Individual Differences in Habitual Social Goals and Daily Well‐Being: The Role of Age and Relationship Closeness

There is a robust evidence that social approach goals (i.e. approach of positive social outcomes) have positive consequences and social avoidance goals (i.e. avoidance of negative social outcomes) have negative consequences for subjective well‐being in young adulthood. Little is known about individual differences in social goals in later life. The current diary study with young (n = 212), middle‐aged (n = 232), and older adults (n = 229) tested––and supported––the hypotheses that age (i) differentially predicts the strength of habitual approach and avoidance goals in close and peripheral relationships and (ii) moderates the relation of approach and avoidance goals in peripheral (but not close) relationships and daily outcomes (subjective well‐being, subjective health, and satisfaction with social encounters). Older adults compared to younger adults reported higher levels of avoidance goals in peripheral (but not close) relationships. Younger adults who reported high levels of approach goals and older adults who reported high levels of avoidance goals in peripheral relationships experienced the most positive daily outcomes. In addition, social goals moderated some of the associations between (positive and negative) daily interactions and daily outcomes. Results underscore the importance of the closeness of social partners for individual differences in social goals across adulthood. © 2019 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Is `Property' Necessary? On Owning the Human Body and its Parts

Courts usually treat control over human bodies and body parts as a property issue and find that people do not have property rights in themselves. This contradicts the liberal philosophical principle that people should be able to perform any self-regarding actions that do not cause harm to others. The philosophical inconsistencies under pinning the legal treatment of body parts arguably stem from a misplaced judicial preoccupation with‘property’. A better approach would be to hold a policy inquiry into the degree of liberty a society wishes to grant its inhabitants. Only once this substantive issue has been addressed should property be raised as a possible method of implementing the policy. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Behavioral and Emotional Rating Scale: Two Studies of Convergent Validity

As the field of mental health services shifts its focus to early intervention, the need to develop valid and reliable measures of young children's behavioral functioning is clear. Traditional assessment instruments have focused on deficits, problems, and pathologies to the exclusion of strengths and competencies. However, assessing child strengths provides parents, direct service providers, and educators with a more holistic view of the child's functioning and an understanding of skills from which individualized treatment and education plans may be written. The Behavioral and Emotional Rating Scale (BERS; Epstein & Sharma, 1998) is a strength-based instrument designed to identify children's behavioral and emotional strengths. The psychometrics of the BERS has been demonstrated through several studies; however, the focus has mainly been on older age students. We sought to assess the convergent validity of the BERS with kindergarten children. The results of these two studies provide further support of the psychometric characteristics of the BERS and indicate its appropriateness with young children.     

Train‐the‐trainer: Methodology to learn the cognitive interview

Research has indicated that police may not receive enough training in interviewing cooperative witnesses, specifically in use of the cognitive interview (CI). Practically, for the CI to be effective in real‐world investigations, police investigators must be trained by law enforcement trainers. We conducted a three‐phase experiment to examine the feasibility of training experienced law enforcement trainers who would then train others to conduct the CI. We instructed Federal Bureau of Investigation and local law enforcement trainers about the CI (Phase I); law enforcement trainers from both agencies (n = 4, 100% male, mean age = 50 years) instructed university students (n = 25, 59% female, mean age = 21 years) to conduct either the CI or a standard law enforcement interview (Phase II); the student interviewers then interviewed other student witnesses (n = 50, 73% female, mean age = 22 years), who had watched a simulated crime (phase III). Compared with standard training, interviews conducted by those trained by CI‐trained instructors contained more information and at a higher accuracy rate and with fewer suggestive questions.     

Optische Versuche über Ruhe und Bewegung

Ohne Zusammenfassung Mit 20 Textabbildungen. Dissertation der Naturwissenschaftlichen Fakult?t Frankfurt a. M.     

A novel in vivo measure of cyberaggression

Cyberaggression (CA), or the use of information communication technologies to inflict harm on others, is an emerging public health crisis. Unfortunately, our current ability to assess CA in a research context remains limited, curtailing efforts to address this important issue. We sought to fill this gap in the literature by developing an adapted “chat” version of the Taylor aggression paradigm (TAP) that would more closely resemble a social gaming format (hereafter referred to as the TAP-Chat). In the TAP-Chat, participants have a chat function available to communicate with their (fictitious) co-player. Following loss trials in a competitive reaction time task, they receive a “mean chat” from their co-player. Participant messages to their (fictitious) co-player are then coded for aggressive content by a team of trained research assistants, and via automated linguistic analysis software (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count). The current study evaluated the predictive utility of the TAP-Chat task in independent discovery and replication samples (N = 843 and N = 350, respectively). Participants’ publicly available tweets served as an important external criterion variable, along with a handful of self-report questionnaires assessing CA and related constructs. Analyses suggest that, although it can be completed in ∼13 min, the TAP-Chat predicts CA on Twitter and, to a lesser extent, as reported on questionnaires. Although there are still several issues to address, it is our hope that the research community will benefit from this straightforward behavioral assessment of CA.     

An assessment of age differences in theory of mind using the virtual assessment of mentalizing ability

ABSTRACT

Prior research has shown that older adults perform more poorly than young on tasks that assess theory of mind (ToM). However, these studies have used tasks that are performed “offline” (i.e., requiring a second-person perspective) as opposed to “online” (i.e., requiring a first-person perspective). Therefore, the present study was designed to establish whether age-related ToM difficulties are also evident when an “online” measure of ToM is used. Forty younger and 40 older adults completed the Virtual Assessment of Mentalizing Ability (VAMA) along with two conventional ToM tasks. No age differences were evident on the conventional measures, but older adults had lower accuracy on the VAMA relative to their younger counterparts. The overall pattern of errors did not differ between the groups. These data provide no evidence that age effects are reduced when stimuli are used that are more likely to engage the mentalizing processes elicited in real life social interactions.     

Building the perfect curse word: A psycholinguistic investigation of the form and meaning of taboo words

Taboo words represent a potent subset of natural language. It has been hypothesized that “tabooness” reflects an emergent property of negative valence and high physiological arousal of word referents. Many taboo words (e.g., dick, shit) are indeed consistent with this claim. Nevertheless, American English is also rife with negatively valenced, highly arousing words the usage of which is not socially condemned (e.g., cancer, abortion, welfare). We evaluated prediction of tabooness of single words and novel taboo compound words from a combination of phonological, lexical, and semantic variables (e.g., semantic category, word length). For single words, physiological arousal and emotional valence strongly predicted tabooness with additional moderating contributions from form (phonology) and meaning (semantic category). In Experiment 2, raters judged plausibility for combinations of common nouns with taboo words to form novel taboo compounds (e.g., shitgibbon). A mixture of formal (e.g., ratio of stop consonants, length) and semantic variables (e.g., ± receptacle, ± profession) predicted the quality of novel taboo compounding. Together, these studies provide complementary evidence for interactions between word form and meaning and an algorithmic prediction of tabooness in American English. We discuss applications for models of taboo word representation.