Precursors to aggression are evident by 6 months of age

We tested the hypothesis that developmental precursors to aggression are apparent in infancy. Up to three informants rated 301 firstborn infants for early signs of anger, hitting and biting; 279 (93%) were assessed again as toddlers. Informants' ratings were validated by direct observation at both ages. The precursor behaviours were significantly associated with known risk factors for high levels of aggressiveness. Individual differences were stable from early infancy to the third year and predicted broader conduct problems. These findings suggest that some individuals set forth on the trajectory to high levels of aggression by 6 months of age. The findings have implications for developmental studies of aggression, clinical prevention and intervention strategies, and theoretical considerations regarding the detection of precursors in different domains of development.     

Raised by Depressed Parents: Is it an Environmental Risk?

The mechanisms explaining how parental depression compromises healthy child development are complex and multifaceted, with genetic and environmental pathways intertwined. Reexamination of whether and how maternal and paternal depression serve as environmental risk factors is important because such an investigation can be helpful to identify modifiable mechanisms that are accessible to interventions. We review studies that have employed designs that isolate the effects of the environment from genetic influences, including adoption studies and children of twins studies. Findings indicate that maternal depression is an environmental risk factor for the emotional, behavioral, and neurobiological development of children. Although more studies are needed, preliminary findings suggest that paternal depression appears to be a weaker environmental risk as compared to maternal depression, at least during infancy and toddlerhood. Implications for theory and future research are discussed.     

Referrals to chaplains: The role of religion and spirituality in healthcare settings

Given the increasing importance of understanding how healthcare workers interact with the principal person designated to meet patients’ spiritual needs— the chaplain— the current study provides an inter-disciplinary perspective of the role of chaplains (and spirituality) in patients’ emotional, physical, and spiritual health. The study surveyed a randomly selected national sample of hospital directors in four disciplines: medicine (n?=?278), nursing (n?=?230), social services (n?=?229), and pastoral care (n?=?470). Participants rated the importance of referring patients to chaplains for four different areas: pain/depression, anxiety/anger, treatment issues, and loss/death/meaning. Results revealed significant differences in referral patterns for type of hospital, professional discipline, the hospital's religious affiliation, and self-reported spirituality. Results are discussed in relation to historical views of spirituality and religion within the different disciplines.     

Entertaining Media Use and the Satisfaction of Recovery Needs: Recovery Outcomes Associated With the Use of Interactive and Noninteractive Entertaining Media

Recent research has linked the enjoyment of entertaining media to the satisfaction of intrinsic human needs (Tamborini, Bowman, Eden, Grizzard, & Organ, 2010 Tamborini, R., Bowman, N. D., Eden, A., Grizzard, M. and Organ, A. 2010. Defining media enjoyment as the satisfaction of intrinsic needs. Journal of Communication, 60: 758–777. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Tamborini, Grizzard, et al., in press). The present investigation addressed the satisfaction of recovery needs through the use of interactive and noninteractive entertaining media stimuli and the resulting recovery outcomes. In an experiment (N = 160), participants were first exposed to a working task to elicit the need for recovery and then randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions: 1) a video game, 2) a video recording of a game, 3) an animated video clip, or 4) the control condition. The results demonstrate that interactive and noninteractive media stimuli elicit different patterns of recovery experience. Furthermore, recovery experience was significantly related to enjoyment as well as subjective (energetic arousal) and objective (cognitive performance) recovery outcomes. Enjoyment mediated the relationship between recovery experience and energetic arousal. The results demonstrate that the effects of need satisfaction associated with the use of entertaining media go beyond enjoyment and may affect recovery and psychological well being. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for research on the recovery effects of entertaining media and for current needs-based approaches to media enjoyment.     

Facilitating Game Play: How Others Affect Performance at and Enjoyment of Video Games

The current study implements the drive theory of social facilitation to explain the influence of audience presence in video game play. This integration is an important one for research aiming to understand the experience of video game play, as the social aspect of video game play is a relevant dimension of the technology often ignored in research on gaming experiences. The study finds a significant positive association between non-gaming cognitive abilities (such as hand–eye coordination and mental rotation ability) and performance at a first-person shooter. Data also support the social facilitation hypothesis: Game play in the presence of a physical audience significantly predicts increased game performance. Social facilitation effects are only found for low-challenge games where the drive-inducing capacity of task challenge is minimized. Resultant influences on game enjoyment are less clear.     

Shattered dreams,resiliency, and hope: “restorying” after loss

Abstract

Experiences of shattered dreams can cause some to lose hope and the capacity to dream new dreams and create new stories. Unless family professionals pay attention to and aid persons in grieving lost dreams, children, adults, and families may have difficulty turning the corner to hope and healing after loss. The connections among attention to losses, especially shattered dreams, the promotion of resiliency, story telling, and hope are addressed in this article.     

Short-lived effects of a visual inducer during egocentric space perception and manual behavior

A pitched visual inducer has a strong effect on the visually perceived elevation of a target in extrapersonal space, and also on the elevation of the arm when a subject points with an unseen arm to the target’s elevation. The manual effect is a systematic function of hand-to-body distance (Li and Matin Vision Research 45:533–550, 2005): When the arm is fully extended, manual responses to perceptually mislocalized luminous targets are veridical; when the arm is close to the body, gross matching errors occur. In the present experiments, we measured this hand-to-body distance effect during the presence of a pitched visual inducer and after inducer offset, using three values of hand-to-body distance (0, 40, and 70 cm) and two open-loop tasks (pointing to the perceived elevation of a target at true eye level and setting the height of the arm to match the elevation). We also measured manual behavior when subjects were instructed to point horizontally under induction and after inducer offset (no visual target at any time). In all cases, the hand-to-body distance effect disappeared shortly after inducer offset. We suggest that the rapid disappearance of the distance effect is a manifestation of processes in the dorsal visual stream that are involved in updating short-lived representations of the arm in egocentric visual perception and manual behavior.     

Selective preservation of a lexical category in aphasia: Dissociations in comprehension of body parts and geographical place names following focal brain lesion

Abstract

The selective dissociation of memory for proper names is discussed in the context of a review of dissociations involving broadly defined vs narrowly defined semantic categories in brain damaged adults. Two narrowly defined categories for which dissociations have been reported are body parts (selectively impaired in comprehension) and geographical place names (selectively preserved in comprehension). In this study, 167 aphasic patients were tested for their ability to correctly identify body parts and map locations from spoken names, relative to a baseline for correct responses on general word discrimination (object identification). Wernicke's aphasics and Global aphasics both had significantly more success in pointing to named map locations and significantly worse performance in pointing to named body parts than they had in selecting other objects from multiple choice. Anomic aphasics showed precisely the opposite pattern of results. Other aphasic subgroups (Broca's aphasics. Mixed Nonfluent aphasics. Conduction aphasics, Transcortical Motor and Transcortical Sensory aphasics, and Mixed Fluent aphasics) did not show significant deviations in either direction. We suggest that the selective preservation for place names may be related to their status as proper names.     

Domain‐General and Domain‐Specific Creative‐Thinking Tests: Effects of Gender and Item Content on Test Performance

The study examined the effects of gender and item content of domain‐general and domain‐specific creative‐thinking tests on four subscale scores of creative‐thinking (fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration). Chinese tenth‐grade students (234 males and 244 females) participated in the study. Domain‐general creative thinking was measured by using two domain‐independent items—box and newspaper. Domain‐specific creative thinking was measured in the domain of history by two history‐specific items—school uniform and health food—that were part of lessons in modern Chinese history. Domain‐general creative‐thinking scores were not different across gender in any of the four subscales. In domain‐specific creative thinking, female students produced more responses (fluency) and more categories of ideas (flexibility), and more detailed answers (elaboration) on both items than did males. Gender difference was not found in originality. Item effects were significant in both general and specific creative‐thinking scores, with higher fluency, flexibility, and elaboration for the newspaper than the box item, and higher fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration for the school uniform than the health food item. The findings on both gender and item effects support the contention that personal interest and life experience influence the generation of creative solutions. The finding that gender did not differ in domain‐general creative‐thinking was expected, as the two general items (box and newspaper) are experienced similarly by both genders. As most of the creative‐thinking tests are influenced by individuals' experience beyond creative‐thinking ability, judicial evaluation and use of creative‐thinking scores are underscored.