The association between high status positions and aggressive behavior in early adolescence

The present study examined the association between high status social positions in early adolescence and both overt and relational aggression. A sample of 234 sixth graders (132 girls, 102 boys) completed peer nominations assessing aggression, social centrality, and coolness. Data analyses were based on all sixth graders who received peer nominations, for a total sample size of 417 students (224 girls, 193 boys). Hierarchical linear modeling was used to examine both within-peer group differences and between-peer group differences. Results indicated relational aggression was related to higher overall social centrality and being nominated as cool even when controlling for overt aggression. Overt aggression appeared to be related to higher overall social centrality and being nominated as cool, but this relationship was much weaker when relational aggression was controlled. Although girls used relational aggression more often and boys used overt aggression more often, the use of relational aggression by either gender was related to membership in high status peer groups and high status within the peer group. Implications of the findings and suggestions for future research are discussed.     

Perceptual identification across the life span: a dissociation of early gains and late losses

The age-correlated gains and losses in visual identification under backward pattern masking were studied in a representative sample of 226 individuals ranging from 6 to 88 years of age. Participants identified masked symbols at leisure under high and low stimulus quality and at varying Stimulus Onset Asynchronies. Performance increased from childhood to early adulthood and then decreased, describing the common inverted U-shaped function. However, measures of general processing speed accounted for the gains in childhood and adolescence but not for losses in older age. This asymmetry between child development and aging is inconsistent with general-factor lifespan theories of cognitive development and suggests that specific mechanisms underlying visual identification during child development and aging are different.     

The Role of Gender and Ethnicity in Perceptions of Rape and Its Aftereffects

Caucasian-, Hispanic-, and Asian-American male and female students (n?=?764) attending a California (USA) public university reported their perceptions of sexual assault. After reading a rape vignette, participants gave their impressions of the victim; estimated time needed for recovery and treatment; and recommended a sentence for the assailant. Half of the sample received information regarding state sentencing guidelines. Relative to female participants, males perceived the victim as more responsible. Caucasian-American males had stronger reservation about the victim’s judgment. Males were less inclined to assign blame than were females. Ethnicity was the only factor influencing perceptions of recovery. Ethnicity and sentencing guidelines, but not gender, impacted imprisonment decisions. Issues impeding a unified theoretical understanding of perceptions of rape victims were considered.     

Investigating the influence of continuous babble on auditory short-term memory performance

A number of factors could explain the adverse effect that babble noise has on memory for spoken words (Murphy, Craik, Li, & Schneider, 2000). Babble could degrade the perceptual representation of words to such an extent that it compromises their subsequent processing, or the presence of speech noise in the period between word presentations could interfere with rehearsal. Thirdly, the top-down processes needed to extract the words from the babble could draw on resources that otherwise would be used for encoding. We tested all these hypotheses by presenting babble either only during word presentation or rehearsal, or by gating the babble on and off 500 ms before and after each word pair. Only the last condition led to a decline in memory. We propose that this decline in memory occurred because participants were focusing their attention on the auditory stream (to enable them to better segregate the words from the noise background) rather than on remembering the words they had heard. To further support our claim we show that a similar memory deficit results when participants perform the same memory task in quiet together with a nonauditory attention-demanding secondary task.     

How to stop and change a response: the role of goal activation in multitasking

Multitasking was studied in the stop-change paradigm, in which the response for a primary GO1 task had to be stopped and replaced by a response for a secondary GO2 task on some trials. In 2 experiments, the delay between the stop signal and the change signal was manipulated to determine which task goals (GO1, GO2, or STOP) were involved in performance and to determine whether the goals were activated in series or in parallel. As the delay increased, the probability of responding on stop trials changed very little, but GO2 task reaction times decreased substantially. Such effects are consistent with both a nondeterministic serial model (in which the GO1 goal is replaced by the STOP goal, which is subsequently replaced by the GO2 goal) and a limited-capacity parallel model (in which stopping and GO2 processing occur concurrently) with a capacity-sharing proportion that resembles serial processing.     

Good fortune but bad luck? Predictable versus unpredictable gains and losses in risky choice

This study examines the effects of two different types of good and bad experiences on risk‐taking preferences: fortune and luck. We define fortune as a relatively stable positive or negative context within which choices are made and luck as a more unpredictable series of better or worse outcomes. With the use of a lottery‐based paradigm, fortune was operationalized as a preponderance of all‐gain or all‐loss two‐outcome option pairs within a larger set of mixed‐outcome control lotteries. Luck was operationalized as the experienced frequency of better versus worse outcomes when playing the lotteries. We predicted that fortune and luck would lead to opposite risk‐taking tendencies within control lotteries. An assimilation effect of fortune was predicted, with risk‐averse preferences for control lotteries when surrounded by good fortune and risk‐seeking preferences when surrounded by bad fortune. In contrast, we expected that high rates of success with good luck would lead to risk‐seeking preferences, whereas low rates of success with bad luck would yield risk‐averse preferences. Our predictions for fortune were confirmed; however, there was no evidence of any effect on risk taking based on experiencing good versus bad luck. Moreover, we observed a striking disconnect between impressions of the experience and risk‐taking behavior. Both identification and attributions of luck and fortune were highly correlated with the number of gain outcomes that participants experienced but were uncorrelated with risk taking. We review these surprising findings considering several prominent theories of risk‐taking behavior, particularly drawing attention to the differential roles of predecisional and postdecisional information in choice.     

Does interview anxiety predict job performance and does it influence the predictive validity of interviews?

Interview anxiety is negatively related to interview performance; however, its relation to job performance is unknown. It could correlate negatively with job performance, and it could moderate the interview performance–job performance relation. In a sample of applicants for Residence Assistant positions, interview anxiety had near‐zero correlations with job performance, rated by supervisors and supervisees. It moderated the relation between interview performance and supervisor‐rated facilitating peer and team performance, such that interview performance did not predict this job performance component for anxious applicants. The moderation was not found for supervisor‐rated task proficiency, or for supervisee ratings of either job performance component, suggesting that the impact of interview anxiety depends on rater source and which job performance component is rated.     

Manager personality, manager service quality orientation, and service climate: test of a model

This article conceptually and empirically explores the relationships among manager personality, manager service quality orientation, and climate for customer service. Data were collected from 1,486 employees and 145 managers in grocery store departments (N = 145) to test the authors' theoretical model. Largely consistent with hypotheses, results revealed that core self-evaluations were positively related to managers' service quality orientation, even after dimensions of the Big Five model of personality were controlled, and that service quality orientation fully mediated the relationship between personality and global service climate. Implications for personality and organizational climate research are discussed.     

Panic as a form of foreclosed experience

Following a discussion of panic states and their relationship to psychosomatic illness and related disorders, the author presents an extended clinical vignette in which he initially viewed the patient's intense anxiety as a manifestation of repressed conflict and, accordingly, used verbal interpretations as the principal mode of intervention. After this approach did not prove effective, the analyst began to make use of nonverbal interventions consistent with his emerging understanding of the patient's distress as a manifestation of the foreclosure (de M'Uzan 2003) and relegation to the body of undreamable experience (Bion 1962).