Doing and Redoing Emphasized Femininity: How Women Use Emotion Work to Manage Competing Expectations in College Hookup Culture

Sex Roles - Emphasized femininity plays a key role in maintaining gender inequality. Yet, classic conceptualizations of emphasized femininity render it static and inflexible, and obscure...     

Disorganized attachment in emerging adulthood: Measurement comparisons and relations to childhood maltreatment and emotion dysregulation

There is an abundance of research examining disorganized attachment in childhood. However, few researchers have worked to advance the study of disorganized attachment in the context of emerging adult romantic relationships. As such, consistent and clear measurement of this attachment dimension is lacking. In the current study, emerging adult college students (N = 318) completed two previously designed self-report measures for assessing adult disorganized attachment in the context of romantic relationships. The two scales were compared in a factor analytic framework to create a single cohesive measure of romantic disorganized attachment, which captures the unique features of disorganized attachment, including fear, distrust and suspicion of attachment figures, as well as odd and disoriented behaviors. The result was a 15-item measure, which showed good reliability and factorial validity, and was moderately related to existing measures of attachment anxiety and avoidance. Additionally, the new measure demonstrated good test–retest reliability in a follow-up (n = 52). Finally, path analysis was used to provide evidence that disorganized attachment mediates the relation of childhood maltreatment to difficulties in emotion regulation, above what is captured by anxious and avoidant attachment. The current findings suggest the revised measure is a reliable self-report measure of disorganized adult romantic attachment to be used to further the study of disorganized attachment in emerging adulthood.     

Pornography use and sexual aggression: the impact of frequency and type of pornography use on recidivism among sexual offenders

In this study, we examined the unique contribution of pornography consumption to the longitudinal prediction of criminal recidivism in a sample of 341 child molesters. We specifically tested the hypothesis, based on predictions informed by the confluence model of sexual aggression that pornography will be a risk factor for recidivism only for those individuals classified as relatively high risk for re-offending. Pornography use (frequency and type) was assessed through self-report and recidivism was measured using data from a national database from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Indices of recidivism, which were assessed up to 15 years after release, included an overall criminal recidivism index, as well as subcategories focusing on violent (including sexual) recidivism and sexual recidivism alone. Results for both frequency and type of pornography use were generally consistent with our predictions. Most importantly, after controlling for general and specific risk factors for sexual aggression, pornography added significantly to the prediction of recidivism. Statistical interactions indicated that frequency of pornography use was primarily a risk factor for higher-risk offenders, when compared with lower-risk offenders, and that content of pornography (i.e., pornography containing deviant content) was a risk factor for all groups. The importance of conceptualizing particular risk factors (e.g., pornography), within the context of other individual characteristics is discussed.     

Assessing the basic traits associated with psychopathy: development and validation of the Elemental Psychopathy Assessment

A new self-report assessment of the basic traits of psychopathy was developed with a general trait model of personality (five-factor model [FFM]) as a framework. Scales were written to assess maladaptive variants of the 18 FFM traits that are robustly related to psychopathy across a variety of perspectives including empirical correlations, expert ratings, and translations of extant assessments. Across 3 independent undergraduate samples (N = 210-354), the Elemental Psychopathy Assessment (EPA) scales proved to be internally consistent and unidimensional, and were strongly related to the original FFM scales from which they were derived (mean convergent r = .66). The EPA scales also demonstrated substantial incremental validity in the prediction of existing psychopathy measures over their FFM counterparts. When summed to form a psychopathy total score, the EPA was substantially correlated with 3 commonly used psychopathy measures (mean r = .81). Finally, in a small male forensic sample (N = 70), the EPA was significantly correlated with scores on a widely used self-report psychopathy measure, disciplinary infractions, alcohol use, and antisocial behavior. The EPA provides an opportunity to examine psychopathy and its nomological network through smaller, more basic units of personality rather than by scales or factors that blend these elements.     

Lost in the supermarket: Quantifying the cost of partitioning memory sets in hybrid search

The items on a memorized grocery list are not relevant in every aisle; for example, it is useless to search for the cabbage in the cereal aisle. It might be beneficial if one could mentally partition the list so only the relevant subset was active, so that vegetables would be activated in the produce section. In four experiments, we explored observers’ abilities to partition memory searches. For example, if observers held 16 items in memory, but only eight of the items were relevant, would response times resemble a search through eight or 16 items? In Experiments 1a and 1b, observers were not faster for the partition set; however, they suffered relatively small deficits when “lures” (items from the irrelevant subset) were presented, indicating that they were aware of the partition. In Experiment 2 the partitions were based on semantic distinctions, and again, observers were unable to restrict search to the relevant items. In Experiments 3a and 3b, observers attempted to remove items from the list one trial at a time but did not speed up over the course of a block, indicating that they also could not limit their memory searches. Finally, Experiments 4a, 4b, 4c, and 4d showed that observers were able to limit their memory searches when a subset was relevant for a run of trials. Overall, observers appear to be unable or unwilling to partition memory sets from trial to trial, yet they are capable of restricting search to a memory subset that remains relevant for several trials. This pattern is consistent with a cost to switching between currently relevant memory items.