Effects of Playing Videogames on Children's Aggressive and Other Behaviors1

Noting the pervasiveness of videogames in American culture, the authors set out to examine the effects that playing videogames has on children. Thirty-one children were matched on sex, randomly assigned to play either a violent (karate) videogame or a nonviolent (jungle vine swinging) videogame, and then observed during free play. The main results were that the children who had played the jungle swing videogame later played more with a jungle swing toy and that the children who played the violent videogame later showed more aggression. The authors interpreted the findings as an indication that young children who play videogames later tend to act similarly to how their videogame character acted.     

Disarmament Decisions as Social Dilemmas1

The individual deciding on a nuclear weapons production policy is faced with a dilemma in which a choice must be made to support one of several conflicting defense policies. In order to investigate the social-psychological variables that are related to armament policy decision making, a telephone survey was conducted in the City of St. Louis, Missouri. Adult subjects (N= 110) responded to questions concerned with cognitive, attitudinal, and emotional responses to nuclear arms. Participants were also asked to choose a weapons production policy for the United States under conditions of continued and decreased Soviet nuclear arms production. Results indicated that respondents decisions about nuclear weapons production were related to their support for deterrence, the availability of their nuclear-related images, their emotional response to nuclear war, their attributions of responsibility for the prevention of nuclear war, and their political party affiliation. Distinctions between antinuclear decision-makers and pronuclear decision-makers are discussed.     

On the Integration of Nomothetic and Idiographic Research Methods in the Study of Personal Meaning

ABSTRACT This study presents the technique of self-investigation as a research tool for the study of personal meaning from the perspective of the general and the particular After reviewing the nomothesis-idiography debate, I argue that personality psychology can benefit from a combination of nomothetic and idiographic research methodologies This creates a need for new theoretical frameworks that incorporate both nomo-concepts, enabling the study of people in general and idio-concepts, enabling the psychologist to understand the particular world of the individual Allport's term “value” is reformulated as the idio-concept “valuation,” which refers to personal meaning in an individual's history The term “affect,” as a central component in the process of valuation, is treated as a nomo-concept The relation between the two concepts is demonstrated by studying specific concerns in the history of an individual as recurrent expressions of general winner and loser experiences     

Neuroticism, extraversion, and related traits in adult twins reared apart and reared together

The relative importance of genetic and environmental factors for neuroticism, extraversion, impulsivity, and monotony avoidance were estimated in a sample of 99 monozygotic and 229 dizygotic pairs of twins reared apart (TRA) and a matched sample of 160 monozygotic and 212 dizygotic pairs of twins reared together (TRT). The average age was 58.6 (SD = 13.6); 72% of the twins were 50 or older. Model-fitting analyses verified the importance of genetic factors for all four measures; from 23% to 45% of the total variation was attributable to genetic sources. There was considerable evidence that these factors were operating in a nonadditive manner for extraversion and impulsivity. Shared environment accounted for less than 10% of the variance; some evidence for selective placement was found for neuroticism.     

Influence of positive affect on the subjective utility of gains and losses: it is just not worth the risk

A modification of the procedure originally used by Davidson, Suppes, and Siegel (1956) to measure subjective utility was used to study the influence of positive affect on individuals' perceived value (utility) functions. Results indicated, as expected, that persons in whom positive affect had been induced showed a more negative subjective utility for losses than did controls. This indicates that losses seem worse to people who are feeling happy than to those in a control condition. The subjective utility functions of the two groups did not differ as much, however, when people were considering potential gain. Thus, at least in the situation tested in this study, potential gains did not seem to be more appealing (nor less so) for affect subjects than they did for controls. These findings are discussed in relation to theoretical issues in decision making and work suggesting that positive affect can promote increased sensitivity to losses in situations of potential meaningful loss.     

The effects of contextual information and gender on the prediction of hypnotic susceptibility

Council, Kirsch, and Hafner (1986) obtained empirical support for the hypothesis that significant correlations between questionnaire measures of absorption and hypnotic susceptibility are an artifact of subjects' beliefs about their own hypnotizability. We tested this hypothesis in a two-session experiment. During Session 1, subjects completed questionnaire measures of absorption, mystical experience, daydreaming frequency, and paranormal beliefs. During Session 2, subjects were tested for hypnotic susceptibility. Subjects were also exposed to one of three information manipulations: They were told about hypnotic testing either before or after filling out the questionnaires or were not told about hypnotic testing. The information manipulation moderated the prediction of susceptibility by the questionnaire measures for women, but not for men. For women, scores on the absorption questionnaire predicted susceptibility only when subjects were informed about hypnotic testing. In the told-after condition, this effect generalized to all of the remaining questionnaire measures. For men, none of the questionnaires was a reliable predictor of susceptibility.     

Conceptions of states and traits: dimensional attributes with ideals as prototypes

Traits and states are concepts that people use to both describe and understand themselves and others. We show that people view these concepts as prototype-based categories that have a graded internal structure and fuzzy boundaries and identify a set of attributes that define the prototypical cores of two categories: traits and states. Prototypical traits are stable, long-lasting, and internally caused. Prototypical states are temporary, brief, and caused by external circumstances. These prototypes are not defined by averages, as the family-resemblance principle would suggest, but by ideal (or extreme) attribute values. Like other ideal-based categories, traits and states serve particular goals. Trait concepts permit people to predict the present from the past; state concepts identify those behaviors that can be controlled by manipulating the situation. These two complementary schemas are part of the extensive theory of psychological causality that is implicit in language. Abstract social concepts differ from object categories in their category standards, the nature of their attributes, and the interrelations among those attributes.     

The recognition of threatening facial stimuli

Two studies examined the information that defines a threatening facial display. The first study identified those facial characteristics that distinguish between representations of threatening and nonthreatening facial displays. Masks that presented either threatening or nonthreatening facial displays were obtained from a number of non-Western cultures and scored for the presence of those facial features that discriminated between such displays in the drawings of two American samples. Threatening masks contained a significantly higher number of these characteristics across all cultures examined. The second study determined whether the information provided by the facial display might be more primary nonrepresentational visual patterns than facial features with obvious denotative meaning (e.g., diagonal lines rather than downturned eyebrows). The subjective response to sets of diagonal, angular, and curvilinear visual stimuli revealed that the nonrepresentational features of angularity and diagonality in the visual stimulus appeared to have the ability to evoke the subjective responses that convey the meaning of threat.     

Role of visual information in ball catching

The present study is concerned with the perceptual information about the body and space underlying the act of catching a ball. In a series of four experiments, subjects were asked to catch a luminous ball under various visual conditions. In general, catching in a normally illuminated room was contrasted with catching the luminous ball in an otherwise completely dark room. In the third and fourth experiments, intermediate conditions of visual information were included. The results suggest that it is possible to catch a ball with one hand when only the ball is visible, but performance is better when the subject has the benefit of a rich visual environment and two hands. The second experiment indicated that subject performance does improve with practice in the dark, but time spent in the darkened room itself doesn't result in a significant decrement in performance. Results of the third study suggest that vision of one's hand does not aid in the performance of this task whereas the presence of a minimal visual frame appears to aid performance. The final study examined the relation between catching performance and body sway under similar visual conditions. Results of this experiment imply that persons who exhibit relatively little postural sway in full-room lighting performed better at this catching task.     

The role of visual information in control of a constrained locomotor task

The nature of visually guided locomotion was examined in an experiment where subjects had to walk to targets under various conditions. Target distance was manipulated so that subjects had to (a) lengthen their paces in order to hit the target; (b) shorten their paces; (c) make no adjustments to their standard pace length at all. They did this under four visual conditions: (a) normal vision; (b) with vision restricted to a "snapshot" each time the foot that was to be placed on the target was on the ground; (c) with a snapshot each time the foot to be placed was in the swing phase; and (d) no vision after departure fro the target. The results show that the subjects succeed in reaching the target in most cases. However, the smoothness and fluidity of their movements vary significantly between conditions. Under normal vision or where visual snapshots are delivered when the pointing foot is on the ground, locomotion is smoothly regulated as the subjects approach the target. where snapshots are delivered when the pointing foot is in the swing phase, regulation becomes clumsy and ill coordinated. Where no vision is available at all during the approach, adjustments are made, but these are least coordinated of all. The results show that well-coordinated visual regulation does not require continuous visual guidance but depends on intermittent information being available at the appropriate times in the action sequence. Such timing is often more important than the total amount of information that is available for guidance.