Measuring aggression: Self‐reports,partner reports,and responses to provoking scenarios

This paper describes three studies. The first is concerned with the relationship between the Aggression Questionnaire (AQ) and a peer‐report version of the AQ (AQ‐P). The results (from a sample of 77 men aged 19 to 55 years) showed agreement between the two versions, thus providing evidence for the congruent validity of the AQ‐P, and good internal consistency was shown for the subscales of the AQ and AQ‐P. The second study involved the development, piloting, and validation of a vignette‐based assessment of aggressive behavior, the Aggressive Provocation Questionnaire. The third concerned the use of the finalised Aggressive Provocation Questionnaire in a sample of 130 men (aged 17 to 54 years). The results show that prior self‐reported aggression (measured by the AQ) predicted responses to provoking scenarios. Younger men (< 28 years) showed an association between physical aggression and the aggressive action scale (of the Aggressive Provocation Questionnaire) in response to provoking scenarios. Older men (> 28 years) showed an association between physical aggression and the assertive action scale. The findings are discussed in relation to aggression measurement and changes in aggression with age. Aggr. Behav. 27:79–101, 2001. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Scholastic Attainment Following Severe Early Institutional Deprivation: A Study of Children Adopted from Romania

The relationship between severe early institutional deprivation and scholastic attainment at age 11 in 127 children (68 girls and 59 boys) adopted from institutions in Romania was compared to the attainment of 49 children (17 girls and 32 boys) adopted within the UK from a non-institutional background. Overall, children adopted from Romania had significantly lower attainment scores than those adopted within the UK; the children within the Romanian sample who had spent 6 months or more in an institution had significantly lower attainment scores than those who had spent less than 6 months in an institution, but there was no additional risk of low attainment associated with longer institutional care after 6 months. The lower scholastic attainment in the children adopted from Romanian institutions, as compared with domestic adoptees, was mediated by IQ, and to a lesser degree, inattention/overactivity. When these factors were taken into account, only small between-group differences in attainment remained.     

Visual working memory for observed actions

Human society depends on the ability to remember the actions of other individuals, which is information that must be stored in a temporary buffer to guide behavior after actions have been observed. To date, however, the storage capacity, contents, and architecture of working memory for observed actions are unknown. In this article, the author shows that it is possible to retain information about only 2-3 actions in visual working memory at once. However, it is also possible to retain 9 properties distributed across 3 actions almost as well as 3 properties distributed across 3 actions, showing that working memory stores integrated action representations rather than individual properties. Finally, the author shows that working memory for observed actions is independent from working memory for object and spatial information. These results provide evidence for a previously undocumented system in working memory for storing information about actions. Further, this system operates by the same storage principles as visual working memory for object information. Thus, working memory consists of a series of distinct yet computationally similar mechanisms for retaining different types of visual information.     

Looking at the sunny side of life: age-related change in an event-related potential measure of the negativity bias

Studies of the negativity bias have demonstrated that negative information has a stronger influence than positive information in a wide range of cognitive domains. At odds with this literature is extensive work now documenting emotional and motivational shifts that result in a positivity effect in older adults. It remains unclear, however, whether this age-related positivity effect results from increases in processing of positive information or from decreases in processing of negative information. Also unknown is the specific time course of development from a negative bias to an apparently positive one. The present study was designed to investigate the negativity bias across the life span using an event-related potential measure of responding to emotionally valenced images. The results suggest that neural reactivity to negative images declines linearly with age, but responding to positive images is surprisingly age invariant across most of the adult life span.     

Predicting Happiness: How Normative Feeling Rules Influence (and Even Reverse) Durability Bias

Consumers’ purchase decisions are often influenced by a simple assessment of how long they expect an anticipated purchase (e.g., buying a sports car or a new outfit) will make them happy. Unfortunately, affective forecasts are prone to durability bias (i.e., the overes‐timation of the duration of felt emotions in response to a future event). Here, this article suggests that normative beliefs, or “feeling rules,” often underlie emotion forecasts. This account suggests that affective forecasts can be influenced by external normative communications and that conditions exist where affect duration may be underestimated rather than overestimated—thus demonstrating a reversal of durability bias. Such reversals occur when existing norms advocate attenuated emotional responses (e.g., one should not be overly impacted by minor setbacks or small imperfections). This article discusses how marketers can influence consumers’ happiness forecasts by modifying salient norms for consumer groups or product categories.     

Experiences of time loss among videogame players: an empirical study.

Playing videogames is now a major leisure pursuit, yet research in the area is comparatively sparse. Previous correlational evidence suggests that subjective time loss occurs during playing videogames. This study examined experiences of time loss among a relatively large group of gamers (n = 280). Quantitative and qualitative data were collected through an online survey. Results showed that time loss occurred irrespective of gender, age, or frequency of play, but was associated with particular structural characteristics of games such as their complexity, the presence of multi-levels, missions and/or high scores, multiplayer interactions, and plot. Results also demonstrated that time loss could have both positive and negative outcomes for players. Positive aspects of time loss included helping players to relax and temporarily escape from reality. Negative aspects included the sacrificing of other things in their lives, guilty feelings about wasted time, and social conflict. It is concluded that for many gamers, losing track of time is a positive experience and is one of the main reasons for playing videogames.     

On the relation between the acquisition of singular-plural morpho-syntax and the conceptual distinction between one and more than one

We investigated the relationship between the acquisition of singular-plural morpho-syntax and children's representation of the distinction between singular and plural sets. Experiment 1 tested 18-month-olds using the manual-search paradigm and found that, like 14-month-olds (Feigenson & Carey, 2005), they distinguished three objects from one but not four objects from one. Thus, they failed to represent four objects as 'plural' or 'more than one'. Experiment 2 found that children continued to fail at the 1 vs. 4 manual-search task at 20 months of age, even when told, via explicit morpho-syntactic singular-plural cues, that one or many balls are being hidden. However, 22- and 24-month-olds succeeded both with and without verbal cues. Parental report data indicated that most 22- and 24-month-olds, but few 20-month-olds, had begun producing plural nouns in their speech. Also, the success among the older children was due to those children who had reportedly begun producing plural nouns. We discuss a possible role for language acquisition in children's deployment of set-based quantification and the distinction between singular and plural sets.     

The Shedler-Westen Assessment Procedure-200 as a basis for modifying DSM personality disorder categories

The Shedler-Westen Assessment Procedure-200 (SWAP) is a Q-sort instrument designed to assess personality pathology on the basis of clinician ratings. On the basis of research with the SWAP, its creators have proposed a group of 12 personality disorder (PD) diagnoses that can be used to replace or modify current Axis II categories of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The authors discuss conceptual and empirical issues that require clarification before this proposal can be properly evaluated. They identify problematic psychometric features of the SWAP, including its unrepresentative normative sample, its reliance on a fixed skewed distribution, and anomalies in its T-score approach to diagnoses. In addition, a review of research on SWAP-based PD categories indicates that important information regarding diagnostic coverage, validity, and temporal stability is presently lacking. The authors conclude that research evidence is currently insufficient to justify the use of SWAP-based PD categories to guide revision of the DSM.     

Christianity and Bakhtin

Book reviewed in this article: Ruth Coates, Christianity in Bakhtin: God and the Exiled Author