An Examination of the Connections Between Eating Disorder Symptoms,Perceived Burdensomeness,Thwarted Belongingness,and Suicide Risk Among Undergraduate Students

Suicide attempts and premature mortality due to suicide are elevated in people with eating disorders. Informed by the interpersonal theory of suicide, two studies examined the role of perceived burdensomeness and thwarted belongingness in explaining the association between eating disorder symptoms and suicide risk. Results indicated that various eating disorder symptoms had an indirect effect on suicide risk through perceived burdensomeness and thwarted belongingness. Targeting perceived burdensomeness and thwarted belongingness may be useful for decreasing suicide risk among undergraduates with eating disorder symptoms.     

Effects of word frequency and age of acquisition on short-term memory span

The experiments reported examine the effects of two highly related variables, word frequency and age of acquisition, on short-term memory span. Short-term memory span and speech rate were measured for sets of words which independently manipulated frequency and age of acquisition. It was found that frequency had a considerable effect on short-term memory span, which was not mediated by speech rate differences—although frequency did affect speech rate in one experiment. For age of acquisition, this situation was reversed; there was a small but significant effect of age of acquisition on speech rate, but no effect on memory span. This occurred despite results confirming that the stimuli used in the experiments produce an effect of age of acquisition on word naming. The results are discussed in terms of a two-component view of performance on short-term memory tasks.     

A model for predicting the outcomes of basketball games

We investigated the task of predicting the outcomes of sporting events, in particular, basketball games. In two experiments, college students predicted the outcomes of a series of National Basketball Association (NBA) games. Following each prediction, the subject received feedback in the form of the actual outcome of the NBA game. After a period of initial learning about the relative strengths of the teams, the subjects were surprisingly successful in their predictions. We examined expert–novice differences by comparing the published predictions of professional oddsmakers to the predictions of the experimental subjects. The average predictions by the subjects were approximately as accurate as the predictions of experts. Finally, we applied a mathematical model, developed originally as an account of simpler learning experiments, to the subjects' responses. We found that the course of the subjects' learning about the teams was well-described by this model.     

Impulsivity, fight history, and camaraderie as predictors of a willingness to escalate a disturbance

This field study examined the relationships between six predictor variables and a self-report measure of spectators' likelihood of joining in a crowd disturbance. Subjects were males (N = 78) found in attendance at an ice hockey game. The variables jects were males (N = 78) found in attendance at an ice hockey game. The variables related to the likelihood of escalating a disturbance included subjects who were more impulsive, had a history of fighting, were younger, saw provocations as more volatile, liked to watch player fights and attended with others. A multiple regression analysis yielded a solution that accounted for 52.9% of the variance. The results were discussed against the background of previous research examining the factors associated with spectators' propensity for involving themselves in crowd disorders. The authors wish to thank the Medicine Hat Tigers Hockey Club for their cooperation.     

Coherence masking protection in speech sounds: The role of formant synchrony

Three experiments were performed to examine listeners’ thresholds for identifying stimuli whose spectra were modeled after the vowels /i/ and /ε/, with the differences between these stimuli restricted to the frequency of the first formant. The stimuli were presented in a low-pass masking noise that spectrally overlapped the first formant but not the higher formants. Identification thresholds were lower when the higher formants were present than when they were not, even though the first formant contained the only distinctive information for stimulus identification. This indicates that listeners were more sensitive in identifying the first formant energy through its contribution to the vowel than as an independent percept; this effect is given the namecoherence masking protection. The first experiment showed this effect for synthetic vowels in which the distinctive first formant was supported by a series of harmonics that progressed through the higher formants. In the second two experiments, the harmonics in the first formant region were removed, and the first formant was simulated by a narrow band of noise. This was done so that harmonic relations did not provide a basis for grouping the lower formant with the higher formants; coherence masking protection was still observed. However, when the temporal alignment of the onsets and offsets of the higher and lower formants was disrupted, the effect was eliminated, although the stimuli were still perceived as vowels. These results are interpreted as indicating that general principles of auditory grouping that can exploit regularities in temporal patterns cause acoustic energy belonging to a coherent speech sound to stand out in the auditory scene.