Effects of Playing Videogames on Children's Aggressive and Other Behaviors1

Noting the pervasiveness of videogames in American culture, the authors set out to examine the effects that playing videogames has on children. Thirty-one children were matched on sex, randomly assigned to play either a violent (karate) videogame or a nonviolent (jungle vine swinging) videogame, and then observed during free play. The main results were that the children who had played the jungle swing videogame later played more with a jungle swing toy and that the children who played the violent videogame later showed more aggression. The authors interpreted the findings as an indication that young children who play videogames later tend to act similarly to how their videogame character acted.     

Denial and Confirmatory Search: Paradoxical Consequences of Medical Diagnosis1

An experiment was conducted to examine the effects of medical diagnostic-test results on illness appraisal and the recall of symptoms and behavior. Subjects were tested for a fictitious enzyme deficiency and were told either that the test result was positive (deficiency present) or that it was negative (deficiency absent). In addition, some of the subjects were told the test was accurate 95% of the time and others were told it was accurate 75% of the time. As predicted, subjects judged the enzyme deficiency as less serious and more prevalent when presented with positive test results. Subjects with positive test results also recalled more behaviors that had been labeled as risk factors. Although positive test subjects tended to report more deficiency-related symptoms, diagnosis did not affect the free recall of general symptoms. In addition, information concerning the reliability of the diagnostic test had no effect on judgments or recall but did affect information seeking. Subjects with positive test results were less likely to request a definitive follow-up test when their results were unreliable. The results are interpreted as evidence for independent confirmatory search and denial processes following medical diagnosis.     

Disarmament Decisions as Social Dilemmas1

The individual deciding on a nuclear weapons production policy is faced with a dilemma in which a choice must be made to support one of several conflicting defense policies. In order to investigate the social-psychological variables that are related to armament policy decision making, a telephone survey was conducted in the City of St. Louis, Missouri. Adult subjects (N= 110) responded to questions concerned with cognitive, attitudinal, and emotional responses to nuclear arms. Participants were also asked to choose a weapons production policy for the United States under conditions of continued and decreased Soviet nuclear arms production. Results indicated that respondents decisions about nuclear weapons production were related to their support for deterrence, the availability of their nuclear-related images, their emotional response to nuclear war, their attributions of responsibility for the prevention of nuclear war, and their political party affiliation. Distinctions between antinuclear decision-makers and pronuclear decision-makers are discussed.     

Influence of positive affect on the subjective utility of gains and losses: it is just not worth the risk

A modification of the procedure originally used by Davidson, Suppes, and Siegel (1956) to measure subjective utility was used to study the influence of positive affect on individuals' perceived value (utility) functions. Results indicated, as expected, that persons in whom positive affect had been induced showed a more negative subjective utility for losses than did controls. This indicates that losses seem worse to people who are feeling happy than to those in a control condition. The subjective utility functions of the two groups did not differ as much, however, when people were considering potential gain. Thus, at least in the situation tested in this study, potential gains did not seem to be more appealing (nor less so) for affect subjects than they did for controls. These findings are discussed in relation to theoretical issues in decision making and work suggesting that positive affect can promote increased sensitivity to losses in situations of potential meaningful loss.     

Personality in adulthood: a six-year longitudinal study of self-reports and spouse ratings on the NEO Personality Inventory

Previous longitudinal studies of personality in adulthood have been limited in the range of traits examined, have chiefly made use of self-reports, and have frequently included only men. In this study, self-reports (N = 983) and spouse ratings (N = 167) were gathered on the NEO Personality Inventory (Costa & McCrae, 1985b), which measures all five of the major dimensions of normal personality. Cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses on data from men and women aged 21 to 96 years showed evidence of small declines in Activity, Positive Emotions, and openness to Actions that might be attributed to maturation, but none of these effects was replicated in sequential analyses. The 20 other scales examined showed no consistent pattern of maturational effects. In contrast, retest stability was quite high for all five dimensions in self-reports and for the three dimensions measured at both times in spouse ratings. Comparable levels of stability were seen for men and women and for younger and older subjects. The data support the position that personality is stable after age 30.     

Role of visual information in ball catching

The present study is concerned with the perceptual information about the body and space underlying the act of catching a ball. In a series of four experiments, subjects were asked to catch a luminous ball under various visual conditions. In general, catching in a normally illuminated room was contrasted with catching the luminous ball in an otherwise completely dark room. In the third and fourth experiments, intermediate conditions of visual information were included. The results suggest that it is possible to catch a ball with one hand when only the ball is visible, but performance is better when the subject has the benefit of a rich visual environment and two hands. The second experiment indicated that subject performance does improve with practice in the dark, but time spent in the darkened room itself doesn't result in a significant decrement in performance. Results of the third study suggest that vision of one's hand does not aid in the performance of this task whereas the presence of a minimal visual frame appears to aid performance. The final study examined the relation between catching performance and body sway under similar visual conditions. Results of this experiment imply that persons who exhibit relatively little postural sway in full-room lighting performed better at this catching task.     

A "change-of-standard" perspective on the relations among context, judgment, and memory

We conducted three studies that tested a "change-of-standard" perspective on the relations among context, judgment, and recall. Each study consisted of two or three sessions held a few days apart. All subjects read about the sentencing decisions of one or two target trial judges and of six nontarget trial judges who consistently gave either higher or lower sentences than the target judge(s). Each study varied both the standard that was available when subjects initially judged the sentencing decisions of a target judge and the standard available when subjects subsequently recalled those decisions. To accomplish this, we varied the context of judgment, the timing of judgment, and the overall category norm for trial judges' sentencing decisions that was available at recall. We found that although subjects had been exposed to the same target information and had initially judged it in the same way, their recall of the information was different depending on whether and how a change-of-standard had occurred between judgment and recall. Unique predictions of the change-of-standard perspective were confirmed that could not be accounted for in terms of other types of context effects on judgment and memory.     

Specific forms of facial EMG response index emotions during an interview: from Darwin to the continuous flow hypothesis affect-laden information processing

Previous research has demonstrated that mild negative emotional imagery and unpleasant sensory stimuli lead to greater electromyographic activity over the brow muscle region than mild positive imagery and stimuli, even in the absence of significant changes in visceral and general facial EMG activity. Previous research has not addressed whether electromyographic responses over the brow region are a sensitive and specific index of emotions, however, since a multiplicity of events lead to changes in brow activity. In this research, facial electromyographic and audiovisual recordings were obtained while individuals were interviewed about themselves. Afterwards, individuals were asked to describe what they had been thinking of during specific segments of the interview marked by distinctive electromyographic responses over the brow region in the context of ongoing but stable levels of activity elsewhere in the face. The results are interpreted in terms of a continuous flow hypothesis of affect-laden information processing.     

Social contagion of binge eating

A social psychological account of the acquisition of binge eating, analogous to the classic social psychological work, "Social Pressures in Informal Groups" (Festinger, Schachter, & Back, 1950), is suggested and tested in two college sororities. In these sororities, clear evidence of group norms about appropriate binge-eating behavior was found; in one sorority, the more one binged, the more popular one was. In the other, popularity was associated with binging the right amount: Those who binged too much or too little were less popular than those who binged at the mean. Evidence of social pressures to binge eat were found as well. By the end of the academic year, a sorority member's binge eating could be predicted from the binge-eating level of her friends (average r = .31). As friendship groups grew more cohesive, a sorority member's binge eating grew more and more like that of her friends (average r = .35). The parsimony of a social psychological account of the acquisition of binge eating behavior is shown. I argue that there is no great mystery to how bulimia has become such a serious problem for today's women. Binge eating seems to be an acquired pattern of behavior, perhaps through modeling, and appears to be learned much like any other set of behaviors. Like other behaviors, it is under substantial social control.     

Major life events, hassles, and adaptation in adolescence: confounding in the conceptualization and measurement of life stress and adjustment revisited

Prior work has suggested that methodological and conceptual confounding may play a role in the associations obtained between stressful life events, social resources, and adaptive outcome. Of particular concern in our work were (a) the source and method of assessment; (b) conceptual overlap between life stress and resource items and symptoms of disorder; and (c) induced response bias through the instructional sets of the stress measures. A second goal was to extend our understanding of the life stress-adjustment linkage in groups for whom little data of this type exist. By using multi-trait-multimethod procedures we found that both distal major life events and proximal daily stressors had important degrees of unique and shared variance with adaptive functioning, whereas the effects for social support were inconclusive. Further, the importance of considering possible sources of potential confounding in producing quite different levels of association between life stress and adaptation was underscored by the results.