Creating your own hostile environment: a laboratory examination of trait aggressiveness and the violence escalation cycle

A dyadic interactive aggression paradigm tested hypotheses from the General Aggression Model about how trait aggressiveness can create behaviorally hostile social environments. Pairs of college student participants competed in a modified reaction time task in which they repeatedly delivered and received each other's punishments. The trait aggressiveness of both participants influenced the punishment intensities (aggression level) set by each member of the dyad on later trials. Furthermore, there was a pattern of escalation from early to later trials. These trait aggressiveness effects (both self and partner) on later aggressive behavior were largely mediated by partner aggression levels during early trials. Results also suggested two aggressive motives--hostile and instrumental--resulted from high partner aggression during early trials and these motives partially mediated the effects of trait aggressiveness and of early trial aggression on later aggressive behavior.     

Attention orienting effects of hesitations in speech: evidence from ERPs

Filled-pause disfluencies such as um and er affect listeners' comprehension, possibly mediated by attentional mechanisms (J. E. Fox Tree, 2001). However, there is little direct evidence that hesitations affect attention. The current study used an acoustic manipulation of continuous speech to induce event-related potential components associated with attention (mismatch negativity [MMN] and P300) during the comprehension of fluent and disfluent utterances. In fluent cases, infrequently occurring acoustically manipulated target words gave rise to typical MMN and P300 components when compared to nonmanipulated controls. In disfluent cases, where targets were preceded by natural sounding hesitations culminating in the filled pause er, an MMN (reflecting a detection of deviance) was still apparent for manipulated words, but there was little evidence of a subsequent P300. This suggests that attention was not reoriented to deviant words in disfluent cases. A subsequent recognition test showed that nonmanipulated words were more likely to be remembered if they had been preceded by a hesitation. Taken together, these results strongly implicate attention in an account of disfluency processing: Hesitations orient listeners' attention, with consequences for the immediate processing and later representation of an utterance.     

Solving the credit assignment problem: explicit and implicit learning of action sequences with probabilistic outcomes

In most problem-solving activities, feedback is received at the end of an action sequence. This creates a credit-assignment problem where the learner must associate the feedback with earlier actions, and the interdependencies of actions require the learner to remember past choices of actions. In two studies, we investigated the nature of explicit and implicit learning processes in the credit-assignment problem using a probabilistic sequential choice task with and without a secondary memory task. We found that when explicit learning was dominant, learning was faster to select the better option in their first choices than in the last choices. When implicit reinforcement learning was dominant, learning was faster to select the better option in their last choices than in their first choices. Consistent with the probability-learning and sequence-learning literature, the results show that credit assignment involves two processes: an explicit memory encoding process that requires memory rehearsal and an implicit reinforcement-learning process that propagates credits backwards to previous choices.     

Being distinctive versus being conspicuous: The effects of numeric status and sex-stereotyped tasks on individual performance in groups

Being in the numeric minority (e.g., being a solo woman in a group of men) influences how well a person performs within a work group. But being the solo member is only one way in which people can be atypical in a group; a person can also represent a social or demographic category that has not typically been associated with the task that the group is working on. Using a design with four categories of group composition (minority, balanced, majority, homogeneous) and two categories of tasks (sex-typical, sex-atypical) we found that the sex composition of the group interacted with the sex typicality of the task to influence both positive deferrals by group members and individual performance in groups. But, rather than consistently reducing performance as prior research has suggested, being numerically atypical enhanced individual performance when the task was typical for that person’s sex. Further, positive deferrals mediated between the interaction of numeric composition and task typicality in influencing individual performance suggesting that both majority group members and the solo member affect one another’s performance in groups. We conclude by discussing why understanding the interplay between these two sources of stereotyping, numeric composition and task typicality, is important for understanding the social nature of individual performance in groups.     

The construct validity of three entry level personality inventories used in the UK: a cautionary case study

We report an error in “The Construct Validity of Three Entry Level Personality Inventories Used in the UK: A Cautionary Case Study” by Neil Anderson and Deniz S. Ones (European Journal of Personality, 2003, Vol. 17, S39–S66). We also alert the reader to a potential data shift of one data row in the dataset reported on in Anderson and Ones (2003) and provide an alternate table. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Self-affirmation increases acceptance of health-risk information among UK adult smokers with low socioeconomic status.

This study reports an experiment designed to test whether self-affirmation can overcome defensive processing of risk information in a sample of UK adult smokers with low socioeconomic status. Participants (N = 57) were randomized to either a self-affirmation or control condition before reading a government-sponsored antismoking leaflet and completing measures of message acceptance, intention, and self-efficacy. Participants' subsequent behavior (taking leaflets) was recorded surreptitiously. Results showed that the manipulation significantly increased message acceptance, intention and behavior, and that the effects of the manipulation on behavior were mediated through message acceptance and intention. The practical and theoretical implications of the findings are discussed in relation to the possible use of self-affirmation manipulations to enhance the effectiveness of smoking cessation interventions.     

Convergent and discriminant validity of three measures of stage of change

The University of Rhode Island Change Assessment (E. A. McConnaughy, J. O. Prochaska, & W. F. Velicer, 1983), the Stages of Change Readiness and Treatment Eagerness Scale (W. R. Miller & J. S. Tonigan, 1996), and the Readiness to Change Questionnaire (S. Rollnick, N. Heather, R. Gold, & W. Hall, 1992) are commonly used multidimensional measures of stage of change. The authors examined the convergent and discriminant validity of drug-use versions of these 3 measures through multitrait-multimethod analysis in a population of indigent, out-of-treatment drug users (N = 377). Agreement in stage-of-change assignment and the relationship between stage of change and drug-use behaviors were also examined. Confirmatory factor analysis suggests that the Stages of Change Readiness and Treatment Eagerness Scale may have questionable convergent validity with the University of Rhode Island Change Assessment and Readiness to Change Questionnaire. There was moderate agreement in stage assignment. Analysis of behavior did provide some support for the construct validity of the measures. The results suggest that these drug-use stage-of-change measures may not be equivalent.     

Understanding psychological distress in Meniere's disease: a systematic review

It has long been suspected that psychological disturbance is common in Meniere's disease (MD), but there has been no systematic review of research on this topic since 1977. The aim of this review was to investigate whether components of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or health anxiety contribute to distress, so that support and psychological therapy can be tailored better to the particular problems of people with MD. We systematically identified all studies of psychological factors associated with MD between 1977 and 2004. We then tabulated the findings from each of the 28 studies to match them to the components of PTSD and health anxiety. Levels of psychosocial impairment and distress were comparable to patients with similar illness. Evidence was found for some of the components of both PTSD and health anxiety. We conclude that more specific research into PTSD-like symptoms and health anxiety in MD is needed. There was a general lack of research into psychological mechanisms contributing to distress in this population, many studies had methodological weaknesses, and only one qualitative and one longitudinal study had been carried out.     

A novel assessment of behaviors associated with body dissatisfaction and disordered eating

The purpose of the present study was to compare response rates to questions assessing behaviors associated with body dissatisfaction and disordered eating on a standard self-report questionnaire that was nominally anonymous to an unmatched count questionnaire that allowed for true response anonymity. Five hundred sixty-seven undergraduate students were asked about disordered eating and body image-related behaviors using one of two response formats; either a conventional true-false questionnaire or an unmatched count questionnaire that did not require participants to directly respond to any sensitive questions. Both men and women had significantly different rates of endorsement between the two methods of assessment on the majority of the questions, suggesting that degree of anonymity and format of response may affect endorsements of these potentially sensitive topics. These results contribute to the existing literature highlighting the necessity of understanding self-report bias in determining accurate rates of sensitive behaviors.