Active Defending and Passive Bystanding Behavior in Bullying: The Role of Personal Characteristics and Perceived Peer Pressure

This study examined the role of pro-victim attitudes, personal responsibility, coping responses to observations of bullying, and perceived peer normative pressure in explaining defending the victim and passive bystanding behavior in bullying. A total of 462 Italian early adolescents (mean age = 13.4 years, SD = 9 months) participated in the study. The behaviors were measured through two informants: each individual student and the teachers. The findings of a series of hierarchical regressions showed that, regardless of the informant, problem solving coping strategies and perceived peer normative pressure for intervention were positively associated with active help towards a bullied peer and negatively related to passivity. In contrast, distancing strategies were positively associated with passive bystanding, whereas they were negatively associated with teacher-reported defending behavior. Moreover, self-reported defending behavior was positively associated with personal responsibility for intervention, but only under conditions of low perceived peer pressure. Finally, the perception of peer pressure for intervention buffered the negative influence of distancing on passive bystanding tendencies. Future directions are discussed.     

Burden, depression, and anxiety in caregivers of people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a progressive and fatal neurodegenerative disease caused by the degeneration of motor neurons. The burden for ALS caregivers is quite high. There are still few studies that have investigated the emotional impact of ALS care. We conducted a cross-sectional study among 40 ALS caregivers, assessing general worries, burden of care, depression, anxiety, perception of social support, and patients' severity of disease. Caregiver burden, depression, and anxiety were positively related with each other, and all these variables had a negative relation with social support. Patient's loss of physical functions was positively related with caregiver burden, anxiety, and somatic expression of depression. Caregivers expressed worries for their own health conditions. Given these results, we consider the hypothesis of an emotional-somatic impact of ALS care. The implications and limitations are discussed.     

Adults’ implicit associations to infant positive and negative acoustic cues: Moderation by empathy and gender

In this study a novel auditory version of the Single Category Implicit Association Test (SC-IAT-A) was developed to investigate (a) the valence of adults’ associations to infant cries and laughs, (b) moderation of implicit associations by gender and empathy, and (c) the robustness of implicit associations controlling for auditory sensitivity. Eighty adults (50% females) were administered two SC-IAT-As, the Empathy Quotient, and the Weinstein Noise Sensitivity Scale. Adults showed positive implicit associations to infant laugh and negative ones to infant cry; only the implicit associations with the infant laugh were negatively related to empathy scores, and no gender differences were observed. Finally, implicit associations to infant cry were affected by noise sensitivity. The SC-IAT-A is useful to evaluate the valence of implicit reactions to infant auditory cues and could provide fresh insights into understanding processes that regulate the quality of adult–infant relationships.     

Emotional inertia emerges after prolonged states of exhaustion: Evidences from a measurement burst study

Motivation and Emotion - Exhaustion refers to the feeling of ongoing loss of emotional, physical and cognitive resources. The present study draws on the Conservation of Resources Theory to examine...     

Do Coping Strategies Discriminate Eating Disordered Individuals Better Than Eating Disorder Features? An Explorative Study on Female Inpatients with Anorexia and Bulimia Nervosa

The purpose of this explorative research was to examine how the COPE (Coping Orientation to Problem Experienced Inventory), an established instrument for measuring coping styles, and EDI-2 (Eating Disorder Inventory-2), a widely used questionnaire for assessing psychological and behavioural features of eating disorders (ED), discriminate among healthy individuals, inpatients with anorexia nervosa (AN) and inpatients with bulimia nervosa (BN). A discriminant analysis approach was used. Results showed that coping styles such as positive attitude, planning and social support are even more discriminative variables than eating disorder features. Implications for further studies are discussed.     

TRoPICALS: a computational embodied neuroscience model of compatibility effects

Perceiving objects activates the representation of their affordances. For example, experiments on compatibility effects showed that categorizing objects by producing certain handgrips (power or precision) is faster if the requested responses are compatible with the affordance elicited by the size of objects (e.g., small or large). The article presents a neural-network architecture that provides a general framework to account for compatibility effects. The model was designed with a methodological approach (computational embodied neuroscience) that aims to provide increasingly general accounts of brain and behavior (4 sources of constraints are used: neuroscientific data, behavioral data, embodied systems, reproduction of learning processes). The model is based on 4 principles of brain organization that we claim underlie most compatibility effects. First, visual perception and action are organized in the brain along a dorsal neural pathway encoding affordances and a ventral pathway encoding goals. Second, the prefrontal cortex within the ventral pathway gives a top-down bias to action selection by integrating information on stimuli, context, and goals. Third, reaction times depend on dynamic neural competitions for action selection that integrate bottom-up and top-down information. The congruence or incongruence between affordances and goals explains the different reaction times found in the experiments. Fourth, as words trigger internal simulations of their referents, they can cause compatibility effects as objects do. We validated the model by reproducing and explaining 3 types of compatibility effects and showed its heuristic power by producing 2 testable predictions. We also assessed the explicative power of the model by comparing it with related models and showed how it can be extended to account for other compatibility effects.     

Bullying as a social process: The role of group membership in students' perception of inter-group aggression at school

Bullying is a widespread social phenomenon involving both individual and group variables. The present study was aimed at analyzing how students' perception of a bullying episode might be influenced by group and context variables. A convenience sample of 455 adolescents read a short story, in which the in-group role (bully vs. victim) and level of teacher likeability (high vs. low) were manipulated. Participants were asked to evaluate their own group and an out-group, in terms of four dependent variables: liking, right to use the basketball court, attribution of blame, and attribution of punishment. Data showed a strong participant in-group bias and a generalized tendency to favor the in-group, especially when it was the victimized group. Conversely, the manipulation of teacher likeability did not affect students' perception of bullying, except for girls' attribution of punishment. Lastly, a clear gender effect emerged, in that boys accepted physical bullying more readily than girls did. Results are discussed in terms of group dynamics and preadolescent social identity concerns.