The spirited, the observant, and the disheartened: social concepts of optimism, realism, and pessimism

The social concepts of optimism, pessimism, and realism were investigated by assessing the prototypical acts (thoughts, feelings, goals, and actions) that laypersons assign to optimists, pessimists, and realists responding to a controllable and an uncontrollable situation. Optimists and realists, but not pessimists, were seen as adjusting their behavior to the situation. However, whereas optimists were characterized by flexibility in thoughts and feelings but invariance in goals and actions (i.e., they pursued their goals in both controllable and uncontrollable situations), the act profiles assigned to realists varied on all of these dimensions. The profile assigned to pessimists was characterized by cognitive, affective, motivational, and behavioral invariance, encompassing negative construals of the situation, giving up, and a focus on distress.     

Self-control as predictor of school grades,life balance,and flow in adolescents

Background. Recently, several studies have shown that strength of self-control is a crucial factor in determining positive outcomes in individuals’ lives. Most attention has been directed to the relationships that self-control has with learning and academic achievement. Aims. This article analyses the effects of self-control not only on school grades but also on the experience of life balance and flow. It is theorized that students with a higher level of self-control are better able to distribute their time in a satisfying way over academic and leisure matters, and are better able to shield their studying against distractions. Samples. A total of 697 eighth graders with a mean age of 13.4 years participated in the longitudinal study. Method. Students completed a questionnaire containing measures of self-control, school grades, subjective life balance, and flow while studying at the beginning and at the end of the school year. Structural equation modelling was used to analyse the relationships between the constructs. Results and conclusions. Results of cross-lagged analyses show that self-control predicted school grades, life balance, and flow. The findings suggest that self-control may assist adolescents to be better prepared, not only for school, but also for coordinating their investments in different areas of their lives.     

Visuospatial attention in schizophrenia: deficits in broad monitoring

Although selective attention is thought to be impaired in people with schizophrenia (PSZ), prior research has found no deficit in the ability to select one location and withdraw attention from another. PSZ and healthy control subjects (HCS) performed a stimulus detection task in which one, two, or all four peripheral target locations were cued. When one or two locations were cued, both PSZ and HCS responded faster when the target appeared at a cued than uncued location. However, increases in the number of validly cued locations had much more deleterious effects on performance for PSZ than HCS, especially for targets of low contrast whose detection was more dependent on attention. PSZ also responded more slowly in trials with four cued locations relative to trials with one or two invalidly cued locations. Thus, visuospatial attention deficits in schizophrenia arise when broad monitoring is required rather than when attention must be focused narrowly.     

Contagious bodies. An investigation of affective and discursive strategies in contemporary online activism

The paper presents an analysis of Climate Justice Fast, a campaign consisting of an international hunger strike against political in action on climate change. Within the theoretical framework of political online activism and theories of affect, we investigate the encoding and decoding of the starving activist bodies in relation to CJF. Our material consists of texts from the CJF website, activist blogs, and two online debates on a large Danish media platform. The methodological approach is discourse analytical and esthetic-affective. In our analysis we outline the different semantic significations of the starving bodies as central signifiers and we investigate the different affective responses to the hunger strike. We furthermore argue that the starved body seems to be relationally powerful, because of both its contagious ability to attune other bodies and its semantic ‘wildness’.     

Gender Differences in Risk and Promotive Classifications Associated With Adolescent Delinquency

How likely are children exposed to multiple risk factors to engage in delinquent behavior, to what extent do promotive factors mitigate exposure to these risk factors, and do the predictors of delinquent behavior differ by gender? To address these questions, the authors analyzed data from youths (229 boys, 187 girls) who completed the third wave of the Lehigh Longitudinal Study using Latent Profile Analysis. A unique risk and promotive class with slightly elevated rates of exposure to parental violence, mean levels of other risk factors and low levels of promotive factors was present for girls but not for boys. Additionally, for boys and girls, high-risk, low-promotive individuals were significantly more likely to engage in delinquent behavior than low-risk, high-promotive cases. Findings suggest the need to examine risk and promotive factors in combination to account for their shared influences on developmental outcomes for youth.     

Development of Exploration and Investigation in the Norway Rat (Rattus norvegicus)

A cross-sectional study of the development of spontaneous exploratory behavior in the laboratory rat was conducted. Long-Evans hooded rat pups aged 11 to 28 days (n = 158, from 25 litters) were placed into a dimly illuminated arena for 10 min on 2 consecutive days. Analysis of videotaped records from the second session for each rat pup showed a relatively sudden emergence of locomotor exploration between 12 and 16 days of age. The behavioral topography of interactions with objects developed less uniformly, with some features (e.g., bout length) relatively unchanging and other features (e.g., number of bouts, number of different behaviors displayed) increasing with age. The data for locomotor exploration are consistent with an explanation that depends on maturation-driven emergence of species-typical behavior, but that explanation cannot account for the pattern of development for object investigation. These results provide further evidence that some important aspects of the character of exploratory behavior depend, at least partially, on experience, and that exploration is not in fact a single behavior system. In addition, they provide important baseline information for further studies of the structure and function of exploratory behavior.     

Erscheinungsformen und Ursachen von Amoktaten aus kriminologischer,forensisch-psychiatrischer und forensisch-psychologischer Sicht

Cases of running amok are intentional, accomplished and attempted multiple homicides by which mass murder is generally carried out by a single offender, motivated by anger, hate and revenge, attacking defined or randomly selected victims. The offender intends to become famous and in many cases commits suicide after the attack. Young offenders up to the age of 24 years old differ from the heterogeneous group of adults. Within a core group of young offenders personality disorders and behavioral problems are the main cause of the attacks. A quiet, reclusive and always somewhat strange loner has a deep feeling of alienation, feels offended and disregarded, identifies with perpetrators and stages the crime as revenge for subjectively experienced insults. Schizotypal, paranoid and narcissistic aspects dominate. The offenders are not characterized by patterns of impulsive, aggressive or dissocial behavior.