Viewing the world through “blood-red tinted glasses”: The hostile expectation bias mediates the link between violent video game exposure and aggression

Research has clearly shown that violent video games can increase aggression. It is less clear why they do. This study investigates the mediating effect of the hostile expectation bias (i.e., tendency to perceive hostile intent on the part of others) on the link between violent video game exposure and aggression. French college students (N = 136) played either a violent or nonviolent game for 20 minutes. Afterwards, they read ambiguous story stems about potential interpersonal conflicts, and listed what they thought the main characters would do or say, think, and feel as the story continued. Aggression was measured using a competitive computer game in which the winner could blast the loser with loud noise through headphones. As hypothesized, video game violence increased the hostile expectation bias, which, in turn, increased aggression. Effects were larger for men than women. Thus one reason why violent games increase aggression is because they increase hostile expectations.     

Screw misfit dislocations perpendicular to one or two free surfaces

ABSTRACT

When a screw dislocation pierces one or two free surface(s), noticeable elastic relaxation takes place nearby these surfaces. To refine the theoretical interpretation of an electron microscopy image this relaxation should be included in a precise imaging model. In the present work, the relaxation field is evaluated for a periodic set of misfit screw dislocations normal to the free surface of a semi-infinite or plate-like heterogeneous bicrystal. The proposed approach uses an appropriate combination of known biperiodic elastic fields. For a homogeneous medium and when the period increases, the results around a misfit screw dislocation converge to those of Eshelby and Stroh (1951) who considered an isolated translation screw dislocation.     

Defining Compulsive Behavior

Neuropsychology Review - Compulsive tendencies are a central feature of problematic human behavior and thereby are of great interest to the scientific and clinical community. However, no consensus...     

The medial temporal lobe and visual working memory: Comparisons across tasks, delays, and visual similarity

Whether the hippocampus and medial temporal lobe (MTL) play any important role in visual working memory is a relatively new and controversial research question. The primary goal of this study was to assess working memory for faces over very short delays in patients with MTL damage. Patients and matched controls were required to remember one face that was parametrically morphed to be more or less similar to a probe face, over either a 1- or an 8-sec delay. Memory was assessed using both forced choice and old-new recognition tasks. The results show that MTL damage impairs both speed and accuracy of visual working memory across tasks. We speculate that the hippocampus is generally necessary for memory encoding.     

Innovation across cultures: Connecting leadership,identification, and creative behavior in organizations

Innovation is considered essential for today's organizations to survive and thrive. Researchers have also stressed the importance of leadership as a driver of followers' innovative work behavior (FIB). Yet, despite a large amount of research, three areas remain understudied: (a) The relative importance of different forms of leadership for FIB; (b) the mechanisms through which leadership impacts FIB; and (c) the degree to which relationships between leadership and FIB are generalizable across cultures. To address these lacunae, we propose an integrated model connecting four types of positive leadership behaviors, two types of identification (as mediating variables), and FIB. We tested our model in a global data set comprising responses of N = 7,225 participants from 23 countries, grouped into nine cultural clusters. Our results indicate that perceived LMX quality was the strongest relative predictor of FIB. Furthermore, the relationships between both perceived LMX quality and identity leadership with FIB were mediated by social identification. The indirect effect of LMX on FIB via social identification was stable across clusters, whereas the indirect effects of the other forms of leadership on FIB via social identification were stronger in countries high versus low on collectivism. Power distance did not influence the relations.     

Introduction to the Special Section: Advances in psychological prevention and treatment interventions to promote children's mental health

This paper introduces the Special Section on Advances in Psychological Prevention and Treatment Interventions to Promote Children's Mental Health. The three articles in the Special Section provide perspectives on the adaptation, evaluation, and implementation of evidence‐based psychological interventions for children in countries in Northern and Eastern Europe, and Latin America. The articles highlight disparate methodologies for the examination of intervention data, including addressing causal inference in the absence of availability of true experiment data (i.e., randomised controlled trial data), randomised trial data from a school‐based prevention programme, and predictors of change in an evidence‐based treatment programme. Together, the articles highlight the movement of evidence‐based practices into routine care settings and emerging strategies for settings in which randomised trial data are not yet available. They demonstrate the contribution of psychological research to the advancement of practices for improving children's mental health.     

What constitutes an episode in episodic memory?

The idea of episodic memory implies the existence of a process that segments experience into episodes so that they can be stored in memory. It is therefore surprising that the link between event segmentation and the organization of experiences into episodes in memory has not been addressed. We found that after participants read narratives containing temporal event boundaries at varying locations in the narrative, their long-term associative memory for information across event boundaries was lower than their memory for information within an event. This suggests that event segmentation during encoding resulted in segmentation of those same events in memory. Further, functional imaging data revealed that, across participants, brain activity consistent with the ongoing integration of information within events correlated with this pattern of mnemonic segmentation. These data are the first to address the mechanisms that support the organization of experiences into episodes in long-term memory.     

Gleaning Information for Cognitive Operations from Don’t Know Responses in Cognitive and Noncognitive Assessments

The Don’t Know (DK) response – taking the form of an omitted response or not-reached at the end of a cognitive test, or explicitly presented as a response option in a social survey – contains important information that is often overlooked. Direct psychometric modeling efforts for DK responses are few and far between. In this article, the linear logistic test model (LLTM) is proposed for delineating the impacts of cognitive operations for a test that contains DK responses. We assume that the DK response is a valid response. The assumption is reasonable for many situations, including low-stakes cognitive tests and attitudinal assessments. By extracting information embedded in the DK response, the method shows how DK can inform the latent construct of interest and the cognitive operations underlying the response to stimuli. Using a proven recoding scheme, the LLTM could be implemented through commonly used programs such as PROC GLIMMIX. Two simulation experiments to evaluate how well the parameters can be recovered were conducted. In addition, two real data examples, from a noncognitive test of health belief assessment and a cognitive test of knowledge in diabetes, are also presented as case studies to illustrate the LLTM for DK response.