Anger arousal,deindividuation, and aggression

We tested the notion that angered persons' aggression would be increased through a process of excitation transfer when they are deindividuated, but that individuated subjects would be most aggressive in circumstances under which they could use the information that they had ingested an arousing drug as a pretext for their aggression. Sixty-two male undergraduates participated under either deindividuated or individuated conditions, ingested either 350 mg of caffeine or a placebo, were informed that they had either taken a stimulant or a nonarousing drug, and were all angered by a confederate. According to prediction, when deindividuated and aroused by caffeine the amount of noxious stimulation subjects delivered to the provocateur was greater if they believed that the drug they had taken was nonarousing than if they thought it was a stimulant; in contrast, individuated subjects' aggression was greater when aroused subjects believed the drug was a stimulant. The results are discussed in terms of excitation transfer and the effect of aggression inhibition on the use of information about one's arousal.     

Spatial distribution of attentional inhibition is not altered in healthy aging

Inhibition of return (IOR) is a phenomenon of attentional orienting that is indexed by slower responses to targets presented at previously attended locations. The purpose of this study was to examine adult age differences in the distribution of IOR to multiple locations. In three experiments, young adults (ages 18–30 years) and older adults (ages 60–87 years) completed an IOR task that varied in the number of simultaneous onset cues (one to seven) and the number of display locations (four or eight). Analyses were conducted to explore whether IOR patterns were most consistent with limited inhibitory resources, with regional distribution of inhibition, or with vector averaging of cues. The IOR effects were most consistent with vector averaging, such that multiple cues initiated a directional gradient of inhibition centered on the average direction of the cues. The IOR patterns varied minimally with age, consistent with the conclusion that older adults and young adults distributed inhibition in a similar manner.     

Gender role masculinity and angry aggression in women

The extent to which gender role masculinity is related to degree of women's angry retaliation was investigated. The study also examined whether the relationship between gender role masculinity and anger is mediated by gender role differences in reactivity to provocation, or to differences in the labeling of anger. It was expected that the influence of gender role masculinity on affect and aggression would be greatest when the nature of the affective arousal is ambiguous. Sixty undergraduate women (predominantly upper middle class and white) were given a placebo pill. They were either given ambiguous information about the pill's effects, or were told it was a vitamin or a stimulant. They then were either provoked or not provoked, and finally received an opportunity to retaliate. The participants had been divided by median split into high- and low-masculinity groups based on their scores on Spence and Helmreich's (1978) Personal Attributes Questionnaire. As expected, when provoked, high-masculinity subjects were more aggressive than low-masculinity subjects but only in the ambiguous drug information condition. Although they reported more arousal-related sensations, they did not rate themselves higher in anger. The results are discussed in terms of gender role influences on the experience of anger and the expression of aggression.     

A systematic review of cognitive functioning among young people who have experienced homelessness,foster care,or poverty

Young people who have experienced homelessness, foster care, or poverty are among the most disadvantaged in society. This review examines whether young people who have these experiences differ from their non-disadvantaged peers with respect to their cognitive skills and abilities, and whether cognitive profiles differ between these three groups. Three electronic databases were systematically searched for articles published between 1 January 1995 and 1 February 2015 on cognitive functioning among young people aged 15 to 24 years who have experienced homelessness, foster care, or poverty. Articles were screened using pre-determined inclusion criteria, then the data were extracted, and its quality assessed. A total of 31 studies were included. Compared to non-disadvantaged youth or published norms, cognitive performance was generally found to be impaired in young people who had experienced homelessness, foster care, or poverty. A common area of difficulty across all groups is working memory. General cognitive functioning, attention, and executive function deficits are shared by the homeless and poverty groups. Creativity emerges as a potential strength for homeless young people. The cognitive functioning of young people with experiences of impermanent housing and poverty has been relatively neglected and more research is needed to further establish cognitive profiles and replicate the findings reviewed here. As some aspects of cognitive functioning may show improvement with training, these could represent a target for intervention.     

Recognition without picture identification: Geons as components of the pictorial memory trace

Participants viewed a list of black-and-white line drawings and were then presented with a picture fragment identification task in which half of the fragments corresponded to studied pictures and half corresponded to unstudied pictures. In addition to trying to identify each picture fragment, participants gave a rating to indicate the likelihood that the fragment came from a studied picture. When participants could not identify the picture fragments, they were still able to discriminate between fragments that came from studied pictures and fragments that came from unstudied pictures (as shown by their recognition ratings), but only when the fragments contained information about the geometric components (geons) that underlay the original pictures. No recognition without identification was found when the fragments contained only line segment information.     

A preliminary evaluation of two behavioral skills training procedures for teaching abduction-prevention skills to schoolchildren

Although child abduction is a low-rate event, it presents a serious threat to the safety of children. The victims of child abduction face the threat of physical and emotional injury, sexual abuse, and death. Previous research has shown that behavioral skills training (BST) is effective in teaching children abduction-prevention skills, although not all children learn the skills. This study compared BST only to BST with an added in situ training component to teach abduction-prevention skills in a small-group format to schoolchildren. Results showed that both programs were effective in teaching abduction-prevention skills. In addition, the scores for the group that received in situ training were significantly higher than scores for the group that received BST alone at the 3-month follow-up assessment.     

Age-related changes in selective attention and perceptual load during visual search

Three visual search experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that age differences in selective attention vary as a function of perceptual load (E. A. Maylor & N. Lavie, 1998). Under resource-limited conditions (Experiments 1 and 2), the distraction from irrelevant display items generally decreased as display size (perceptual load) increased. This perceptual load effect was similar for younger and older adults, contrary to the findings of Maylor and Lavie. Distraction at low perceptual loads appeared to reflect both general and specific inhibitory mechanisms. Under more data-limited conditions (Experiment 3), an age-related decline in selective attention was evident, but the age difference was not attributable to capacity limitations as predicted by the perceptual load theory.     

Differential age effects on attention-based inhibition: inhibitory tagging and inhibition of return

The purpose of this study was to determine whether 2 forms of attentional inhibition, inhibition of return (IOR) and inhibitory tagging, are differentially affected by the aging process. The authors tested 24 younger adults (mean age = 22 years) and 24 older adults (mean age = 69 years) on a combined IOR and Stroop task (Vivas & Fuentes, 2001). As predicted, younger adults' performance was consistent with inhibitory tagging of objects at inhibited locations. Although older adults demonstrated intact IOR, there was no evidence of inhibitory tagging. The results suggest that age deficits in inhibition are selective.     

Adult age differences in visual word identification: functional neuroanatomy by positron emission tomography

Adult age differences in the neural systems mediating semantic (context-independent) memory were investigated using positron emission tomography (PET). Younger (20-29 years) and older (62-70 years) participants performed lexical decision (word/nonword discrimination) and nonsemantic (simple visual search) baseline tasks during PET scanning. Within the lexical decision task, display duration and presentation rate were varied across scans. The behavioral data suggested that although an age-related slowing was evident in visual feature and response processing, the retrieval of semantic/lexical information was similar for younger and older adults. For both age groups, lexical-related activation occurred in inferior prefrontal and occipitotemporal regions of the left hemisphere. Differential activation, as a function of age group, was observed in the left occipitotemporal pathway as a result of older adults' maintaining higher levels of neural activity in striate cortex (during visual search) and in inferior temporal cortex (during lexical decision). The prefrontal activation was similar for the two age groups. Thus, although this form of semantic memory retrieval does not undergo significant age-related decline, an age-related change in the associated pattern of neural activation is evident. These findings differ from previous neuroimaging studies of episodic (context-dependent) memory retrieval, which have suggested that age-related compensatory mechanisms are expressed primarily by greater activation of prefrontal regions for older adults than for younger adults.