Aggressive Behavior and Peer Social Status of Elementary School Children

The relation between aggression and peer social status was investigated in a group of 238 third-through fifth-grade children. Peer social status refers to the degree to which a child is accepted by his or her peer group. By asking children to nominate peers they “like most” and “like least,” one can identify children who are popular, rejected, neglected, or viewed as average within their peer group. Results indicated low to moderate correlations between peer-nominated aggression and global indices of social acceptance. More specifically, it was found that aggressive children largely comprised the rejected and average social status groups, but not the popular or neglected groups. Furthermore, analyses indicated that according to both peers and teachers, aggressive/rejected children showed academic and social-skill deficits, whereas aggressive children of average peer status exhibited adequate adjustment similar to that of nonaggressive/average-status children. These results suggest the importance of considering peer social status when identifying aggressive children in need of intervention and in determining which skill deficits to address. In addition, knowledge of an aggressive child's peer status might be useful in enhancing the predictability of adult adjustment.     

Choose change: Situation modification,distraction, and reappraisal in mild versus intense negative situations

Motivation and Emotion - Despite the theoretical importance and applied potential of situation modification as an emotion regulation strategy, empirical research on how people change situations to...     

Precise Worlds for Certain Minds: An Ecological Perspective on the Relational Self in Autism

Topoi - Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) presents a challenge to social and relational accounts of the self, precisely because it is broadly seen as a disorder impacting social relationships. Many...     

COVID-19 and Religious Ethics

The editors of the JRE solicited short essays on the COVID-19 pandemic from a group of scholars of religious ethics that reflected on how the field might help them make sense of the complex religious, cultural, ethical, and political implications of the pandemic, and on how the pandemic might shape the future of religious ethics.     

How do we judge our confidence? Differential effects of meta-memory feedback on eyewitness accuracy and confidence

According to the cue–belief model, we assess confidence in our memories using self-credibility cues that reflect beliefs about our memory faculties. We tested the influence of meta-memory feedback on self-credibility cues in the context of eyewitness testimony, when feedback was provided prior to “testifying” via a memory questionnaire (Experiment 1) and after an initial memory questionnaire but before participants had to retake it (Experiment 2). Participants received feedback (good score, bad score, or none) on a fictitious scale purported to predict eyewitness memory ability. Those given good score feedback before testifying were more confident (but no more accurate) than those given bad score feedback. Feedback also affected confidence (good increased and bad decreased) and accuracy (good increased) after testifying but only on leading questions. These differential effects of meta-memory feedback on confidence for normal and leading questions are not explained by the cue–belief model. Implications for our confidence judgments are discussed.     

Correction to: Towards a Better Understanding of Cognitive Deficits in Absence Epilepsy: a Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Neuropsychology Review - Due to an error during the editorial phase, a correction regarding Fig. 2 is added to the original article: “Towards a Better Understanding of Cognitive...     

Moderating Loss Aversion: Loss Aversion Has Moderators,But Reports of its Death are Greatly Exaggerated

Loss aversion, the principle that losses impact decision making more than equivalent gains, is a fundamental idea in consumer behavior and decision making, though its existence has recently been called into question. Across five unique samples (N_total = 17,720), we tested several moderators of loss aversion, which supported a preference construction account. Across studies, more domain knowledge and experience were associated with lower loss aversion, though people of all knowledge and experience levels were loss averse. Among car buyers, those who knew more about a particular car attribute (e.g., fuel economy) were less loss averse for that attribute but not other attributes (e.g., comfort), consistent with the idea that people with less attribute knowledge are more likely to construct preferences, thereby increasing loss aversion. Additionally, older consumers were more loss averse across different loss aversion measures and studies. We discuss implications for several accounts of loss aversion, including accounts rooted in status quo bias, emotion, or ownership. In addition to discovering loss aversion moderators, we cast doubt on recent claims that loss aversion is a fallacy or is fully explained by status quo bias, risk aversion, or the educated laboratory samples often used to study loss aversion.     

Where and when to look: Sequential effects at the millisecond level

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics - Learning and imitating a complex motor action requires to visually follow complex movements, but conscious perception seems too slow for such tasks....     

Effects of fluprazine (DU 27716) upon aggressive and sexual behavior of testosterone-treated female rats

Female rats, chronically treated with Testosterone Propionate (TP), were injected with Fluprazine (DU 27716) or saline and tested for social aggression, masculine and feminine sexual behavior. Fluprazine-treated females were less aggressive than saline-treated females, as indicated by a shift from offensive to less offensive parameters of aggression. At the same time, mounting in Fluprazine-treated females was almost totally abolished, both in aggression tests and in tests for sexual behavior. Feminine sexual responses increased during aggressive encounters but were slightly inhibited when females were confronted with sexually active males. Females treated with Fluprazine and tested for mounting with a receptive female showed a substantial increase of offensive aggression directed at the receptive stimulus female. It is concluded that Fluprazine does not selectively inhibit offensive aggression in TP-treated female rats.     

Learning subjective health complaints

Symptom episodes often show a spatio-temporal structure, that is, they occur in a specific context for a certain duration. Repeated experiences may therefore be construed as associative learning trials, in which context elements are turned into predictive cues, triggering anticipatory processes conducive to subjective health complaints. A series of experiments, using inhalations of air enriched with CO2 and external (odors) or internal (mental images) stimuli as cues, is discussed to show that subjective health complaints may occur upon presenting the cue alone. Learned symptoms may be unrelated to bodily responses and easily generalize to new related cues. Better learning occurs to cues with a negative affective valence and in participants scoring high for negative affectivity. Our findings are relevant to the understanding of medically unexplained ("functional") syndromes and the poor relationship between objective and subjective health indicators in general.