In the Eye of the Beholder: Eye-tracking Assessment of Social Information Processing in Aggressive Behavior

Acording to social information processing theories, aggressive children are hypersensitive to cues of hostility and threat in other people’s behavior. However, even though there is ample evidence that aggressive children over-interpret others’ behaviors as hostile, it is unclear whether this hostile attribution tendency does actually result from overattending to hostile and threatening cues. Since encoding is posited to consist of rapid automatic processes, it is hard to assess with the selfreport measures that have been used so far. Therefore, we used a novel approach to investigate visual encoding of social information. The eye movements of thirty 10–13 year old children with lower levels and thirty children with higher levels of aggressive behavior were monitored in real time with an eyetracker, as the children viewed ten different cartoon series of ambiguous provocation situations. In addition, participants answered questions concerning encoding and interpretation. Aggressive children did not attend more to hostile cues, nor attend less to non-hostile cues than non-aggressive children. Contrary, aggressive children looked longer at non-hostile cues, but nonetheless attributed more hostile intent than their non-aggressive peers. These findings contradict the traditional bottom-up processing hypotheses that aggressive behavior would be related with failure to attend to non-hostile cues. The findings seem best explained by topdown information processing, where aggressive children’s pre-existing hostile intent schemata (1) direct attention towards schema inconsistent non-hostile cues, (2) prevent further processing and recall of such schema-inconsistent information, and (3) lead to hostile intent attribution and aggressive responding, disregarding the schema-inconsistent non-hostile information.     

Introduction: Special Issue on Positive Psychology and Adult Development

An adult seems to articulate surprisingly similar meaning themes and similar processes about relationships in several widely disparate domains of behavior, domains of both non-pathological and pathological types. Whether the person is consciously describing early relationships with parental figures, unconsciously acting them out in current relationships, experiencing relationships with God or the Transcendent, or acting on the basis of relational delusions during psychotic episodes, his or his experienced relational reality seems to be filtered through a single, coherent, personally unique spiritual, existential, and epistemological relational lens. Conflicts may involve other relational meanings, but may be conflicts because of the existence of that dominant lens. Two parts of that dominant lens system, specifically the part relating the person’s concept of God to the other parts of the system and the part relating the specifics of psychotic breaks and spiritual emergence to other parts of the system, are seldom discussed. Both understanding the person’s dominant relational lens and the implications of that person’s using the lens to see reality, and sharing that knowledge with the individual (if he or he has stabilized to some degree) can help the troubled or disoriented individual. That person can gradually give a more adaptive meaning to consistent distortions in the many areas of meaning and behavior attached to relationships, and even to very skewed behavior such as hallucinations and delusions during psychotic breaks. Distortions during experiences of spiritual emergence also can be made clearer to the disturbed client if the therapist has a better understanding of the person’s overall coherent relational meaning system and its implications, and can translate the language of that system into spiritually transformative terms. A case is summarized and discussed as an example of these ideas. Then, two theories are described. A useful theory of human-felt connection and a cognitive developmental theory of Postformal Complex Thought have been developed by the author and described in earlier publications. These two theories help make sense of the multiple but coherent themes, cognitive dimensions of theme genesis and change, and the nature of the relational lenses used. Suggestions about interventions in the person’s system of coherently distorted relational themes, suggestions based on the two theories, are discussed. The recommendation is made that all therapists become fluent in the languages of, and especially the connections among, all of the relational areas named in the title of this paper that are part of the coherent relational theme.     

Gender and Sexual Risk-Taking Among Selected Nigerian University Students

This paper explores Nigerian undergraduate students’ perspectives of gender influence on sexual risk-taking. Participants were recruited from several peer networks with snowballing because female students initially refused to participate in a long interview about their risk-prone sexual conducts with a male investigator. Analytically, essentialist notions of gender, such as hegemonic masculinity or passive femininity, were interrogated against the backdrop that they determine women’s vulnerability to sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and unwanted pregnancies in heterosexual relationships. There were tensions and contradictions between respondents’ narrative self-presentations as knowledgeable, purposeful, and active social agents capable of elective sexual choice, and as agents whose sexualities are concurrently constrained and enabled by a cohort of interdependent societal structures, including gender, whose unitary influence on sexual risk-taking they consider weak. All respondents concede that their purposive and active pursuit of premarital heterosexual relationships, especially their maintenance with unprotected sex, is a stronger determinant of their vulnerabilities to STIs and unwanted pregnancies than the gender structure alone. Unequivocally, findings challenge essentialist notions of feminine sexual passivity and exclusive masculine sexual privilege, within premarital heterosexual relationships. Consequently, the author calls for the re-examination of gender structure on patterned behavior based on specified social interactions, such as premarital heterosexuality.     

Ambiguity aversion: the explanatory power of indeterminate probabilities

Daniel Ellsberg presented in Ellsberg (The Quarterly Journal of Economics 75:643–669, 1961) various examples questioning the thesis that decision making under uncertainty can be reduced to decision making under risk. These examples constitute one of the main challenges to the received view on the foundations of decision theory offered by Leonard Savage in Savage (1972). Craig Fox and Amos Tversky have, nevertheless, offered an indirect defense of Savage. They provided in Fox and Tversky (1995) an explanation of Ellsberg’s two-color problem in terms of a psychological effect: ambiguity aversion. The ‘comparative ignorance’ hypothesis articulates how this effect works and explains why it is important to an understanding of the typical pattern of responses associated with Ellsberg’s two-color problem. In the first part of this article we challenge Fox and Tversky’s explanation. We present first an experiment that extends Ellsberg’s two-color problem where certain predictions of the comparative ignorance hypothesis are not confirmed. In addition the hypothesis seems unable to explain how the subjects resolve trade-offs between security and expected pay-off when vagueness is present. Ellsberg offered an explanation of the typical behavior elicited by his examples in terms of these trade-offs and in section three we offer a model of Ellsberg’s trade-offs. The model takes seriously the role of imprecise probabilities in explaining Ellsberg’s phenomenon. The so-called three-color problem was also considered in Fox and Tversky (1995). We argue that Fox and Tversky’s analysis of this case breaks a symmetry with their analysis of the two-color problem. We propose a unified treatment of both problems and we present a experiment that confirms our hypothesis.     

Parental Interpersonal Sensitivity and Youth Social Problems: A Mediational Role for Child Emotion Dysregulation

We examined the relations between parental interpersonal sensitivity and youth social problems and explored the mediational role of child emotion dysregulation. Mothers (N = 42; M age = 39.38) and fathers (N = 41; M age = 39.38) of youth aged 7–12 (N = 42; M age = 9.12) completed measures of their own interpersonal sensitivity and reported on their child’s emotion regulation skills and social functioning. Maternal interpersonal sensitivity was positively associated with child social problems, and this relationship was fully mediated by child emotion dysregulation. A bootstrapping technique provided evidence for the significance of the mediation. For fathers, only the association between child emotion dysregulation and child social problems was significant. Our findings suggest one potential mechanism through which maternal behaviors relate to youth psychosocial functioning. Identification of such mechanisms contributes to the development of conceptual models of youth functioning and suggests specific targets for prevention and intervention efforts.     

A Challenge for Soft Line Replies to Manipulation Cases

Cases involving certain kinds of manipulation seem to challenge compatibilism about responsibility-grounding free will. To deal with such cases many compatibilists give what has become known as a ‘soft line’ reply. In this paper I present a challenge to the soft line reply. I argue that any relevant case involving manipulation—and to which a compatibilist might wish to give a soft line reply—can be transformed into one supporting a degree of moral responsibility through the addition of libertarian elements (such as alternative possibilities of a kind unavailable under determinism and executive control of the sort commonly associated with agent-causation). From a compatibilist’s perspective the subtraction of libertarian elements should make no difference to any assessment of the agent’s responsibility. The compatibilist should therefore judge the agent morally responsible after the removal of the libertarian elements. Yet removal of the libertarian elements returns the case to its original form and thus what started out as a soft line has now collapsed into a hard line reply. Various ways of resisting my argument are considered, but each is shown to carry important burdens.     

The Malay Lexicon Project: A database of lexical statistics for 9,592 words

Malay, a language spoken by 250 million people, has a shallow alphabetic orthography, simple syllable structures, and transparent affixation—characteristics that contrast sharply with those of English. In the present article, we first compare the letter—phoneme and letter—syllable ratios for a sample of alphabetic orthographies to highlight the importance of separating language-specific from language-universal reading processes. Then, in order to develop a better understanding of word recognition in orthographies with more consistent mappings to phonology than English, we compiled a database of lexical variables (letter length, syllable length, phoneme length, morpheme length, word frequency, orthographic and phonological neighborhood sizes, and orthographic and phonological Levenshtein distances) for 9,592 Malay words. Separate hierarchical regression analyses for Malay and English revealed how the consistency of orthography—phonology mappings selectively modulates the effects of different lexical variables on lexical decision and speeded pronunciation performance. The database of lexical and behavioral measures for Malay is available at http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/ supplemental.     

Cognitive load and semantic analogies: Searching semantic space

The aim of the present study is to investigate the performance of children of different ages on an analogymaking task involving semantic analogies in which there are competing semantic matches. We suggest that this can best be studied in terms of developmental changes in executive functioning. We hypothesize that the selection of common relational structure requires the inhibition of other salient features, in particular semantically related matches. Our results show that children's performance in classic A ∶ B ∶∶ C ∶ D analogy-making tasks seems to depend crucially on the nature of the distractors and the association strength between both the A and B terms and the C and D terms. These results agree with an analogy-making account (Richland, Morrison, & Holyoak, 2006) based on different limitations in executive functioning at different ages.     

Assessment of Social Information Processing in Early Childhood: Development and Initial Validation of the Schultz Test of Emotion Processing—Preliminary Version

Crick and Dodge’s (Psychological Bulletin 115:74–101, 1994) social information processing model has proven very useful in guiding research focused on aggressive and peer-rejected children’s social-cognitive functioning. Its application to early childhood, however, has been much more limited. The present study responds to this gap by developing and validating a video-based assessment tool appropriate for early childhood, the Schultz Test of Emotion Processing—Preliminary Version (STEP-P). One hundred twenty-five Head Start preschool children participated in the study. More socially competent children more frequently attributed sadness to the victims of provocation and labeled aggressive behaviors as both morally unacceptable and less likely to lead to positive outcomes. More socially competent girls labeled others’ emotions more accurately. More disruptive children more frequently produced physically aggressive solutions to social provocations, and more disruptive boys less frequently interpreted social provocations as accidental. The STEP-P holds promise as an assessment tool that assesses knowledge structures related to the SIP model in early childhood.