The Aggression Questionnaire: a validation study in student samples

The goal of this study was to examine the psychometric properties of the Aggression Questionnaire (AQ) in Spain. The AQ is a 29-item instrument designed to measure the different dimensions of the hostility/anger/aggression construct. It consists of 4 subscales that assess: (a) anger, (b) hostility, (c) verbal aggression, and (d) physical aggression. In Study 1, reliability, construct validity, and convergent validity were evaluated in a group of 384 male and female university students. Test-retest reliability was evaluated using a group of 154 male and female university students. The results of the factor analysis were similar to the scale structure claimed for this instrument. The subscales also showed internal consistency and stability over time. The AQ and its subscales were also compared with the scales and subscales of the Spielberger State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory (STAXI), the Cook-Medley Hostility Scale (Ho), the Buss-Durkee Hostility Inventory (BDHI), and the Jenkins Activity Survey-Form H (JASE-H). The results show that the AQ evaluates some aspects of anger, such as Anger-Trait and Anger-Out, rather than other elements, such as Anger-In or Anger-State. In Study 2, two new male groups were used to evaluate the criterion validity of the AQ: 57 prison inmates and 93 university students, finding that this instrument discriminated between the scores obtained by common offenders and university students.     

The time course of neural changes underlying auditory perceptual learning

Improvement in perception takes place within the training session and from one session to the next. The present study aims at determining the time course of perceptual learning as revealed by changes in auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) reflecting preattentive processes. Subjects were trained to discriminate two complex auditory patterns in a single session. ERPs were recorded just before and after training, while subjects read a book and ignored stimulation. ERPs showed a negative wave called mismatch negativity (MMN)—which indexes automatic detection of a change in a homogeneous auditory sequence—just after subjects learned to consciously discriminate the two patterns. ERPs were recorded again 12, 24, 36, and 48 h later, just before testing performance on the discrimination task. Additional behavioral and neurophysiological changes were found several hours after the training session: an enhanced P2 at 24 h followed by shorter reaction times, and an enhanced MMN at 36 h. These results indicate that gains in performance on the discrimination of two complex auditory patterns are accompanied by different learning-dependent neurophysiological events evolving within different time frames, supporting the hypothesis that fast and slow neural changes underlie the acquisition of improved perception.     

BuscaPalabras: A program for deriving orthographic and phonological neighborhood statistics and other psycholinguistic indices in Spanish

This article describes a Windows program that enables users to obtain a broad range of statistics concerning the properties of word and nonword stimuli in Spanish, including word frequency, syllable frequency, bigram and biphone frequency, orthographic similarity, orthographic and phonological structure, concreteness, familiarity, imageability, valence, arousal, and age-of-acquisition measures. It is designed for use by researchers in psycholinguistics, particularly those concerned with recognition of isolated words. The program computes measures of orthographic similarity online, with respect to either a default vocabulary of 31,491 Spanish words or a vocabulary specified by the user. In addition to providing standard orthographic and phonological neighborhood measures, the program can be used to obtain information about other forms of orthographic similarity, such as transposed-letter similarity and embedded-word similarity. It is available, free of charge, from the following Web site: www.maccs.mq.edu.au/~colin/B-Pal.     

Canceling updating in the comprehension of counterfactuals embedded in narratives

Participants were given counterfactual sentences--for example, "If Mary had won the lottery she would have bought a Mercedes car"--or factual sentences--for example, "Because Mary won the lottery, she bought a Mercedes car"--embedded in short narratives. Reading times showed that readers were immediately sensitive to the special status of counterfactual information (Experiment 1). In addition, probe-recognition latencies demonstrated that old information was more accessible in counterfactual than in factual stories, and new information was equally accessible in both kinds of stories (Experiment 2). However, after reading additional clauses, new information became less accessible in counterfactual than in factual stories (Experiment 3). These results suggest that counterfactual events are momentarily represented but are later suppressed and the readers' attention goes back to previous events in the story.     

Parallel processing of stimulus features during RSVP: evidence from the second response

When observers are asked to report a feature of a single target displayed in rapid serial visual presentation, they frequently make errors. Most frequently, a feature from the to-be-reported dimension pertaining to a stimulus presented near the target is reported. These migrations are so-called illusory conjunctions in the time domain. From parallel models, it is proposed that during the presentation of the series, the response features of the stimuli are extracted. If a high rate of presentation does not enable proper binding processes, the system could base its response on sophisticated guessing on the basis of the relative levels of activation of the available response features. However, the multiple extractions assumption has not received direct empirical support. We report two experiments in which the observers had to report their first and second response candidates. This double response paradigm makes it possible to test the assumption that more than one response feature is available for making a response. Furthermore, the application of the constant ratio rule (following Botella, Barriopedro, & Suero's, 2001, model) to the first responses allows predictions for the ratios between choices of the items for the second responses. The correlations between the observed and the predicted response proportions were .887 and .956 in the two experiments. This high predictive capacity indicates, first, that the observers have more than one response available, among which to choose, and second, that the choice among responses is determined largely in the same way for both, first and second responses. Nevertheless, the small errors in prediction are further reduced if a proportion of pure guesses is assumed in the second responses. These are probably due to memory losses, misidentifications of the features, and other factors impairing performance in second responses in comparison with first responses.     

Stress and coping in Japanese children and adolescents

Japanese children and adolescents (n=580) provided self-reports of stressor intensity, coping efforts, and adjustment. A new measure of Japanese adolescent coping was created, and psychometric analyses confirmed a reliable four-factor structure. Mean group difference analyses showed that girls reported higher levels of self-image and peer relations stress, and reported using isolation and problem-solving coping more and externalising coping less than males. Younger adolescents (5th/8th grades) reported higher stress in the domains of school, peer relations, and family relations, whereas older adolescents (10th grade) reported higher self-image problems. Statistical moderation was used to examine how youth negotiated the stress process. Females were found to be more responsive to appearance, family, and peer difficulties. Affiliation coping by females operated as a buffer between appearance anxiety and dissatisfaction with appearance. Externalizing coping was not associated with peer relations satisfaction for males, but it was negatively associated for females.     

The role of the frequency of constituents in compound words: Evidence from Basque and Spanish

Recent data from compound word processing suggests that compounds are recognized via their constituent lexemes (Juhasz, Starr, Inhoff, & Placke, 2003). The present lexical decision experiment manipulated orthogonally the frequency of the constituents of compound words in two languages: Basque and Spanish. Basque and Spanish diverge widely in their morphological properties and in the number of existing compound words. Furthermore, the head lexeme (i.e., the most meaningful lexeme related to the whole-word meaning) in Spanish tends to be the second lexeme, whereas in Basque the percentage is more distributed. Results showed a facilitative effect of the frequency of the second lexeme, in both Basque and Spanish compounds. Thus, both Basque and Spanish readers decompose compounds into their constituents for lexical access, and this decomposition is carried out in a language-independent and blind-to-semantics manner. We examine the implications of these results for models of lexical access.     

Compound cue processing within the fast and frugal heuristics approach in nonlinearly separable environments

Three experiments investigated whether participants used Take The Best (TTB) Configural, a fast and frugal heuristic that processes configurations of cues when making inferences concerning which of two alternatives has a higher criterion value. Participants were presented with a compound cue that was nonlinearly separable from its elements. The compound was highly valid in Experiments 1 and 2, but invalid in Experiment 3. Participants’ causal mental models were manipulated via instructions: participants were either told that cues acted through the same causal mechanism (configural causal model), through different causal mechanisms (elemental causal model), or the causal mechanisms were not specified (neutral causal model). A high percentage of participants used TTB-Configural when they had a configural causal model and a highly valid compound existed, suggesting that causal knowledge can be incorporated in otherwise very basic cognitive mechanisms to allow fine-grained adaptation to complex task structures.     

The role of external letter positions in visual word recognition

A key issue for any computational model of visual word recognition is the choice of an input coding schema, which is responsible for assigning letter positions. Such a schema must reflect the fact that, according to recent research, nonwords created by transposing letters (e.g., caniso for CASINO ), typically, appear to be more similar to the word than nonwords created by replacing letters (e.g., caviro ). In the present research, we initially carried out a computational analysis examining the degree to which the position of the transposition influences transposed-letter similarity effects. We next conducted a masked priming experiment with the lexical decision task to determine whether a transposed-letter priming advantage occurs when the first letter position is involved. Primes were created by either transposing the first and third letters (démula-MEDULA ) or replacing the first and third letters (bérula-MEDULA). Results showed that there was no transposed-letter priming advantage in this situation. We discuss the implications of these results for models of visual word recognition.