Causal effects of violent sports video games on aggression: Is it competitiveness or violent content?

Three experiments examined the impact of excessive violence in sport video games on aggression-related variables. Participants played either a nonviolent simulation-based sports video game (baseball or football) or a matched excessively violent sports video game. Participants then completed measures assessing aggressive cognitions (Experiment 1), aggressive affect and attitudes towards violence in sports (Experiment 2), or aggressive behavior (Experiment 3). Playing an excessively violent sports video game increased aggressive affect, aggressive cognition, aggressive behavior, and attitudes towards violence in sports. Because all games were competitive, these findings indicate that violent content uniquely leads to increases in several aggression-related variables, as predicted by the General Aggression Model and related social-cognitive models.     

A Task Analysis of Client Re-engagement: Therapeutic De-escalation of High-Conflict Coparents

Parents who are engaged in protracted conflict following a divorce are often referred to coparenting therapy. Episodes of intense conflict are common during these therapy sessions and often result in coparents disengaging from the therapist while they engage in escalating conflict with each other, potentially disrupting their progress in therapy. The purpose of this study was to identify how therapists successfully re-engage clients in the session. To understand this process, 24 disengagement events (12 successful and 12 unsuccessful) from 13 cases were analyzed using a task analytic approach. The sample included coparent dyads referred by the judicial system to a high-conflict coparenting therapy program. Task analysis was used to create a model of how re-engagement unfolds in treatment. The empirical model that resulted has five phases: (1) disengagement from the therapeutic process, (2) disruption of the conflict, (3) de-escalating the most escalated coparent, (4) de-escalating the other coparent, and (5) therapist buffered re-engagement. Successful episodes of re-engagement tended to have therapists who remained active throughout the conflict episode, used structuring interventions aimed at disrupting and then regulating the most escalated partner, blocked attempts to re-engage in conflict, and then repeated this process with the less escalated partner. Additional interventions that promote therapeutic re-engagement are described for each phase, and implications for clinicians and researchers are discussed.     

The influence of threat and aversive motivation on conflict processing in the Stroop task

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics - Motivated attention can be driven by the desire to maximize gains or escape punishment. In the Stroop task, when rewards can be obtained by responding...     

Effects of short-term crowding on aggression in captive groups of pigtail monkeys (macaca nemestrina)

Agonistic behaviors of 14 groups of pigtail monkeys were monitored under 2 spatial conditions, normal living space and half that amount of space. Aggression occurred less frequently in the crowded than in the relatively less crowded condition. The results of this study resemble those of some analogous research on human children, and they suggest that nonhuman primate models of crowding stress and aggression may be especially appropriate.     

From existential alterity to ethical reciprocity: Beauvoir’s alternative to Levinas

Continental Philosophy Review - While Simone de Beauvoir’s theory of alterity has been the topic of much discussion within Beauvoir scholarship, feminist theory, and social and political...