Acceptance patterns of retaliatory aggression among adjudicated youth by sex and race

This study investigates sex and race differences in normative beliefs about the acceptability of aggression across dimensions of severity of provocation (weak versus strong) and sex of provoker (male versus female). Students in the sample of 311 included those required to attend three Department of Youth Services schools after placement by the juvenile court system from across the state of Alabama (N=392). Results show that males were significantly more likely than females to approve of retaliation to weak provocation and against females. There were no significant differences between males and females for retaliation with strong provocation and against males. Results also show the Black group was significantly more likely than the White group to approve of retaliation to weak provocation, strong provocation, and against females.     

Attributions for Expectancy Violating Changes in Affectionate Behavior in Platonic Friendships

Although affectionate communication is vital for the maintenance of close, personal relationships, it has the potential to generate negative as well as positive outcomes, which may in part be a function of what attributions are made for affectionate expressions. The present experiment applied principles of attribution theory to unexpected changes in affectionate communication within dyads of adult platonic friends. Results indicated that attributions are more often made for decreases in affection than for increases. Contrary to the prediction of the fundamental attribution error, all the participants more often made external, noncontrollable attributions for changes in affectionate behavior, and the intimacy level of the friendship moderated this effect. Finally, the types of attributions made were associated with a recipient's evaluations of the giver's affectionate behavior and his or her assessment of the giver's character.     

Interaction of reinforcement conditions and developmental level in a two-choice discrimination task with children

A total of 540 first, fourth, and eighth graders, equally divided by sex, were run on a two-choice discrimination task under one of three reinforcement conditions: reward (R) for correct responses, punishment (P) for incorrect responses, or reward and punishment (RP) for correct and incorrect responses. Half the Ss were tested by a male E; half, by a female E. Across all developmental levels, learning was superior in the P group. Complex interactions involving sex of S and E underline the importance of organismic variables in discrimination learning and in specifying parameters of reinforcer effectiveness.     

How does discourse among like-minded individuals affect their thinking about a complex issue?

Is there reason to be concerned about what has been seen as an increasing trend for discourse on complex issues to be confined to an “echo chamber” of like-minded individuals? To investigate how thinking regarding an issue changes in form following concentrated discourse with like-minded peers, we undertook a qualitative examination of changes in the reasoning that 34 older adults used to justify their positions prior to and following such discourse. They showed a divergence of patterns. A minority abandoned mention of previously expressed ideas at odds with their own positions or otherwise narrowed the reasoning used to justify their positions. Consistent with findings from previous studies, only a minority showed increased certainty and/or extremity (polarisation) on quantitative scales. Countering this minority were a larger proportion whose thinking appeared to benefit from such engagement in several respects that we describe. A follow-up study compares results for a sample of young adults.     

Trajectories of emotional well-being in mothers of adolescents and adults with autism

Raising an adolescent or adult child with a developmental disability confers exceptional caregiving challenges on parents. We examined trajectories of 2 indicators of emotional well-being (depressive symptoms and anxiety) in a sample of primarily Caucasian mothers (N = 379; M age = 51.22 years at Time 1) of adolescent and adult children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD; M age = 21.91 years at Time 1, 73.2% male). We also investigated within-person associations of child context time-varying covariates (autism symptoms, behavior problems, residential status) and maternal context time-varying covariates (social support network size and stressful family events) with the trajectories of emotional well-being. Data were collected on 5 occasions across a 10-year period. Average patterns of stable (depressive symptoms) and improved (anxiety) emotional well-being were evident, and well-being trajectories were sensitive to fluctuations in both child and maternal context variables. On occasions when behavior problems were higher, depressive symptoms and anxiety were higher. On occasions after which the grown child moved out of the family home, anxiety was lower. Anxiety was higher on occasions when social support networks were smaller and when more stressful life events were experienced. These results have implications for midlife and aging families of children with an ASD and those who provide services to these families.     

Is language necessary for human spatial reorientation? Reconsidering evidence from dual task paradigms

Being able to reorient to the spatial environment after disorientation is a basic adaptive challenge. There is clear evidence that reorientation uses geometric information about the shape of the surrounding space. However, there has been controversy concerning whether use of geometry is a modular function, and whether use of features is dependent on human language. A key argument for the role of language comes from shadowing findings where adults engaged in a linguistic task during reorientation ignored a colored wall feature and only used geometric information to reorient [Hermer-Vazquez, L., Spelke, E., & Katsnelson, A. (1999). Sources of flexibility in human cognition: Dual task studies of space and language. Cognitive Psychology, 39, 3-36]. We report three studies showing: (a) that the results of Hermer-Vazques et al. [Hermer-Vazquez, L., Spelke, E., & Katsnelson, A. (1999). Sources of flexibility in human cognition: Dual task studies of space and language. Cognitive Psychology, 39, 3-36] are obtained in incidental learning but not with explicit instructions, (b) that a spatial task impedes use of features at least as much as a verbal shadowing task, and (c) that neither secondary task impedes use of features in a room larger than that used by Hermer-Vazquez et al. These results suggest that language is not necessary for successful use of features in reorientation. In fact, whether or not there is an encapsulated geometric module is currently unsettled. The current findings support an alternative to modularity; the adaptive combination view hypothesizes that geometric and featural information are utilized in varying degrees, dependent upon the certainty and variance with which the two kinds of information are encoded, along with their salience and perceived usefulness.     

Trouble crossing the bridge: altered interhemispheric communication of emotional images in anxiety

Worry is thought to involve a strategy of cognitive avoidance, in which internal verbalization acts to suppress threatening emotional imagery. This study tested the hypothesis that worry-prone individuals would exhibit patterns of between-hemisphere communication that reflect cognitive avoidance. Specifically, the hypothesis predicted slower transfer of threatening images from the left to the right hemisphere among worriers. Event-related potential (ERP) measures of interhemispheric transfer time supported this prediction. Left-to-right hemisphere transfer times for angry faces were relatively slower for individuals scoring high in self-reported worry compared with those scoring low, whereas transfer of happy and neutral faces did not differ between groups. These results suggest that altered interhemispheric communication may constitute one mechanism of cognitive avoidance in worry.     

Anxiety and error monitoring: Increased error sensitivity or altered expectations?

This study tested the prediction that the error-related negativity (ERN), a physiological measure of error monitoring, would be enhanced in anxious individuals, particularly in conditions with threatening cues. Participants made gender judgments about faces whose expressions were either happy, angry, or neutral. Replicating prior studies, midline scalp negativities were greater following errors than following correct responses. In addition, state anxiety interacted with facial expression to predict ERN amplitudes. Counter to predictions, participants high in state anxiety displayed smaller ERNs for angry-face blocks and larger ERNs for happy-face blocks, compared to less anxious participants. These results are inconsistent with the simple notion that anxiety enhances error sensitivity globally. Rather, we interpret the findings within an expectancy violation framework, in which anxious participants have altered expectations for success and failure in the context of happy and angry facial cues, with greater ERN amplitudes when expectations are violated.     

Expressed emotion and familial interaction: a study with agoraphobic and obsessive-compulsive patients and their relatives

Patients with panic disorder with agoraphobia (n = 40) or obsessive- compulsive disorder (n = 61) participated in a 10-min problem-solving interaction with their primary relative. Relatives were categorized as hostile or nonhostile toward the patient on the basis of a measure of expressed emotion (EE). Observed interactions between patients and their hostile relatives, relative to those of dyads with a nonhostile relative, were marked by higher rates of relatives' criticism and of patients' negativity but not by higher rates of negative reciprocity. Analyses of sequences indicated that the dyads with a hostile relative had a higher rate of sequences in which the relative was first critical and the patient then negative than was the case for dyads with nonhostile relatives. Moreover, hostile relatives were more frequently critical than nonhostile relatives whether patients' preceding behavior was positive, negative, or neutral. The findings are consistent with the stress-vulnerability model of the effect of EE on mental health, in that patients living with a high EE relative appear to be exposed to higher levels of interpersonal stress.