Connections Among Identity,Attachment, and Psychological Dating Aggression During Adolescence

The collective influence of identity styles and romantic attachment insecurity on psychological dating aggression was examined for 1,975 adolescents living in a southern state in the United States. Informational identity style related negatively to psychological dating aggression, but anxious romantic attachment related positively to this behavior. Diffuse-avoidant identity style and using psychological dating aggression were associated positively, whereas normative identity style and receiving psychological dating aggression were associated negatively. In addition, the combination of high informational or normative identity style with high avoidant romantic attachment was linked to lower psychological dating aggression. Our findings build on the previously noted parallelism between identity styles and romantic attachment insecurity by showing how they work together to explain variability in psychological dating aggression.     

The cyber dating violence inventory. Validation of a new scale for online perpetration and victimization among dating partners

Cyber dating abuse is a new kind of dating violence. Several recent measures assess this phenomenon, but do not focus on a severe aggression that aims to spoil a partner’s relational network (relational cyber abuse). This study developed and validated the Cyber Dating Violence Inventory (CDVI) with 1405 adolescents and young adults (M_age = 18.17; SD_age = 2.39; 65.1% females), an instrument that considers the relational dimension of online dating abuse. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses found two correlated factors (Psychological and Relational) for both perpetration and victimization, showing good reliability. CDVI factors were positively correlated with offline dating violence, showing good criterion validity. This instrument has clinical and educational implications.     

Social event segmentation

Humans are experts in understanding social environments. What perceptual and cognitive processes enable such competent evaluation of social information? Here we show that environmental content is grouped into units of “social perception”, which are formed automatically based on the attentional priority given to social information conveyed by eyes and faces. When asked to segment a clip showing a typical daily scenario, participants were remarkably consistent in identifying the boundaries of social events. Moreover, at those social event boundaries, participants' eye movements were reliably directed to actors' eyes and faces. Participants' indices of attention measured during the initial passive viewing, reflecting natural social behaviour, also showed a remarkable correspondence with overt social segmentation behaviour, reflecting the underlying perceptual organization. Together, these data show that dynamic information is automatically organized into meaningful social events on an ongoing basis, strongly suggesting that the natural comprehension of social content in daily life might fundamentally depend on this underlying grouping process.     

A systematic review of relationship maintenance: Reflecting back and looking to the future

Relationship maintenance processes include a wide range of activities and cognitions that romantic partners engage in to sustain or enhance their relationships. In this article, we review literature from the past two decades (2002–2021). We focus on key definitional and conceptual issues in the study of relational maintenance. Guided by a lens of intersectionality, we then perform a theoretically-driven review of the empirical articles published over the last 20 years paying careful attention to the nature of the samples, methods, and privileged research questions. We conclude by offering a reflection on the current state of this literature and provide suggestions for future research.     

Are older adults in Hong Kong “living in history” in their autobiographical memories?

Transition theory posits that autobiographical memories are organized by major life transitions, which is often supported by the Living-in-History effect that occurs when people frequently refer to public events to support their date estimates of personal events. In the present study, 52 Chinese older adults in Hong Kong recalled autobiographical events using cue-word method and justified the date estimates of the events. They also reported the most important events and assessed their impacts. Results showed that participants referred to public events only when estimating the date of 5.5% of word-cued events and reported a few public events as personally important, suggesting an absence of the Living-in-History effect. Nonetheless, word-cued events and important events accumulated around major life transitions to form a transition bump; the material change that important events brought about predicted whether the important events were used to organize autobiographical memory, thereby providing new evidence for the transition theory.     

Thematic role properties of subjects and objects

This paper tests two claims about the thematic roles Agent and Patient: first, that they can be decomposed into more primitive features, as laid out in Dowty's (1991) Proto-Roles Hypothesis; and second, that these properties can be inferred directly from the grammatical roles subject and object. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants rated the Proto-Roles properties of the subject and object of transitive sentences with real verbs. Subjects were rated as more Agent-like than objects, while objects were rated as more Patient-like than subjects. Experiment 3 used transitive sentences with nonsense content words (e.g. "The rom mecked the zarg"). Even in the absence of a known verb, the results were the same. Experiment 4 examined the corollary prediction that subjects and objects should not differ on grammatically irrelevant properties (e.g. "being liquid"); this prediction was confirmed. In Experiment 5, verbs that do not permit objects (e.g. "fall," "erupt") were placed in the transitive frame. Results were the same as in Experiments 1 through 3. Moreover, the semantics of the verb were altered by the frame, indicating that participants tried to fuse the semantics of the verb with those of the frame. Possible sources of these inferences are considered.     

Perception in action: multiple roles of sensory information in action control

Perceptual processes play a central role in the planning and control of human voluntary action. Indeed, planning an action is a sensorimotor process operating on sensorimotor units, a process that is based on anticipations of perceptual action effects. I discuss how the underlying sensorimotor units emerge, and how they can be employed to tailor action plans to the goals at hand. I also discuss how even a single action can induce sensorimotor binding, how intentionally implemented short-term associations between stimuli and responses become autonomous, how feature overlap between stimulus events and actions makes them compatible, and why action plans are necessarily incomplete.

Reactive and proactive aggression: predictions to physical violence in different contexts and moderating effects of parental monitoring and caregiving behavior

This study aimed at (a) comparing the links of proactive and reactive aggression at 13 years of age to delinquency-related violence and dating violence at ages 16 and 17, and (b) examining the moderating effects of parental supervision, and mother's and father's warmth and caregiving behaviors on these links. Based on a sample of 525 Caucasian boys, the results showed that proactive aggression uniquely predicted delinquency-related violence, whereas reactive aggression uniquely predicted later dating violence. The relation between proactive aggression and delinquency-related violence, however, was moderated by parental supervision. The relation between reactive aggression and dating violence was moderated by mother's warmth and caregiving behavior. The implications of the findings for the theoretical and practical distinction between proactive and reactive aggression are discussed.     

A computational model of event segmentation from perceptual prediction

People tend to perceive ongoing continuous activity as series of discrete events. This partitioning of continuous activity may occur, in part, because events correspond to dynamic patterns that have recurred across different contexts. Recurring patterns may lead to reliable sequential dependencies in observers' experiences, which then can be used to guide perception. The current set of simulations investigated whether this statistical structure within events can be used 1) to develop stable internal representations that facilitate perception and 2) to learn when to update such representations in a self-organizing manner. These simulations demonstrate that experience with recurring patterns enables a system to accurately predict upcoming stimuli within an event, to identify boundaries between such events based on transient increases in prediction error, and to use such boundaries to improve prediction about subsequent activities.     

Grammatical aspect and event recognition in children’s online sentence comprehension

This study investigated whether or not the temporal information encoded in aspectual morphemes can be used immediately by young children to facilitate event recognition during online sentence comprehension. We focused on the contrast between two grammatical aspectual morphemes in Mandarin Chinese, the perfective morpheme –le and the (imperfective) durative morpheme –zhe. The perfective morpheme –le is often used to indicate that an event has been completed, whereas the durative morpheme –zhe indicates that an event is still in progress or continuing. We were interested to see whether young children are able to use the temporal reference encoded in the two aspectual morphemes (i.e., completed versus ongoing) as rapidly as adults to facilitate event recognition during online sentence comprehension. Using the visual world eye-tracking paradigm, we tested 34 Mandarin-speaking adults and 99 Mandarin-speaking children (35 three-year-olds, 32 four-year-olds and 32 five-year-olds). On each trial, participants were presented with spoken sentences containing either of the two aspectual morphemes while viewing a visual image containing two pictures, one representing a completed event and one representing an ongoing event. Participants’ eye movements were recorded from the onset of the spoken sentences. The results show that both the adults and the three age groups of children exhibited a facilitatory effect trigged by the aspectual morpheme: hearing the perfective morpheme –le triggered more eye movements to the completed event area, whereas hearing the durative morpheme –zhe triggered more eye movements to the ongoing event area. This effect occurred immediately after the onset of the aspectual morpheme, both for the adults and the three groups of children. This is evidence that young children are able to use the temporal information encoded in aspectual morphemes as rapidly as adults to facilitate event recognition. Children’s eye movement patterns reflect a rapid mapping of grammatical aspect onto the temporal structures of events depicted in the visual scene.