Staying alive: evolution, culture, and women's intrasexual aggression

Females' tendency to place a high value on protecting their own lives enhanced their reproductive success in the environment of evolutionary adaptation because infant survival depended more upon maternal than on paternal care and defence. The evolved mechanism by which the costs of aggression (and other forms of risk taking) are weighted more heavily for females may be a lower threshold for fear in situations which pose a direct threat of bodily injury. Females' concern with personal survival also has implications for sex differences in dominance hierarchies because the risks associated with hierarchy formation in nonbonded exogamous females are not offset by increased reproductive success. Hence among females, disputes do not carry implications for status with them as they do among males, but are chiefly connected with the acquisition and defence of scarce resources. Consequently, female competition is more likely to take the form of indirect aggression or low-level direct combat than among males. Under patriarchy, men have held the power to propagate images and attributions which are favourable to the continuance of their control. Women's aggression has been viewed as a gender-incongruent aberration or dismissed as evidence of irrationality. These cultural interpretations have "enhanced" evolutionarily based sex differences by a process of imposition which stigmatises the expression of aggression by females and causes women to offer exculpatory (rather than justificatory) accounts of their own aggression.     

Psychometric Aspects of Verbal Pragmatic Ratings

This study examined the psychometric aspects of a verbal pragmatic rating scale. The scale contained six pragmatic features (i.e., Conciseness, Lexical Selection, Quantity, Relevancy, Specificity, and Topic Maintenance) based on Grice's cooperative principles. Fifteen right brain-damaged (RBD), 15 left brain-damaged (LBD), and 16 healthy normal control (NC) right-handed adult participants produced narratives while recollecting emotional and nonemotional experiences. Naive raters evaluated each pragmatic feature for appropriateness on a 5-point Likert scale. When reliability was examined, the overall internal consistency of the pragmatic scale was extremely high (alpha =.96). Factor analysis was conducted to examine the theoretical relations among the six pragmatic features. Three meaningful factors involving discourse content, conceptual unity, and parsimony were identified. Findings are discussed in light of Grice's model and the construct validity of the scale.     

Role of the unquantified electroencephalography in psychiatric research

This paper outlines potential research applications of the unquantified (paper or digital) electroencephalography (EEG) in psychiatry. Three main areas are highlighted: first, the need for thorough familiarity with the unquantified EEG is emphasized, including the ability to confidently recognize all normal and abnormal activities that could influence further analysis of the record as well as artifacts that can contaminate the tracings; second, the fact that definitive studies relating EEG abnormalities to psychiatric symptomatology and clinical response are lacking; and third, the potential for EEG to be utilized as a tool to decrease the risk of invasive research studies is discussed.     

Natural Theology in Paul? Reading Romans 1.19–20

This reading of Romans 1.19–20 suggests that, viewed within the argumentative progression of the letter from 1.18–3.20, these verses are properly understood as a subversion of the premises of natural revelation, rather than an endorsement of them. The traditional account of Paul's argument, in which 1.19–20 announces a theology of natural knowledge of God, is contradicted both by Paul's wider theological commitments and by his attitude to the privileges of Judaism. An alternative construal of the argument considers it as an ad hominem strategy, in which the opening verses serve to recapitulate at the beginning of the argument the presuppositions that Paul seeks ultimately to overthrow.     

Division by multiplication

In two experiments, item-specific transfer was examined in simple multiplication and division with prime and probe problems separated by four to six trials. As was predicted by Rickard and Bourne's (1996) identical-elements model, response time (RT) savings were larger with identical (e.g., prime 63 divided by 7, probe 63 divided by 7) than with inverted (63 divided by 9 and 63 divided by 7) division problems, whereas identical (7 x 9 and 7 x 9) and inverted (9 x 7 and 7 x 9) multiplication problems produced equivalent transfer. Nonetheless, there was statistically significant transfer between inverted division problems. Furthermore, RT savings in the multiplication-to-division transfer conditions (e.g., prime 7 x 9, probe 63 divided by 7) indicated that multiplication mediated large-number division problems. These latter effects are not predicted by the identical-elements model but may be reconciled with the model by distinguishing associative transfer (facilitation owing to strengthening of a common problem node in memory) from mediated transfer (facilitation owing to mediation by a strengthened, related problem). Skilled adults can exploit the conceptual correspondences between multiplication and division facts in a highly efficient way to facilitate performance.     

More about brows: how poses that change brow position affect perceptions of gender

The speeded categorisation of gender from photographs of men's and women's faces under conditions of vertical brow and vertical head movement was explored in two sets of experiments. These studies were guided by the suggestion that a simple cue to gender in faces, the vertical distance between the eyelid and brow, could support such decisions. In men this distance is smaller than in women, and can be further reduced by lowering the brows and also by lowering the head and raising the eyes to camera. How does the gender-classification mechanism take changes in pose into account? Male faces with lowered brows (experiment 1) were more quickly and accurately categorised (there was little corresponding 'feminisation' of raised-brow faces). Lowering gaze had a similar effect, but failed to interact with head lowering in a simple manner (experiment 2). We conclude that the initial classification of gender from the facial image may not involve normalisation of the face image to a canonical state (the 'mug-shot view') for expressive pose (brow movement and direction of gaze). For head pose (relative position of the features when the face is not viewed head-on), normalisation cannot be ruled out. Some perceptual mechanisms for these effects, and their functional implications, are discussed.     

Distress tolerance but not impulsivity predicts outcome in concurrent treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder and substance use disorder

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and substance use disorder (SUD) commonly co-occur. Emerging research suggests that both distress tolerance and impulsivity may underlie this comorbidity. However, to our knowledge no studies have examined whether these 2 constructs predict outcome in PTSD-SUD treatment. The current study investigated whether pretreatment distress tolerance and impulsivity predicted posttreatment PTSD and cravings severity in a sample of 70 Veterans receiving concurrent treatment for PTSD and SUD in a residential day treatment program. Veterans completed measures of symptom severity before and after treatment. Results demonstrated that pretreatment distress tolerance predicted posttreatment PTSD severity while controlling for pretreatment PTSD. By contrast, pretreatment impulsivity was not predictive of posttreatment PTSD while controlling for pretreatment values. Neither distress tolerance nor impulsivity predicted posttreatment cravings severity. The findings support the notion that distress tolerance may help to explain the co-occurrence of PTSD and SUD and suggest that targeting this construct in PTSD-SUD treatment may be important for successful outcomes.