Violent video games and aggressive behavior in young women

The increasing availability of violent video games and their implication in recent school shootings has raised the volume of public debate on the effects of such games on aggressive behavior and related variables. This article reports an experiment designed to test key hypotheses concerning the short term impact of exposure to violent video games on young women, a population that has received relatively little attention in this research literature. Results were that brief exposure to a violent video game increased aggressive behavior. Mediational analyses suggested that the violent video game effect on aggression was not mediated by instrumental aggressive motivation, but was partially mediated by revenge motivation. Other results suggested that the violent video game effect on aggression might be greater when the game player controls a same‐sex violent game character. Aggr. Behav. 29:423–429, 2003. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

面对面和计算机群体决策在观点产生上的比较

以144名被试组成32个群体,通过实验室模拟实验,对群体规模、群体类型和交流方式等3个变量在观点产生的数量和质量等指标上进行了比较。结果表明：（1）在所有实验条件下,CM（以计算机为中介的）决策群体都比FTF（面对面的）决策群体产生了更多数量的有效观点;CM名义群体比FTF名义群体产生了更多数量的有效观点。有效观点和创新观点产生的数量,主要受产生式障碍和评价恐怖的影响。（2）交流方式影响群体创新观点的数量,但对观点产生的深度和广度没有影响。群体规模和群体类型影响观点产生的深度和广度。名义群体比互动群体产生范围更广的观点。一般来说,名义群体比互动群体产生的观点深度高。匿名性和平行沟通是促进群体成员产生大量创新观点的主要原因。（3）相对于传统的FTF头脑风暴法,运用电子头脑风暴法的群体成员对自己或群体所产生的观点用于解决实际问题的信心不足。     

Abandoning the Public Good: How Universities Have Helped Privatize Higher Education

In this article we assert that much of the public good associated with teaching and research in higher education is gradually being displaced. This privatization of higher education is reflected in increased licensing of research and in the fragmentation of the traditional general education core. Taxpayer de-funding and institutional substitution are economic consequences of public good displacement.     

Caring for Nature: From Fact to Value, from Respect to Reverence

Abstract. Despite the classical prohibition of moving from fact to value, encounter with the biodiversity and plenitude of being in evolutionary natural history moves us to respect life, even to reverence it. Darwinian accounts are value‐laden and necessary for understanding life at the same time that Darwinian theory fails to provide sufficient cause for the historically developing diversity and increasing complexity on Earth. Earth is a providing ground; matter and energy on Earth support life, but distinctive to life is information coded in the genetic molecules that superintends this matter‐energy. Life is generated and regenerated in struggle, persists in its perishing. Such life is also a gift; nature is grace. Biologists and theologians join in celebrating and conserving the genesis on Earth, awed in their encounter with this creativity that characterizes our home planet.     

The Pleasant Life, the Engaged Life, and the Meaningful Life: What about the Balanced Life?

Martin Seligman, in his very popular book Authentic Happiness (Seligman 2002), argued that authentic happiness is derived from three major sets of experiences in life, namely experiencing pleasantness regularly (the pleasant life), experiencing a high level of engagement in satisfying activities (the engaged life), and experiencing a sense of connectedness to a greater whole (the meaningful life). In this paper, we maintain that balance in life contributes significantly to subjective well-being. Balance contributes to subjective well-being because of the satisfaction limit that people can derive from a single life domain. People have to be involved in multiple domains to satisfy the full spectrum of human development needs. Different life domains tend to focus on different human developmental needs. More specifically, balance contributes to subjective well-being because subjective well-being can only be attained when both survival and growth needs are met. High levels of subjective well-being cannot be attained with satisfaction of basic needs or growth needs alone. Both needs have to be met to induce subjective well-being.     

Cognitive components in risk perception: Natural versus manmade risks

In a questionnaire study 106 Norwegian students rated natural and manmade hazards according to risk magnitude and public versus private responsibility for risk management. Another group of 50 subjects judged 36 natural hazards on nine risk dimensions used in previous psychometric studies of ‘manmade risks’. When ratings on nine risk characteristics for natural hazards were factor analyzed a three-dimensional solution was found, with one active/passive dimension, one potency dimension, and one novelty dimension. This contrasts with the two-dimensional solution found for manmade hazards. Responsibility for risk management was found to be related to the type of risk in focus, and different risk characteristics seem to play different roles for manmade and natural hazards.     

After the puzzle boxes: thorndike in the 20th century

From the beginning of this century, following the publication of his dissertation, Thorndike made many significant contributions to psychology, some related to animal and human learning and others to various areas of educational psychology. This paper concentrates on the former and mentions some of the latter, in the context of personal and professional aspects of his life.     

Averaging Effects In The Study Of Fixed-ratio Response Patterns

Three rats were exposed to multiple fixed-ratio schedules in which large and small ratios alternated in an irregular order. Over a series of training phases, one ratio was held constant as the second ratio was increased to higher values. On average, postreinforcement pauses increased in duration as the ratio size was increased. Pausing was controlled by the size of the upcoming ratio; the previous ratio had smaller and less consistent effects. However, more detailed consideration of the aggregated data indicated that the pause distributions were positively skewed and that changes in average performances were more a consequence of increased skew rather than shifts of the entire distributions. Moreover, the distributions of pauses from condition to condition overlapped, and brief pauses were common even at the highest ratios. These results demonstrated that depictions of pausing based on aggregated data can be misleading without corresponding information about variations in the distribution on which the averages are based.