Moral signals, public outrage, and immaterial harms

Public outrage is often triggered by “immaterially” harmful acts (i.e., acts with relatively negligible consequences). A well-known example involves corporate salaries and perks: they generate public outrage yet their financial cost is relatively minor. The present research explains this paradox by appealing to a person-centered approach to moral judgment. Strong moral reactions can occur when relatively harmless acts provide highly diagnostic information about moral character. Studies 1a and 1b first demonstrate dissociation between moral evaluations of persons and their actions—although violence toward a human was viewed as a more blameworthy act than violence toward an animal, the latter was viewed as more revealing of bad moral character. Study 2 then shows that person-centered cues directly influence moral judgments—participants preferred to hire a more expensive CEO when the alternative candidate requested a frivolous perk as part of his compensation package, an effect mediated by the informativeness of his request.     

Multiple group membership influences face-recognition: Recall and neurological evidence

The limited face-recognition research involving targets categorizable on multiple dimensions has provided contradictory evidence as to how partial-ingroup members are processed and recognized. This research demonstrates that partial-ingroup members are recognized in a manner distinct from double-ingroup and double-outgroup targets. Specifically, when race and university-affiliation are crossed, university-affiliation does not influence recognition for own-race targets, but does for other-race targets, in that other-race/own-university targets are recalled more accurately than other-race/other-university targets. The neurological mechanisms involved in the effect are explored through the inclusion of electroencephalography.     

What You Feel Influences What You See: The Role of Affective Feelings in Resolving Binocular Rivalry

It seems obvious that what you see influences what you feel, but what if the opposite were also true? What if how you feel can shape your visual experience? In this experiment, we demonstrate that the affective state of a perceiver influences the contents of visual awareness. Participants received positive, negative, and neutral affect inductions and then completed a series of binocular rivalry trials in which a face (smiling, scowling, or neutral) was presented to one eye and a house to the other. The percepts “competed” for dominance in visual consciousness. We found, as predicted, that all faces (smiling, scowling, and neutral) were dominant for longer when perceivers experienced unpleasant affect compared to when they were in a neutral state (a social vigilance effect), although scowling faces increased their dominance when perceivers felt unpleasant (a relative negative congruence effect). Relatively speaking, smiling faces increased their dominance more when perceivers were experiencing pleasant affect (a positive congruence effect). These findings illustrate that the affective state of a perceiver serves as a context that influences the contents of consciousness.     

Psychopathic personality traits in relational aggression among young adults

Psychopathy is a robust predictor of overt physical aggression that may also be relevant to relational aggression (RA). This study was conducted to investigate the utility of psychopathic personality traits in the prediction of RA in a sample of 291 college students. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses indicated that both primary and secondary psychopathic traits explained additional variance in general/peer and romantic RA beyond physical aggressiveness. Consistent with previous research, no gender differences were found on either form of RA, challenging the popular stereotype of RA as a female behavior. Moreover, psychopathic traits were not differentially predictive of RA by gender or level of physical aggressiveness. Implications of these findings for research and clinical practice are discussed.     

Students Reported for Cheating Explain What They Think Would Have Stopped Them

I analyzed 298 open-ended responses of undergraduate students who have been reported for cheating to the question, “What, if anything, would have stopped you from committing your act of academic dishonesty?” These responses included a few major themes: students pled ignorance of what constitutes academic dishonesty and the consequences/seriousness associated with violations; students tended to deflect blame, usually by saying that their professor could have done something differently (neutralization); students did not feel they had enough time, resources, and/or skills to get the desired result without taking responsibility for this lack of time, resources, and/or skills (strain); students felt they did not manage their time well with accepting the blame for the poor time management; and that a bad grade was not an option. These data and results are discussed in relation to the extant literature on the topic.     

Does d-Cycloserine Augmentation of CBT Improve Therapeutic Homework Compliance for Pediatric Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder?

Clinical studies in adults and children with obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) have shown that d-cycloserine (DCS) can improve treatment response by enhancing fear extinction learning during exposure-based psychotherapy. Some have hypothesized that improved treatment response is a function of increased compliance and engagement in therapeutic homework tasks, a core component of behavioral treatment. The present study examined the relationship between DCS augmented cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and homework compliance in a double-blind, placebo controlled trial with 30 youth with OCD. All children received 10 CBT sessions, the last seven of which included exposure and response prevention paired with DCS or placebo dosed 1 h before the session started. Results suggested that DCS augmented CBT did not predict improved homework compliance over the course of treatment, relative to the placebo augmented CBT group. However, when groups were collapsed, homework compliance was directly associated with treatment outcome. These findings suggest that while DCS may not increase homework compliance over time, more generally, homework compliance is an integral part of pediatric OCD treatment outcome.     

Evidence-Based Assessment in Children and Adolescents with Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder

The assessment of varied psychiatric disorders, including obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), is shifting towards the use of evidence-based assessments (EBAs). This shift has fostered the development, validation and adaptation of several measures to rate obsessive–compulsive symptoms and other related problematic areas such as functional impairment or family attitudes among others. The aim of this paper is to present a systematic review of psychometric studies on pediatric OCD-specific measures to classify these according to assessment evidence-based criteria. Selection criteria that determined which studies were included in the review were: (1) analyzing an OCD measure and (2) including participants’ age being 18 years or younger. The literature search procedure was conducted in Medline, PsycINFO, PsycARTICLES, ERIC, Cochrane Library, and Scholar Google databases and enabled us to locate 42 studies which analyzed psychometric properties of 14 OCD measures studied in children and adolescents. Instruments were grouped into the following assessment areas: symptom presence and severity, functional impairment, family functioning and cognitive dimensions of OCD. Psychometric data regarding internal structure, internal consistency, reliability, validity and diagnostic precision were also reported. Further, measures were classified as well-established, approaching well-established and promising assessments in terms of reliability and validity. We concluded that the assessment of OCD in pediatric populations is a growing field that in a short-medium term could provide a wide variety of EBAs for the evaluation obsessive–compulsive symptoms and other OCD-related dimensions. The paper concludes by highlighting directions for future research.     

Graph Theoretical Analysis of Brain Network Characteristics in Brain Tumor Patients: A Systematic Review

Neuropsychology Review - Graph theory is a branch of mathematics that allows for the characterization of complex networks, and has rapidly grown in popularity in network neuroscience in recent...