in turn affected by a wide variety of variables. However, limited research has been conducted to determine exactly what personal responsibility fundamentally entails. While duty, moral obligation, choice, and commitment have been suggested as being integral to the concept of responsibility, few investigations have systematically varied more than one of these variables in a single experiment. The present study was conducted to investigate the effects of both choice and commitment on personal responsibility assumed for and behavioral intentions to engage in tornado preparedness. Results indicate that both choice and commitment were required to generate personal responsibility for and subsequent intentions to engage in tornado preparedness. Implications of these results are discussed.     

Reduced right hemisphere activation in severely abused violent offenders during a working memory task: An fMRI study

This study uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to address two important gaps in our knowledge of brain functioning and violence: (1) What are the brain correlates of adults in the community who have suffered severe physical abuse early in life and who go on to perpetrate serious violence in adulthood? (2) What characterizes those who experience severe physical abuse but who refrain from serious violence? Four groups of participants recruited from the community (controls, severe physical child abuse only, serious violence only, and severely abused, seriously violent offenders) underwent fMRI while performing a visual/verbal working memory task. Violent offenders who had suffered severe child abuse show reduced right hemisphere functioning, particularly in the right temporal cortex. Abused individuals who refrain from serious violence showed relatively lower left, but higher right, activation of the superior temporal gyrus. Abused individuals, irrespective of violence status, showed reduced cortical activation during the working memory task, especially in the left hemisphere. Brain deficits were independent of IQ, history of head injury, task performance, cognitive strategy, and mental activity during the control task. Findings constitute the first fMRI study of brain dysfunction in violent offenders, and indicate that initial right hemisphere dysfunction, when combined with the effects of severe early physical abuse, predisposes to serious violence but that relatively good right hemisphere functioning protects against violence in physically abused children. Aggr. Behav. 27:111–129, 2001. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Hemispheric asymmetries for global and local visual perception: effects of stimulus and task factors.

Although neurotogical and physiological studies indicate a right hemisphere superiority in global processing and a left hemisphere superiority in local processing of Navon-type hierarchical letters (D. Navon, 1977), most investigations of lateralized perception in healthy participants report neither asymmetry. In 6 experiments the authors examined the influence of attentional demands, stimulus properties, and mode of response on perceptual asymmetries for global and local perception. Consistent with their theoretical predictions, asymmetries were more robust on divided- than focused-attention tasks and in response to stimuli in which local and global levels were equally salient compared with those with greater global than local saliency. Contrary to their prediction, perceptual asymmetries were not influenced by the complexity of the motor response.     

The functions of freezing in the social interactions of juvenile high‐ and low‐aggressive mice

Selectively bred low‐aggressive mice are frequently observed to freeze on social contact, despite the fact that this behavior was never a direct target of selection. To elucidate this finding, the present research aimed to identify the possible functions freezing may serve in social interactions. It was hypothesized that freezing may modify social interactions through self‐regulatory mechanisms and/or via its modulating effects on the actions of social partners. These hypotheses were evaluated with respect to the sequential changes observed over the course of a 10‐min dyadic test in freezing, social reactivity, and approaches among juvenile (24–30‐day‐old) mice from the NC900 and NC100 high‐ and low‐aggressive lines. Analyses of the patterns of social interactions between subjects and partners revealed two primary results. First, freezing was more than an expression of fear; it also functioned as a regulator of emotional arousal, as suggested by the substantial reduction of reactive behaviors seen in animals that showed high levels of freezing. Second, freezing functioned to facilitate high levels of affiliative social interaction with social partners. The implications of these results for understanding how the differentiation of the NC900 and NC100 occurred within microevolution and development are discussed. Aggr. Behav. 27:463–475, 2001. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.