Explaining the paradoxical rejection-aggression link: the mediating effects of hostile intent attributions, anger, and decreases in state self-esteem on peer rejection-induced aggression in youth

People are strongly motivated to feel accepted by others. Yet when faced with acute peer rejection they often aggress against the very peers they desire acceptance from, which may lead to further rejection. The present experiment tests three potential mediators of aggressive responses to acute peer rejection in the critical developmental stage of early adolescence. Participants (N=185, M(age)=11.5 years) completed personal profiles that were allegedly evaluated online by peers. After receiving negative or neutral peer feedback, participants could aggress against the same peers who had evaluated them. Rejected participants attributed more hostile intent to the peers, were angrier, showed a greater reduction in state self-esteem, and were more aggressive. Mediational analyses showed that hostile intent attributions mediated the acute peer rejection-aggression relationship, whereas increases in anger and decreases in state self-esteem did not. Thus, acute peer rejection evokes hostile intent attributions that, in turn, lead to aggressive reactions.     

Introducing Science to the Psychology of the Soul: Experimental Existential Psychology

ABSTRACT— Humans live out their lives knowing that their own death is inevitable; that their most cherished beliefs and values, and even their own identities, are uncertain; that they face a bewildering array of choices; and that their private subjective experiences can never be shared with another human being. This knowledge creates five major existential concerns: death, isolation, identity, freedom, and meaning. The role of these concerns in human affairs has traditionally been the purview of philosophy. However, recent methodological and conceptual advances have led to the emergence of an experimental existential psychology directed toward empirically investigating the roles that these concerns play in psychological functioning. This new domain of psychological science has revealed the pervasive influence of deep existential concerns on diverse aspects of human thought and behavior.     

Sign and Object: Quine’s forgotten book project

Synthese - W. V. Quine’s first philosophical monograph, Word and Object (1960), is widely recognized as one of the most influential books of twentieth century philosophy. Notes, letters, and...     

Residual costs in task switching: testing the failure-to-engage hypothesis

Reaction time is typically longer on trials on which the task changes. Thisswitch cost is reduced by the opportunity to prepare for the change before the stimulus onset, but there remains aresidual cost that resists reduction by further opportunity for preparation. De Jong (2000) proposed a model for evaluating the contribution to the residual cost of (1) failure to achieve endogenous task-set reconfiguration on a proportion of trials, and (2) limitations to the completeness of reconfiguration attainable by endogenous means. We report good fits of the model to the data from one previous and one new task-switching experiment, suggesting that the residual switch cost may indeed be attributable to a probabilistic failure to complete advance preparation. But strong incentives for preparation only marginally increased the estimated preparation probability, suggesting some intrinsic limitation to the ability to achieve endogenous preparation for a task switch on every trial.     

Being prepared on time: on the importance of the previous foreperiod to current preparation, as reflected in speed, force and preparation-related brain potentials

How do participants adapt to temporal variation of preparatory foreperiods? For reaction times, specific sequential effects have been observed. Responses become slower when the foreperiod is shorter on the current than on the previous trial. If this effect is due to changes in motor activation, it should also be visible in force of responses and in EEG measures of motor preparation, the contingent negative variation (CNV) and the lateralized readiness potential (LRP). These hypotheses were tested in a two-choice reaction task, with targets occurring 500, 1500, or 2500 ms after an acoustic warning signal. The reaction time results showed the expected pattern and were accompanied by similar effects on a fronto-central CNV and the LRP. In contrast, the increase of response force with brief current foreperiods did not depend on previous foreperiods. Thus, EEG measures confirm that sequential effects on RT are at least partially due to changes in motor activation originating from previous trials. Effects found on response force may be related to general response readiness rather than activation of motor-hand areas, which may explain the absence of a sequential effect on force in the current experiment.     

Does a single session of reading literary fiction prime enhanced mentalising performance? Four replication experiments of Kidd and Castano (2013)

Prior experiments indicated that reading literary fiction improves mentalising performance relative to reading popular fiction, non-fiction, or not reading. However, the experiments had relatively small sample sizes and hence low statistical power. To address this limitation, the present authors conducted four high-powered replication experiments (combined N?=?1006) testing the causal impact of reading literary fiction on mentalising. Relative to the original research, the present experiments used the same literary texts in the reading manipulation; the same mentalising task; and the same kind of participant samples. Moreover, one experiment was pre-registered as a direct replication. In none of the experiments did reading literary fiction have any effect on mentalising relative to control conditions. The results replicate earlier findings that familiarity with fiction is positively correlated with mentalising. Taken together, the present findings call into question whether a single session of reading fiction leads to immediate improvements in mentalising.     

Thin Images Reflected in the Water: Narcissism and Girls’ Vulnerability to the Thin‐Ideal

The purpose of this research is to test how adolescent girls’ narcissistic traits—characterized by a need to impress others and avoid ego‐threat—influence acute adverse effects of thin‐ideal exposure. Participants (11–15 years; total N = 366; all female) reported their narcissistic traits. Next, in two experiments, they viewed images of either very thin or average‐sized models, reported their wishful identification with the models (Experiment 2), and tasted high‐calorie foods in an alleged taste test (both experiments). Narcissism kept girls from wishfully identifying with thin models, which is consistent with the view that narcissistic girls are prone to disengage from thin‐ideal exposure. Moreover, narcissism protected vulnerable girls (those who experience low weight‐esteem) from inhibiting their food intake, and led other girls (those who consider their appearance relatively unimportant) to increase their food intake. These effects did not generalize to conceptually related traits of self‐esteem and perfectionism, and were not found for a low‐calorie foods outcome, attesting to the specificity of findings. These experiments demonstrate the importance of narcissism at reducing girls’ thin‐ideal vulnerability. Girls high in narcissism disengage self‐protectively from threats to their self‐image, a strategy that renders at least subsets of them less vulnerable to the thin‐ideal.     

Narcissism,Bullying, and Social Dominance in Youth: A Longitudinal Analysis

A few previous studies have shown that narcissistic traits in youth are positively associated with bullying. However, research examining the developmental relationship between narcissism and bullying is lacking. Moreover, it is unclear whether narcissists constitute a homogeneous group and whether the bullying of narcissistic youth results in establishing social dominance over peers. The present work addresses these gaps. Children (N?=?393; M _age?=?10.3; 51 % girls) were followed during the last 3 years of primary school. Person-centered analyses were used to examine whether groups with distinct developmental trajectories for narcissism and two bullying forms (direct and indirect) can be identified, and how these trajectories are related. Multiple groups emerged for all constructs examined. For girls, higher narcissism was neither related to more intense bullying, nor to higher social dominance. In contrast, highly narcissistic boys were more likely than their peers to show elevated direct bullying, and in particular elevated indirect bullying. Hence, high narcissism is a risk factor for bullying in boys, but not in girls. However, narcissism is not always accompanied by high bullying, given that many boys on the high bullying trajectories were not high in narcissism. Results show that among narcissistic youth only those who engage in high levels of bullying are high in social dominance.     

Neural substrates of successful working memory and long-term memory formation in a relational spatial memory task

Working memory (WM) tasks may involve brain activation actually implicated in long-term memory (LTM). In order to disentangle these two memory systems, we employed a combined WM/LTM task, using a spatial relational (object-location) memory paradigm and analyzed which brain areas were associated with successful performance for either task using fMRI. Critically, we corrected for the performance on the respective memory task when analyzing subsequent memory effects. The WM task consisted of a delayed-match-to-sample task assessed in an MRI scanner. Each trial consisted of an indoor or outdoor scene in which the exact configuration of four objects had to be remembered. After a short delay (7–13 s), the scene was presented from a different angle and spatial recognition for two objects was tested. After scanning, participants received an unexpected subsequent recognition memory (LTM) task, where the two previously unprobed objects were tested. Brain activity during encoding, delay phase and probe phase was analyzed based on WM and LTM performance. Results showed that successful WM performance, when corrected for LTM performance, was associated with greater activation in the inferior frontal gyrus and left fusiform gyrus during the early stage of the maintenance phase. A correct decision during the WM probe was accompanied by greater activation in a wide network, including bilateral hippocampus, right superior parietal gyrus and bilateral insula. No voxels exhibited supra-threshold activity during the encoding phase, and we did not find any differential activity for correct versus incorrect trials in the WM task when comparing LTM correct versus LTM incorrect trials.