Alcohol as social lubricant.

This study examines how consuming alcohol differentially affects the communicative behavior and perceptions of high and low social self‐esteem (SSE) women as they engage in a brief interaction with a flirtatious male. Alcohol myopia theory proposes that alcohol affects behavior when it blocks a person's normal inhibitions about enacting a behavior. It was predicted that low SSE women would be more inhibited when talking to a flirtatious male than would high SSE women and, therefore administration of a social self‐esteem measure and random assignment to an alcoholic or nonalcoholic beverage condition, participants (N=50) talked with an attractive, flirtatious male confederate. Low SSE women were less anxious and self‐disclosed more when drinking than when sober, whereas high SSE women were not significantly affected by alcohol consumption. The discussion highlights the complex and often contradictory effects of alcohol consumption on social interaction.     

The effects of violent video games on aggression.

Violent content video games such as Mortal Kombat and Doom have become very popular among children and adolescents, causing great concern for parents, teachers, and policy makers. This study cumulates findings across existing empirical research on the effects of violent video games to estimate overall effect size and discern important trends and moderating variables. Results suggest there is a smaller effect of violent video games on aggression than has been found with television violence on aggression. This effect is positively associated with type of game violence and negatively related to time spent playing the games. Directions for future programmatic research on video games are outlined.     

Temporal pattern and spectral complexity as stimulus parameters for eliciting a cardiac orienting reflex in human fetuses

The purpose of this study was to determine whether temporal pattern and/or spectral complexity were important stimulus parameters for eliciting a cardiac orienting reflex (OR) in low-risk human fetuses. Each of 28 term fetuses was exposed to four sounds formed from the four different combinations of temporal pattern (pulsed, continuous) and spectral complexity (sine wave, /a/). The fetal cardiac electrical signal was captured transabdominally at a rate of 1024 Hz, and fetal R-waves were extracted by using adaptive signal-processing techniques. We found that pulsed sounds elicited a significantly greater decrease in heart rate (HR) than did continuous sounds. However, the HR response was relatively unaffected by spectral complexity. For the pure tone and the phoneme used in this study, our results indicate that temporal characteristics were more effective at eliciting a cardiac OR in human fetuses than was spectral complexity.     

Temporal pattern and spectral complexity as stimulus parameters for eliciting a cardiacorienting reflex inhuman fetuses

The purpose of this study was to determine whether temporal pattern and/or spectral complexity were important stimulus parameters for eliciting a cardiac orienting reflex (OR) in low-risk human fetuses. Each of 28 term fetuses was exposed to four sounds formed from the four different combinations of temporal pattern (pulsed, continuous) and spectral complexity (sine wave, IsJ). The fetal cardiac electrical signal was captured transabdominally at a rate of 1024 Hz, and fetal R-waves were extracted by using adaptive signal-processing techniques. We found that pulsed sounds elicited a significantly greater decrease in heart rate (HR) than did continuous sounds. However, the HR response was relatively unaffected by spectral complexity. For the pure tone and the phoneme used in this study, our results indicate that temporal characteristics were more effective at eliciting a cardiac OR in human fetuses than was spectral complexity.