Toward a Positive Perspective on Violence Prevention in Schools: Building Connections

As concerns about the level of school violence have increased in recent years, many schools have instituted policies designed to deter or prohibit violent and aggressive acts on school campuses. Although well intentioned, most such policies tend to be reactive and punitive in nature. In contrast, this article proposes a positive approach to violence prevention based on establishing meaningful connections between students, their families, peers, and school.     

Children's understanding of teaching: the role of knowledge and belief

The relation between preschoolers’ concept of teaching and theory of mind was explored to determine if there is a developmental change in understanding how teaching depends on knowledge and belief. The study tested whether 3- to 6-year-olds thought the awareness of a knowledge difference is necessary for teaching. The 3- and 4-year-olds understood teaching stories with clear knowledge differences and could correctly use that information to specify the teacher and learner. The 5- and 6-year-olds, who performed well on a standard false belief task, further understood that it was the teacher's belief about the knowledge difference that would actually govern teaching. The conceptual link to teaching suggests that theory of mind is critical for understanding other forms of knowledge acquisition besides perceptual access.     

Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors: The Proximal and Distal Effects of Affective Variables on Behavioral Expression

This paper reports on 2 studies designed to examine the contribution of affective variables on the expression of body-focused repetitive behaviors (BFRBs; e.g., skin picking, nail biting). The first study revealed that persons engaging in a BFRB experienced significantly higher levels of anxiety and depression than those without BFRBs. The second study was conducted to determine if repetitive behaviors were differentially affected across various emotional states and across those persons with and without BFRBs. Participants were randomly exposed to anxiety, depression, boredom, and control conditions. Results showed no differential effects on the occurrence of repetitive behaviors within the no-BFRB group; however, the BFRB group engaged in more repetitive behaviors in the Bored condition than in the Control condition. This study offers the first experimental evidence that emotional variables can have a differential impact on the expression of BFRBs.     

REFERENCES EXAMINING ASSAULTS BY WOMEN ON THEIR SPOUSES OR MALE PARTNERS: AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

This bibliography examines 155 scholarly investigations; 126 empirical studies and 29 reviews and/or analyses, which demonstrate that women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners. The aggregate sample size in the reviewed studies exceeds 116,000.     

Separation/divorce sexual assault: The current state of social scientific knowledge

Many contend that the logical solution to woman abuse in marriage/cohabitation is for women to exit through legal separation, divorce, or other means. However, a growing body of empirical work shows that separation or divorce does not necessarily solve the problem of woman abuse. For example, in addition to experiencing lethal or nonlethal forms of physical violence and psychological abuse, many women who try to leave, or who have left their male partners, are sexually assaulted. The main objective of this paper is to critically review the extant empirical and theoretical work on separation/divorce sexual assault. Suggestions for future research and theorizing are also provided.     

Verb subcategorization frequencies: American English corpus data,methodological studies,and cross-corpus comparisons

Verb subcategorization frequencies (verb biases) have been widely studied in psycholinguistics and play an important role in human sentence processing. Yet available resources on subcategorization frequencies suffer from limited coverage, limited ecological validity, and divergent coding criteria. Prior estimates of verb transitivity, for example, vary widely with corpus size, coverage, and coding criteria. This article provides norming data for 281 verbs of interest to psycholinguistic research, sampled from a corpus of American English, along with a detailed coding manual. We examine the effect on transitivity bias of various coding decisions and methods of computing verb biases.