Acting prosocially reduces retaliation: Effects of prosocial video games on aggressive behavior

Past research has provided abundant evidence that exposure to violent video games increases aggression and aggression‐related variables. In contrast, little is known whether and why video game exposure may also decrease aggressive behavior. In fact, two experiments revealed that playing a prosocial (relative to a neutral) video game reduces aggressive behavior. Mediational analyses showed that differences in both aggressive cognition and aggressive affect underlie the effect of type of video game on aggressive behavior. These findings are in line with assumptions of the General Learning Model and point to the importance of the cognitive and affective routes in predicting how aggressive behavior is affected by exposure to video games. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Searching for faces in crowd chokepoint videos

Investigations of face identification have typically focussed on matching faces to photographic IDs. Few researchers have considered the task of searching for a face in a crowd. In Experiment 1, we created the Chokepoint Search Test to simulate real-time search for a target. Performance on this test was poor (39% accuracy) and showed moderate associations with tests of face matching and memory. In addition, trial-level confidence predicted accuracy, and for those participants who were previously familiar with one or more targets, higher familiarity was associated with increased accuracy. In Experiment 2, we found improvements in performance on the test when three recent images of the target, but not three social media images, were displayed during searches. Taken together, our results highlight the difficulties inherent in real-time searching for faces, with important implications for those security personnel who carry out this task on a daily basis.     

Dynamical Social Psychology: Complexity and Coherence in Human Experience

Human experience reflects the interplay of multiple influences operating on various time scales to promote constantly evolving patterns of thought, emotion, and action. Although the complexity and dynamism of personal and social phenomena have long been recognized, they are difficult to investigate using traditional research methods. This article provides an overview of dynamical social psychology, an approach adapted from dynamical systems theory that is designed to capture the complementary tendencies of stability and dynamism at different levels of social reality, from private thoughts to intergroup relations. Utilizing time-series analyses and computer simulations, this perspective documents the emergence of global properties from the interaction of basic elements in mental and social systems and investigates the time-dependent relation between external influences and a system’s internally generated dynamics. The dynamical approach enables social psychology to advance as a precise science while preserving the basic insights that launched the field over a century ago.     

The memory deficits in alzheimer-type dementia: A review

This review is an account of recent experimental studies of memory deficits at the early stages of Alzheimer-type dementia, evaluating these studies in relation to current theories of memory functioning in humans. Whilst memory deficits are found to be widespread, some aspects are more resilient to impairment than others. For example, the processes associated with articulatory rehearsal in working memory are unimpaired despite a reduction in performance on most tests of primary memory. The “implicit” aspects of secondary memory appear to remain unimpaired, in contrast to a marked decline in “explicit” or “episodic” memory. In addition, there is evidence that the rate of forgetting from secondary memory is normal. Some aspects of episodic and semantic memory are found to be impaired as a consequence of a decline in the efficient organisation and processing of verbal material at encoding or retrieval. It is concluded that the deficits share particular features found in organic amnesia, but with additional deficits which relate to impairments in other domains of functioning.     

Logic’s Tower of Babel

Late in his life, Jung speculated that the natural numbers, the integers, “contain the whole of mathematics and everything yet to be discovered in this field.” This article presents the attempts by mathematicians to address this question in their terms; that is, whether arithmetic (the mathematics of the natural numbers) was complete and consistent.

Early in the twentieth century, mathematicians began to seek a formalism that could provide a solid foundation for mathematics. The first important product of this new formalism was Giuseppe Peano’s Postulates: five axioms from which the full arithmetic of the natural numbers or integers (i.e., 0, 1, 2, 3, …) can be derived. Inspired by Peano’s achievement, philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell began a project to show that mathematics could be reduced to logic. His overweening aim was to eventually show that all science could be reduced to logic.

Logician Kurt Gödel realized that the goal of the formalists and logicians was impossible. He produced a logically impeccable proof that no system at least as complex as arithmetic could be proved both complete and consistent within the system. In essence, he proved that the core of mathematical discovery must be intuitive: direct perception of reality, which then clothes itself in mathematical garb. This accords closely with Jung’s own insight, which was based on the idea that each number is qualitatively different from every other number. To this day, Gödel’s proof stands unchallenged.