Types of Aggression,Responsiveness to Provocation,and Callous-unemotional Traits in Detained Adolescents

The present study investigated differences in the behavioral and psychophysiological responses to provocation and in the level of callous-unemotional traits in boys exhibiting different patterns of aggression. Eighty-five boys (ages 13-18) in a juvenile detention center played a competitive computer task against a hypothetical peer who provided low and high levels of provocation. Youth high on both self-reported reactive and proactive aggression showed different behavioral responses to provocation than youth high on only reactive aggression. Specifically, the combined group showed high levels of aggressive responses without any provocation, whereas the group high on reactive aggression showed an increase in aggressive responding to low provocation. Further, results revealed a trend for the combined group to show lower levels of skin conductance reactivity to low provocation if they were also high on callous-unemotional traits.     

Communication and Cognition: The Social Beyond Language,Interaction and Culture

Cognition theories describe the social with terms like language, interaction or culture, whose theoretical status has also been discussed in modern sociology. These concepts are not well-positioned to understand the emergence and autonomy of social orders. Sociological theory of self-referential systems can be useful to reconstruct the bottom-up process which contributes to the emergence of the social as communication as well as to describe the way in which society exerts downward causation upon cognitive phenomena. The core of this theory is the systemic category of meaning as a shared horizon for psychic and social systems.     

Social representations used by the parents of Mexican adolescent drug users under treatment to explain their children's drug use: gender differences in parental narratives

The aim of this study was to explore the social representations used by the parents of adolescent drug users to explain the onset of drug use. Differences in explanations between the parents of male and female adolescents were also explored. Sixty parents who accompanied their children to four rehabilitation centers in 2004 completed two semi-structured questionnaires. In addition, indepth interviews were applied to a subsample. The explanation of the drug use was carried out through two social representations: the neglectful family and the son or daughter as an inexperienced teen. The parents-son model was well structured; however, the parents-daughter was unstructured, which suggests a higher resonance in the familial group.     

Children like dense neighborhoods: Orthographic neighborhood density effects in novel readers

Previous evidence with English beginning readers suggests that some orthographic effects, such as the orthographic neighborhood density effects, could be stronger for children than for adults. Particularly, children respond more accurately to words with many orthographic neighbors than to words with few neighbors. The magnitude of the effects for children is much higher than for adults, and some researchers have proposed that these effects could be progressively modulated according to reading expertise. The present paper explores in depth how children from 1st to 6th grade perform a lexical decision with words that are from dense or sparse orthographic neighborhoods, attending not only to accuracy measures, but also to response latencies, through a computer-controlled task. Our results reveal that children (like adults) show clear neighborhood density effects, and that these effects do not seem to depend on reading expertise. Contrarily to previous claims, the present work shows that orthographic neighborhood effects are not progressively modulated by reading skill. Further, these data strongly support the idea of a general language-independent preference for using the lexical route instead of grapheme-to-phoneme conversions, even in beginning readers. The implications of these results for developmental models in reading and for models in visual word recognition and orthographic encoding are discussed.     

Implicit orientation toward family and school among bilingual Latino college students

The authors examined the associations that underlie the orientations of bilingual Latino college students toward family and school. Participants completed, in English or Spanish, 3 implicit association tests assessing their attitude toward family vs. school, identifications with these concepts, and self-esteem. Results revealed a more positive attitude toward, and stronger identification with, family than school. Identification with family was stronger among participants who completed the study in English, suggesting self-definition in terms of distinctions from the context. Last, the more participants valued family over school and identified with family rather than school, the higher was their self-esteem. These findings shed light on the subtle, yet crucial, mechanisms by which cultural knowledge is incorporated in the self-concept of bilingual Latino college students.     

Mother-Adolescent Relationship Quality and Autonomy as Predictors of Psychosocial Adjustment Among African American Adolescents

This study investigated the role of mother-adolescent relationship quality and autonomy in the psychosocial outcomes in a sample of African American adolescents drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The results indicated that positive mother-adolescent relationship quality and greater autonomy were associated with higher self-esteem, fewer depressive symptoms, and less delinquent behavior. Moreover, adolescents who were older, female, or from households with less income reported more depressive symptoms. In addition, adolescents who were younger or female reported fewer delinquent behaviors. Being male was associated with higher self-esteem. Adolescents’ age, family income, and mother-adolescent relationship quality did not moderate relations between autonomy and the outcome variables.     

Physical and psychological aggression in dating relationships in Spanish university students

The presence of violent behaviors of a psychological and physical nature in dating relations was analyzed in a sample of Spanish university students between 18 and 27 years of age. The results indicate a high prevalence of both kinds of aggression in interpersonal relationships, revealing important typology differences between the sexes. Violent psychological behaviors (characterized by the presence of verbal aggression and coercive and jealous behaviors) and physical aggression were significantly higher in women, though the consequences of physical aggression were worse for the women's health. The implications of the results and their possible relation with more severe violent acts in more stable, emotional relationships are discussed.     

Psychosocial risk factors at work as predictors of mobbing

This work analyses the way in which various psychosocial risk indicators may predict mobbing. A sample of 638 workers, 168 men and 470 women, from the fruit-and-vegetable sector was evaluated. An anonymous questionnaire was administered to all employees who were present on the evaluation days in the companies comprising the study. After analysing the data obtained with the mobbing questionnaire NAQ-RE (Sáez, García-Izquierdo, and Llor, 2003) and with the psychosocial risk factors evaluation method of the INSHT (Martín and Pérez, 1997), using canonical regression, we found that several psychosocial factors such as role definition, mental workload, interest in the workers, and supervision / participation predict two types of mobbing: personal mobbing and work-performance-related mobbing.     

Quantitative numerical and lexical knowledge: evidence of double dissociation

The aim of this work was to explain the involvement of a specific brain injury in the numerical processing and calculation system. The method employed was > analysis and the administration of various cognitive neuropsychology tests. The results of this study revealed a double dissociation between quantitative numerical knowledge and qualitative or lexical numerical knowledge. Patient M.C. preserved quantitative numerical knowledge, as indicated by the results obtained in the numerical comprehension and calculation tasks. However, she showed a drastic deficit in qualitative numerical knowledge. On the other hand, patient M.L. preserved qualitative numerical knowledge, but she had serious problems in all the abilities that require internal manipulation of magnitude; that is, quantitative numerical knowledge. These results have two important implications, as conclusions: firstly, quantitative numerical knowledge may be made up of different elements susceptible to damage independently. And secondly, quantitative and qualitative numerical knowledge were functionally independent.