Lonely hearts and angry minds: Online dating rejection increases male (but not female) hostility

The present work explores the hostile tendencies elicited by romantic rejection in the increasingly common context of online dating. To empirically investigate this issue, we created an ad hoc online dating platform in which fictitious online dating partners romantically rejected heterosexual male and female participants. Results revealed that male—but not female—participants who were rejected by desired dating partners displayed increased hostility. This pattern of findings was consistent across different measures, which considered both aggressive tendencies against the rejecting partners and hostile attitudes against the opposite gender. Further, increased feelings of anger explained the relationship between online romantic rejection and increased male hostility. Our work and its findings have both theoretical and methodological implications for the understanding of interpersonal processes in online interactions and the growing body of literature on online dating.     

Emotion,rationality, and social identity: a theoretical–methodological proposal for a cognitive approach

Cognitive Processing - Humberto Maturana's biology of cognition and the studies of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio have proposed theories that indicate the role of emotion in cognitive...     

Can the chronic exclusion-resignation link be broken? An analysis of support groups within prisons

Social exclusion, especially when prolonged over time––has a strong impact on the individuals’ health and wellbeing. According to the Temporal Need-Threat Model (Williams, 2009), the experience of chronic social exclusion inescapably leads to a condition of resignation, characterized by feelings of alienation, depression, helplessness, and unworthiness. However, few empirical studies have tested this prediction and its potential moderating factors. In this research, we identified the prison as a prototypical condition of chronic social exclusion, and aimed at (a) empirically testing the link between chronic exclusion and the resignation stage, (b) investigating whether situational factors—such as attending a support group in prison—can reduce the adverse outcomes of the resignation, and (c) exploring the role of individual differences (e.g., psychological flexibility) in mediating the effect of the support group on the resignation. The study involved 136 participants—68 detainees (31 of them participated in a support group) and 68 free citizens. Results showed that prisoners without the support group showed the highest levels of feelings of resignation. By contrast, prisoners in the support group were no different from nonprisoners in terms of resignation stage outcomes, and this beneficial effect of the support group was mediated by higher levels of perceived social support and psychological flexibility. Overall, this study suggests that the link between chronic exclusion and the resignation stage could be moderated by intervening social factors, highlighting the potential benefits of group-based interventions to tackle the negative consequences of chronic exclusion in chronically excluded populations.     

Interpolation in Extensions of First-Order Logic

We prove a generalization of Maehara’s lemma to show that the extensions of classical and intuitionistic first-order logic with a special type of geometric axioms, called singular geometric axioms, have Craig’s interpolation property. As a corollary, we obtain a direct proof of interpolation for (classical and intuitionistic) first-order logic with identity, as well as interpolation for several mathematical theories, including the theory of equivalence relations, (strict) partial and linear orders, and various intuitionistic order theories such as apartness and positive partial and linear orders.

     

The lone gamer: Social exclusion predicts violent video game preferences and fuels aggressive inclinations in adolescent players

Violent video game playing has been linked to a wide range of negative outcomes, especially in adolescents. In the present research, we focused on a potential determinant of adolescents’ willingness to play violent video games: social exclusion. We also tested whether exclusion can predict increased aggressiveness following violent video game playing. In two experiments, we predicted that exclusion could increase adolescents’ preferences for violent video games and interact with violent game playing fostering adolescents’ aggressive inclinations. In Study 1, 121 adolescents (aged 10–18 years) were randomly assigned to a manipulation of social exclusion. Then, they evaluated the violent content of nine different video games (violent, nonviolent, or prosocial) and reported their willingness to play each presented video game. The results showed that excluded participants expressed a greater willingness to play violent games than nonviolent or prosocial games. No such effect was found for included participants. In Study 2, both inclusionary status and video game contents were manipulated. After a manipulation of inclusionary status, 113 adolescents (aged 11–16 years) were randomly assigned to play either a violent or a nonviolent video game. Then, they were given an opportunity to express their aggressive inclinations toward the excluders. Results showed that excluded participants who played a violent game displayed the highest level of aggressive inclinations than participants who were assigned to the other experimental conditions. Overall, these findings suggest that exclusion increases preferences for violent games and that the combination of exclusion and violent game playing fuels aggressive inclinations.

     

Missing the dog that failed to bark in the nighttime: on the overestimation of occurrences over non-occurrences in hypothesis testing

In three studies, we investigated whether and to what extent the evaluation of two mutually exclusive hypotheses is affected by a feature-positive effect, wherein present clues are weighted more than absent clues. Participants (N = 126) were presented with abstract problems concerning the most likely provenance of a card that was drawn from one of two decks. We factored the correct response (the hypothesis favored by the consideration of all clues) and the ratio of present-to-absent features in each set of observations. Furthermore, across the studies, we manipulated the presentation format of the features’ probabilities by providing the probability distributions of occurrences (Study 1), non-occurrences (Study 3) or both (Study 2). In all studies, both participant preference and accuracy were mostly determined by an over-reliance on present features. Moreover, across participants, both confidence in the responses and the informativeness of the present clues correlated positively with the number of responses given in line with an exclusive consideration of present features. These results were mostly independent of both the rarity of the absent clues and the presentation format. We concluded that the feature-positive effect influences hypothesis evaluation, and we discussed the implications for confirmation bias.