Moderators of the Dynamic Link Between Alcohol Use and Aggressive Behavior among Adolescent Males

Although longitudinal evidence has linked alcohol use with aggressive behavior during adolescence, most studies have failed to adequately control for the numerous between-individual differences that may underlie this association. In addition, few studies of adolescents have examined whether the nature of the within-individual association between alcohol use and aggression depends on individual and contextual factors. To address these limitations, this study examined the association between within-individual changes in alcohol use and aggressive behavior across adolescence and determined whether impulsive behavior, positive attitudes toward violence, violent peers, neighborhood crime, and race moderated this association. Data from 971 adolescent males assessed annually from ages 13 to 18 were analyzed using a within-individual regression panel model that eliminated all stable between-individual factors as potential confounds. Findings indicated that within-individual increases in alcohol use quantity from one’s own typical levels of drinking were concurrently associated with within-individual increases in aggressive behavior, and vice versa. However, increases in alcohol were more strongly linked to increases in aggressive behavior among boys with attitudes favoring violence and those who lived in high-crime neighborhoods. The association between alcohol and aggressive behavior was similar for White and Black young men. Interventions designed to reduce aggressive behaviors should consider targeting not only alcohol use, but also individual and environmental risk factors that contribute to this link.     

Human time and dreaming

One characteristic of massive trauma is a persistent feeling that time is frozen, i.e., an experience impossible to integrate into a psychic reality. In this paper, the author sets out to explore the dimension of time in the psychoanalytical situation in an effort to shed light on this question. The infant acquires an immediate sense of time through the rhythm of frustration and satisfaction, and out of these encounters, a fundamental dialogue evolves. This primary dialogue is internalised and is regarded as an indispensable structure for psychic life. The child's existence is impregnated by unconscious desires or beliefs of the adult world—enigmatic messages that will constitute an unconscious source of the child's own psychic reality. Timeless desires and enigmatic messages urge on a dreaming in attempts to carry over the psychical sense of time and the implacable time of existence. When we infuse a time dimension through our dreaming and our narratives, we give shape to our timeless wishes. The psychoanalytic situation arouses the primary dialogue and an elementary experience of time. Traumatic experiences are tantamount to the absence of the primary object and thereby the death of time. Dreaming becomes an endeavour to create a psychic space, the aim of which is to restore the primary dialogue. If circumstances obliterate all hope of re-establishing the bond to the primary object, the sense of time is destroyed as well. The author concludes that the experience of time and elaboration of traumatic experiences are closely connected.     

‘Nachträglichkeit’: The intermediary of an unassimilated impression and experience

In this paper, Freud's recommendations regarding the timing of interventions are reviewed, especially the work of pointing out and interpreting resistance-phenomena. This is compared to recent developments in psychoanalytic technique. Interventions, their timing and effect are illustrated by clinical material from three psychoanalyses. The possibility of integrating the different recommendations is discussed. An overall experience is that the most demanding work is that of making resistance-phenomena observable for both parties in the analytic situation. It is demonstrated how this precondition can be developed through the analyst's experience of the interaction, and thus give the time for intervention.     

Grasping spheres,not planets

Memory for objects helps us to determine how we can most effectively and appropriately interact with them. This suggests a tightly coupled interplay between action and background knowledge. Three experiments demonstrate that grasping circumference can be affected by the size of a visual stimulus (Experiment 1), whether that stimulus appears to be graspable (Experiment 2), and the presence of a label that renders that object ungraspable (Experiment 3). The results are taken to inform theories on conceptual representation and the functional distinction that has been drawn between the visual systems for perception and action.     

Immediate truth – Temporal contiguity between a cognitive problem and its solution determines experienced veracity of the solution

A temporal contiguity hypothesis for the experience of veracity is tested which states that a solution candidate to a cognitive problem is more likely to be experienced as correct the faster it succeeds the problem. Experiment 1 varied the onset time of the appearance of proposed solutions to anagrams (50 ms vs. 150 ms) and found for both correct and incorrect candidates that faster appearing solutions were more frequently judged as being correct, although participants were not aware of the difference in onset delay. Experiment 2 replicated this effect with mathematical equations, shorter onset latencies (0 ms vs. 50 ms), and a reversed sequence (presenting first the solution and then the problem). Experiment 3 showed that the probability of judging a word as the solution of a remote associate insight problem decreases linearly with increasing onset delay (50 ms, 150 ms, 300 ms). Possible neurobiological-cognitive explanations for this effect are proposed.     

Do we map remembrances to the left/back and expectations to the right/front of a mental timeline? Space–time congruency effects with retrospective and prospective verbs

Recent experimental studies have shown that people code time in terms of a mental timeline which typically runs from left to right or from back to front. Determining the cognitive function of this mental timeline for language processing, however, is still an unsettled issue. Whereas the studies of Ulrich and Maienborn (2010) and Ulrich et al. (2012) argue against an automatic activation of the mental timeline for the interpretation of tense and temporal adverbials at sentence level, Sell and Kaschak (2011) observe an automatic activation for the processing of past- and future-related sentences in small stories. The present paper reports the results of three experiments which examine the processing of sentences with retrospective and prospective verbs (e.g., to remember, to regret vs. to expect, to announce) in present tense, which locate a second, embedded event in the past or the future. When temporal information was task-relevant, a space–time congruency effect emerged (Experiment 1). This suggests that the mental timeline is not only linked to overtly deictic linguistic material but may also be construed in a more intricate way through the compositional construction of sentence meaning. The congruency effect disappeared, however, when temporal information was task-irrelevant (Experiments 2 and 3), suggesting that the mental timeline is not functionally involved in the cognitive processing of these especially demanding two-event sentences. The results of the present study support the conclusion that the relevant factor driving an automatic activation of the mental timeline is not the number of linguistically expressed events, but might rather be the number of sentential units.     

Making connections about brain connectivity

The Functional Brain Connectivity workshop was organized by Rolf K?tter and Karl Friston, and held in Düsseldorf, Germany, on 4-6 April, 2002.     

A latent state-trait anxiety model and its application to determine consistency and specificity coefficients

Abstract

In the present study the consistency model (Steyer, 1987) was applied to data gathered with the German version of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (Laux, Glanzmann, Schaffner, and Spielberger, 1981). The questionnaire was presented twice to 64 university students with an interval of two months between first and second testing. The consistency and specificity coefficients, estimated by LISREL (Jöreskog and Sörbom, 1984), support the state-trait distinction. The state variables have high specificity and consistency coefficients; the trait variables, in contrast, have high consistency coefficients but low or even negligible specificity coefficients. The discussion points out the advantages of the consistency model over the stability model; the most important advantage is that the theoretical structure of the consistency model is more appropriate for the type of application considered. It contains a state factor for each occasion of measurement and a trait factor common to all occasions of measurement. In the stability model, only latent states, but no latent traits occur. Consistency, specificity, and reliability can be identified as proportions of variance determined by latent variables specified in the model. Therefore, data analysis provides statistics concerning the practical significance of the trait and of the effects of situations and/or interactions.     

Theory and Analysis of Total,Direct, and Indirect Causal Effects

Mediation analysis, or more generally models with direct and indirect effects, are commonly used in the behavioral sciences. As we show in our illustrative example, traditional methods of mediation analysis that omit confounding variables can lead to systematically biased direct and indirect effects, even in the context of a randomized experiment. Therefore, several definitions of causal effects in mediation models have been presented in the literature (Baron &; Kenny, 1986 Baron, R.M., &; Kenny, D.A. (1986). The moderator-mediator variable distinction in social psychological research: Conceptual, strategic and statistical considerations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51, 1173–1182. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.51.6.1173[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Imai, Keele, &; Tingley, 2010 Imai, K., Keele, L., &; Tingley, D. (2010). A general approach to causal mediation analysis. Psychological Methods, 15, 309–334. doi:10.1037/a0020761[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Pearl, 2012 Pearl, J. (2012). The causal mediation formula: A guide to the assessment of pathways and mechanisms. Prevention Science, 13, 426–436. doi:10.1007/s11121-011-0270-1[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). We illustrate the stochastic theory of causal effects as an alternative foundation of causal mediation analysis based on probability theory. In this theory we define total, direct, and indirect effects and show how they can be identified in the context of our illustrative example. A particular strength of the stochastic theory of causal effects are the causality conditions that imply causal unbiasedness of effect estimates. The causality conditions have empirically testable implications and can be used for covariate selection. In the discussion, we highlight some similarities and differences of the stochastic theory of causal effects with other theories of causal effects.     

The feeling of fluent perception: a single experience from multiple asynchronous sources

Zeki and co-workers recently proposed that perception can best be described as locally distributed, asynchronous processes that each create a kind of microconsciousness, which condense into an experienced percept. The present article is aimed at extending this theory to metacognitive feelings. We present evidence that perceptual fluency-the subjective feeling of ease during perceptual processing-is based on speed of processing at different stages of the perceptual process. Specifically, detection of briefly presented stimuli was influenced by figure-ground contrast, but not by symmetry (Experiment 1) or the font (Experiment 2) of the stimuli. Conversely, discrimination of these stimuli was influenced by whether they were symmetric (Experiment 1) and by the font they were presented in (Experiment 2), but not by figure-ground contrast. Both tasks however were related with the subjective experience of fluency (Experiments 1 and 2). We conclude that subjective fluency is the conscious phenomenal correlate of different processing stages in visual perception.