Researchers studied 2,510 children aged 10, 12 and 15

Children who display multiple psychosomatic symptoms, such as regular aches and pains and sleep and appetite problems, are more than twice as likely to be experiencing physical abuse at home than children who do not display symptoms, according to a study in the March edition of Acta Paediatrica.

Swedish researchers who studied 2,510 children aged 10, 12 and 15 from 44 schools found a strong association between reported physical abuse and three or more psychosomatic symptoms. The association was highest in children who were physically abused and also witnessed intimate partner violence (IPV). However, there was no significant association between IPV on its own and multiple symptoms. "The children were asked if they had experienced any of the following symptoms at least twice in the last month: stomach ache, headache, sleeplessness, dizziness, back pain and loss of appetite" explains co-author Professor Staffan Janson from the Division of Public Health Sciences at Karlstad University, Sweden. "They were also asked about 13 common chronic conditions, bullying and school performance, to eliminate any other factors that could cause the symptoms, and about whether they had been physically abused and witnessed IPV at home."

The study sample was equally split between girls and boys, with approximately one third of the sample coming from each of the three age groups. Key findings of the study included:

• Most of the children were born in Sweden (89%) and living with both biological parents (74%). Just under half (42%) had at least one chronic condition, 10% had two chronic conditions and 4% had three or more.
• One in six of the children (16%) had suffered physical abuse or witnessed IPV in the home – 9% reported just physical abuse, 4% reported IPV alone and 3% reported both.
• Two-thirds of the children (66%) reported at least one psychosomatic symptom and just over a third of these children (35%) reported three symptoms or more.
• The most common symptoms were headache (38%), sleeplessness (36%) and stomach ache (31%).
• 86% of the children who reported that they were physically abused and had witnessed IPV at home reported at least one psychosomatic symptom, with 41% reporting three or more, compared with 17% of the non-abused children.
• 82% of the children who reported physical abuse only reported at least one symptom, with 35% reporting three or more symptoms compared with 17% of the non-abused children.
• There was no significant difference in the symptoms reported by children who did or did not report just IPV.
• When confounding factors, such as chronic conditions, bullying and school performance were taken into account, the odds of a child suffering physical abuse, with or without IPV, was 112% higher (OR 2.12) than a child who was not being abused. When IPV was added into the equation, this rose to 171% higher (OR 2.71)
• The odds for a child suffering physical abuse only was 72% higher (OR 1.72) and the odds for IPV only was 9% higher (OR 1.09).
• Abused children with chronic conditions reported significantly more psychosomatic symptoms than abused children without chronic conditions.

"Our study demonstrates a clear association between high levels of psychosomatic symptoms and an increased risk of physical abuse" says Professor Janson. "The association was even stronger in abused children who also witnessed intimate partner violence at home. "The findings suggest that healthcare professionals should consider the possibility of physical abuse if a child presents with three or more regular psychosomatic symptoms a month. "However, it is also important that they rule out any confounding factors, such as chronic illness, bullying and school performance when assessing the child."

It's often assumed that bullying leads to psychological problems, but this study doesn't support this line of thought

A new study provides evidence that adolescents who suffer from depression are more likely to develop difficulty in peer relationships including being bullied at school. It's often assumed that being bullied leads to psychological problems, such as depression, but the study doesn't support this line of thought. "Often the assumption is that problematic peer relationships drive depression. We found that depression symptoms predicted negative peer relationships," said Karen Kochel, Arizona State University School of Social and Family Dynamics assistant research professor. "We examined the issue from both directions but found no evidence to suggest that peer relationships forecasted depression among this school-based sample of adolescents."

The new research is published in the journal Child Development. The article, Longitudinal Associations among Youths' Depressive Symptoms, Peer Victimization, and Low Peer Acceptance: An Interpersonal Process Perspective, was authored by: Arizona State University School of Social and Family Dynamics Professor Gary Ladd; Karen Kochel, who conducted the study for her dissertation; and Karen Rudolph of the University of Illinois.

Being depressed in fourth grade predicted peer victimization in fifth grade and difficulty with peer acceptance in sixth grade, according to the research. The researchers examined data from 486 youths from fourth to sixth grade. Parents, teachers, peers and students themselves provided information through yearly surveys. Data was collected as part of a large-scale longitudinal study that began in 1992 and continued for nearly two decades.

"Adolescence is the time when we see depressive symptoms escalate, particularly in girls," Kochel said. This may be due to the onset of puberty or interpersonal challenges, such as emotionally demanding peer and romantic relationships, which are often experienced during adolescence. Teachers and parents were asked to identify classic signs of depression – crying a lot, lack of energy, etc. - when determining which children suffered from the malady. They defined peer victimization as bullying that was manifested physically, verbally, or relationally, such as hitting someone, saying mean things, talking behind someone's back or picking on someone. "Teachers, administrators and parents need to be aware of the signs and symptoms of depression and the possibility that depression is a risk factor for problematic peer relations," Kochel said.

Research shows that having positive peer relationships is crucial for adapting to certain aspects of life such as scholastic achievement and functioning in a healthy manner psychologically, Kochel said. "If adolescent depression forecasts peer relationship problems, then recognizing depression is very important at this particular age. This is especially true given that social adjustment in adolescence appears to have implications for functioning throughout an individual's lifetime," Kochel said.

School may be the best place to observe and address adolescent signs of depression since students typically start spending more time with their friends and less with their parents as they become adolescents, according to the social scientists. "We studied peer relationships within the school context. Parents tend not to observe these relationships," Kochel said. "Because depression has the potential to undermine the maturation of key developmental skills, such as establishing healthy peer relationships, it's important to be aware of the signs and symptoms of adolescent depression."

Among corporations involved in the 2006 stock-option backdating scandal, those implicated earlier were more likely to dismiss their top executives than those that surfaced later on, according to new research from Rice University and the University of California at Irvine. The study, "Executive Turnover in the Stock-Option Backdating Wave: The Impact of Social Context," will be published in an upcoming edition of the Strategic Management Journal.

The researchers examined the behavior of corporate boards following the 2006 stock-option backdating scandal, in which firms illegally manipulated stock-option grant dates. Researchers reviewed the 141 companies listed as having come under scrutiny for their stock-option practices in the Wall Street Journal Options Scorecard website to understand why corporations respond to the same kind of misconduct in different ways. "When faced with scandal, it's critical for corporations to manage their images and maintain legitimacy with stakeholders and the general public," said Anthea Zhang, professor of strategic management at Rice University's Jones Graduate School of Business. "While it seems to be a natural choice to fire the executives/directors who should be responsible for option backdating, only one-third of the 141 firms we surveyed elected to do so."

Zhang and her co-author, Margarethe Wiersema at the University of California at Irvine, theorize that the decrease in executive/director turnover over the course of the scandal can be attributed to companies using other companies' similar misconduct to justify their own misconduct. "Our findings suggest that corporate boards 'strategize' their response by calculating the reputation damage caused by scandal," Zhang said. "If accountability were the basis for their decision-making, we should have observed a more consistent pattern of companies choosing to dismiss their executives/directors over time."

Zhang said that attention from the media, as well as investigation by the Department of Justice and/or the Securities and Exchange Commission, plays an important role in pushing companies involved in the scandal to fire their executives and directors. "This attention serves to counterbalance corporation boards' tendency to justify their misbehavior with others' misbehavior," she said. Zhang hopes their research can help stakeholders and the general public better understand how corporate boards respond to scandal.

Feeling like you're part of the gang is crucial to the human experience. All people get stressed out when we're left out. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that a feeling of inclusion can come from something as simple as eye contact from a stranger.

Psychologists already know that humans have to feel connected to each other to be happy. A knitting circle, a church choir, or a friendly neighbor can all feed that need for connection. Eric D. Wesselmann of Purdue University wanted to know just how small a cue could help someone feel connected. He cowrote the study with Florencia D. Cardoso of the Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata in Argentina, Samantha Slater of Ohio University, and Kipling D. Williams of Purdue. "Some of my coauthors have found, for example, that people have reported that they felt bothered sometimes even when a stranger hasn't acknowledged them," Wesselmann says. He and his authors came up with an experiment to test that.

The study was carried out with the cooperation of people on campus at Purdue University. A research assistant walked along a well-populated path, picked a subject, and either met that person's eyes, met their eyes and smiled, or looked in the direction of the person's eyes, but past them—past an ear, for example, "looking at them as if they were air," Wesselmann says. When the assistant had passed the person, he or she gave a thumbs-up behind the back to indicate that another experimenter should stop that person. The second experimenter asked, "Within the last minute, how disconnected do you feel from others?"

People who had gotten eye contact from the research assistant, with or without a smile, felt less disconnected than people who had been looked at as if they weren't there.

"These are people that you don't know, just walking by you, but them looking at you or giving you the air gaze—looking through you—seemed to have at least momentary effect," Wesselmann says. Other research has found that even being ostracized by a group you want nothing to do with, like the Ku Klux Klan, can make people feel left out, so it's not surprising that being pointedly ignored can have the same effect. "What we find so interesting about this is that now we can further speak to the power of human social connection," Wesselmann says. "It seems to be a very strong phenomenon."

In cultures that permit men to take multiple wives, the intra-sexual competition that occurs causes greater levels of crime, violence, poverty and gender inequality than in societies that institutionalize and practice monogamous marriage. That is a key finding of a new University of British Columbia-led study that explores the global rise of monogamous marriage as a dominant cultural institution. The study suggests that institutionalized monogamous marriage is rapidly replacing polygamy because it has lower levels of inherent social problems. "Our goal was to understand why monogamous marriage has become standard in most developed nations in recent centuries, when most recorded cultures have practiced polygyny," says UBC Prof. Joseph Henrich, a cultural anthropologist, referring to the form of polygamy that permits multiple wives, which continues to be practiced in some parts of Africa, Asia, the Middle East and North America. "The emergence of monogamous marriage is also puzzling for some as the very people who most benefit from polygyny – wealthy, powerful men – were best positioned to reject it," says Henrich, lead author of the study that is published today in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. "Our findings suggest that that institutionalized monogamous marriage provides greater net benefits for society at large by reducing social problems that are inherent in polygynous societies."

Considered the most comprehensive study of polygamy and the institution of marriage, the study finds significantly higher levels rape, kidnapping, murder, assault, robbery and fraud in polygynous cultures. According to Henrich and his research team, which included Profs. Robert Boyd (UCLA) and Peter Richerson (UC Davis), these crimes are caused primarily by pools of unmarried men, which result when other men take multiple wives. "The scarcity of marriageable women in polygamous cultures increases competition among men for the remaining unmarried women," says Henrich, adding that polygamy was outlawed in 1963 in Nepal, 1955 in India (partially), 1953 in China and 1880 in Japan. The greater competition increases the likelihood men in polygamous communities will resort to criminal behavior to gain resources and women, he says.

According to Henrich, monogamy's main cultural evolutionary advantage over polygyny is the more egalitarian distribution of women, which reduces male competition and social problems. By shifting male efforts from seeking wives to paternal investment, institutionalized monogamy increases long-term planning, economic productivity, savings and child investment, the study finds. Monogamy's institutionalization has been assisted by its incorporation by religions, such as Christianity.

Monogamous marriage also results in significant improvements in child welfare, including lower rates of child neglect, abuse, accidental death, homicide and intra-household conflict, the study finds. These benefits result from greater levels of parental investment, smaller households and increased direct "blood relatedness" in monogamous family households, says Henrich, who served as an expert witness for British Columbia's Supreme Court case involving the polygamous community of Bountiful, B.C.

Monogamous marriage has largely preceded democracy and voting rights for women in the nations where it has been institutionalized, says Henrich, the Canadian Research Chair in Culture, Cognition and Evolution in UBC's Depts. of Psychology and Economics. By decreasing competition for younger and younger brides, monogamous marriage increases the age of first marriage for females, decreases the spousal age gap and elevates female influence in household decisions which decreases total fertility and increases gender equality.

Rats free trapped companions, even when given choice of chocolate instead

The first evidence of empathy-driven helping behavior in rodents has been observed in laboratory rats that repeatedly free companions from a restraint, according to a new study by University of Chicago neuroscientists. The observation, published in Science, places the origin of pro-social helping behavior earlier in the evolutionary tree than previously thought. Though empathetic behavior has been observed anecdotally in non-human primates and other wild species, the concept had not previously been observed in rodents in a laboratory setting. "This is the first evidence of helping behavior triggered by empathy in rats," said Jean Decety, PhD, Irving B. Harris Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Chicago. "There are a lot of ideas in the literature showing that empathy is not unique to humans, and it has been well demonstrated in apes, but in rodents it was not very clear. We put together in one series of experiments evidence of helping behavior based on empathy in rodents, and that's really the first time it's been seen."

The study demonstrates the deep evolutionary roots of empathy-driven behavior, said Jeffrey Mogil, the E.P. Taylor Professor in Pain Studies at McGill University, who has studied emotional contagion of pain in mice. "On its face, this is more than empathy, this is pro-social behavior," said Mogil, who was not involved in the study. "It's more than has been shown before by a long shot, and that's very impressive, especially since there's no advanced technology here."

The experiments, designed by psychology graduate student and first author Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal with co-authors Decety and Peggy Mason, placed two rats that normally share a cage into a special test arena. One rat was held in a restrainer device — a closed tube with a door that can be nudged open from the outside. The second rat roamed free in the cage around the restrainer, able to see and hear the trapped cagemate but not required to take action. The researchers observed that the free rat acted more agitated when its cagemate was restrained, compared to its activity when the rat was placed in a cage with an empty restrainer. This response offered evidence of an "emotional contagion," a frequently observed phenomenon in humans and animals in which a subject shares in the fear, distress or even pain suffered by another subject.

While emotional contagion is the simplest form of empathy, the rats' subsequent actions clearly comprised active helping behavior, a far more complex expression of empathy. After several daily restraint sessions, the free rat learned how to open the restrainer door and free its cagemate. Though slow to act at first, once the rat discovered the ability to free its companion, it would take action almost immediately upon placement in the test arena. "We are not training these rats in any way," Bartal said. "These rats are learning because they are motivated by something internal. We're not showing them how to open the door, they don't get any previous exposure on opening the door, and it's hard to open the door. But they keep trying and trying, and it eventually works."

To control for motivations other than empathy that would lead the rat to free its companion, the researchers conducted further experiments. When a stuffed toy rat was placed in the restrainer, the free rat did not open the door. When opening the restrainer door released his companion into a separate compartment, the free rat continued to nudge open the door, ruling out the reward of social interaction as motivation. The experiments left behavior motivated by empathy as the simplest explanation for the rats' behavior. "There was no other reason to take this action, except to terminate the distress of the trapped rats," Bartal said. "In the rat model world, seeing the same behavior repeated over and over basically means that this action is rewarding to the rat."

As a test of the power of this reward, another experiment was designed to give the free rats a choice: free their companion or feast on chocolate. Two restrainers were placed in the cage with the rat, one containing the cagemate, another containing a pile of chocolate chips. Though the free rat had the option of eating all the chocolate before freeing its companion, the rat was equally likely to open the restrainer containing the cagemate before opening the chocolate container. "That was very compelling," said Mason, PhD, Professor of Neurobiology. "It said to us that essentially helping their cagemate is on a par with chocolate. He can hog the entire chocolate stash if he wanted to, and he does not. We were shocked."

Now that this model of empathic behavior has been established, the researchers are carrying out additional experiments. Because not every rat learned to open the door and free its companion, studies can compare these individuals to look for the biological source of these behavioral differences. Early results suggested that females were more likely to become door openers than males, perhaps reflecting the important role of empathy in motherhood and providing another avenue for study. "This model of empathy and helping behavior opens the path for elucidating aspects of the underlying neurophysiological mechanisms that were not accessible until now." Bartal said.

The experiments also provide further evidence that empathy-driven helping behavior is not unique to humans – and suggest that Homo sapiens could learn a lesson from its rat cousins. "When we act without empathy we are acting against our biological inheritance," Mason said. "If humans would listen and act on their biological inheritance more often, we'd be better off."

A father in Louisiana bludgeoned and beheaded his disabled 7-year-old son last August because he no longer wanted to care for the boy. For most people, such a heinous act is unconscionable. But it may be that a person can become callous enough to commit human atrocities because of a failure in the part of the brain that's critical for social interaction. A new study by researchers at Duke University and Princeton University suggests this function may disengage when people encounter others they consider disgusting, thus "dehumanizing" their victims by failing to acknowledge they have thoughts and feelings.

This shortcoming also may help explain how propaganda depicting Tutsi in Rwanda as cockroaches and Hitler's classification of Jews in Nazi Germany as vermin contributed to torture and genocide, the study said. "When we encounter a person, we usually infer something about their minds. Sometimes, we fail to do this, opening up the possibility that we do not perceive the person as fully human," said lead author Lasana Harris, an assistant professor in Duke University's Department of Psychology & Neuroscience and Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. Harris co-authored the study with Susan Fiske, a professor of psychology at Princeton University.

Social neuroscience has shown through MRI studies that people normally activate a network in the brain related to social cognition -- thoughts, feelings, empathy, for example -- when viewing pictures of others or thinking about their thoughts. But when participants in this study were asked to consider images of people they considered drug addicts, homeless people, and others they deemed low on the social ladder, parts of this network failed to engage. What's especially striking, the researchers said, is that people will easily ascribe social cognition -- a belief in an internal life such as emotions -- to animals and cars, but will avoid making eye contact with the homeless panhandler in the subway. "We need to think about other people's experience," Fiske said. "It's what makes them fully human to us."

The duo's previous research suggested that a lack of social cognition can be linked to not acknowledging the mind of other people when imagining a day in their life, and rating them differently on traits that we think differentiate humans from everything else. This latest study expands on that earlier work to show that these traits correlate with activation in brain regions beyond the social cognition network. These areas include those brain areas involved in disgust, attention and cognitive control. The result is what the researchers call "dehumanized perception," or failing to consider someone else's mind. Such a lack of empathy toward others can also help explain why some members of society are sometimes dehumanized, they said.

For this latest study, 119 undergraduates from Princeton completed judgment and decision-making surveys as they viewed images of people. The researchers sought to examine the students' responses to common emotions triggered by images such as:

• a female college student and male American firefighter (pride)
• a business woman and rich man (envy)
• an elderly man and disabled woman (pity)
• a female homeless person and male drug addict (disgust)

After imagining a day in the life of the people in the images, participants next rated the same person on various dimensions. They rated characteristics including the warmth, competence, similarity, familiarity, responsibility of the person for his/her situation, control of the person over their situation, intelligence, complex emotionality, self-awareness, ups-and-downs in life, and typical humanity. Participants then went into the MRI scanner and simply looked at pictures of people.

The study found that the neural network involved in social interaction failed to respond to images of drug addicts, the homeless, immigrants and poor people, replicating earlier results. "These results suggest multiple roots to dehumanization," Harris said. "This suggests that dehumanization is a complex phenomenon, and future research is necessary to more accurately specify this complexity."

The sample's mean age was 20, with 62 female participants. The ethnic composition of the Princeton students who participated in the study was 68 white, 19 Asian, 12 of mixed descent, and 6 black, with the remainder not reporting.

Racial minorities pay systemically more for basic water and sewer services than white people, according to a study by Michigan State University researchers. This "structural inequality" is not necessarily a product of racism, argues sociologist Stephen Gasteyer, but rather the result of whites fleeing urban areas and leaving minority residents to bear the costs of maintaining aging water and sewer infrastructure. "This study demonstrates a disturbing racial effect to the cost of basic services," said Gasteyer, assistant professor of sociology. "People of color have the fewest opportunities to leave urban centers and are left to pay for the crumbling legacy of a bygone economic era." The findings by Gasteyer and Rachel Butts will appear in an upcoming issue of the research journal Environmental Practice.

The researchers analyzed Census data on self-reported water and sewer costs in Michigan. The study found that urban residents actually pay more than rural residents, which refutes conventional wisdom, Gasteyer said. But perhaps more importantly, Gasteyer said, water and sewer services cost more in areas with greater proportions of racial minorities.

Detroit is the "poster child" for this problem, Gasteyer said. The city has lost more than 60 percent of its population since 1950, and the water and sewer infrastructure is as much as a century old in some areas. Billions of gallons of water are lost through leaks in the aging lines every year, and the entire system has been under federal oversight since 1977 for wastewater violations. "A fair proportion of Detroit's large low-income population cannot afford the burden of rate increases meant to offset infrastructure repairs, leading to tens of thousands of customers getting their water turned off every year," Gasteyer said.

Water and sewer lines are aging throughout the country. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, hundreds of billions of dollars will be needed to repair deteriorating systems over the next 20 years. Paying for those upgrades likely will be a major issue in shrinking cities such as Cleveland, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Birmingham, Ala., and many others, Gasteyer said. "Everything is wearing out, and we are going to have to grapple with how we pay for these so-called liquid assets that need to be upgraded," Gasteyer said. "At the same time, we need to be cognizant of who may be paying an unsustainable burden as those rates go up."

Middle-class children ask their teachers for help more often and more assertively than working-class children and, in doing so, receive more support and assistance from teachers according to a study from the University of Pennsylvania. The findings are reported in the December issue of the American Sociological Review in a paper entitled, "'I Need Help!' Social Class and Children's Help-Seeking in Elementary School" by Jessica McCrory Calarco, a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology in Penn's School of Arts and Sciences. The paper is based on Calarco's dissertation research, a longitudinal ethnographic study of students in one socioeconomically diverse, public elementary school.

For three years, she followed a cohort of students as they progressed from third through fifth grade, observing them regularly in school and interviewing teachers, parents, and students to show that children's social-class backgrounds shaped when and how they sought help in the classroom. "We know that middle-class parents are better able than working-class parents to secure advantages for themselves and their children, but not when and where they learned to do so, or whether they teach their children to do the same," Calarco said. "My research answers those questions by looking at children's role in stratification—how they try to secure their own advantages in the classroom."

Her study showed that middle-class children regularly approached teachers with questions and requests and were much more proactive and assertive in asking for help. Rather than wait for assistance, the middle-class children called out or approached teachers directly, even interrupting to make requests. Working-class children, on the other hand, rarely asked for help from teachers, doing so only as a last resort. Furthermore, when working-class children did ask for help, they tended to do so in less obvious ways (e.g., hanging back or sitting with their hand raised), meaning that they often waited longer for teachers to notice and respond. "Teachers want kids to ask for help if they are struggling, but they rarely make those expectations explicit. That leaves kids to figure out when and how to ask for help," Calarco explained.

In another related project, Calarco found that children learn whether and how to ask for help at school, in part, through the training that they receive from their parents at home. She noted that, "unlike their working-class counterparts, middle-class parents explicitly encourage children to feel comfortable asking for help from teachers, and also deliberately coach children on the language and strategies to use in making these requests." As a result, middle-class children came to school better equipped to secure the support that they needed to complete their assignments quickly and correctly, and also appeared more engaged in the learning process.

Calarco said that while teachers don't mean to privilege some children over others, they tend to be more responsive to middle-class children's help-seeking styles, giving those who ask for help more attention and support in the classroom, and also seeing them as more "proactive" learners. "What that means is that middle-class kids' help-seeking skills and strategies effectively become a form of 'cultural capital' in the classroom—by activating those resources, middle-class kids can secure their own advantages in the classroom," she explained. "It also means that children play a more active role in stratification than previous research has recognized."

The ASR study concludes that inequalities in education are not just the product of differences in the resources that families and schools provide for children; they also reflect differences in the resources that children can secure for themselves in the classroom.

Investigation claims dozens of social-psychology papers contain faked data.
(story at NatureNews)

Some authority combined with little respect is often a toxic combination, according to new research from USC, Stanford and the Kellogg School

Ever wonder why that government clerk was so rude and condescending? Or why the mid-level manager at your company always doles out the most demeaning tasks? Or, on a more profound level, why the guards at Abu Ghraib tortured and humiliated their prisoners?

In a new study, researchers at USC, Stanford and the Kellogg School of Management have found that individuals in roles that possess power but lack status have a tendency to engage in activities that demean others. According to the study, "The Destructive Nature of Power without Status," the combination of some authority and little perceived status can be a toxic combination.

The research, forthcoming in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, is "based on the notions that a) low-status is threatening and aversive and b) power frees people to act on their internal states and feelings." The study was conducted by Nathanael Fast, assistant professor of management and organization at the USC Marshall School of Business; Nir Halevy, acting assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business; and Adam Galinsky, professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

To test their theses, the authors conducted an experiment with students who were told they would be interacting with a fellow student in a business exercise and were randomly assigned to either a high-status "Idea Producer" role or low-status "Worker" role. Then these individuals were asked to select activities from a list of 10 for the others to perform; some of the tasks were more demeaning than others.

The experiment demonstrated that "individuals in high-power/low-status roles chose more demeaning activities for their partners (e.g., bark like a dog three times) than did those in any other combination of power and status roles." According to the study, possessing power in the absence of status may have contributed to the acts committed by U.S. soldiers in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004. That incident was reminiscent of behaviors exhibited during the famous Stanford Prison Experiment with undergraduate students that went awry in the early 1970s. In both cases the guards had power, but they lacked respect and admiration in the eyes of others and in both cases prisoners were treated in extremely demeaning ways.

Fast said that he and his colleagues focused on the relationship between power and status because "although a lot of work has looked at these two aspects of hierarchy, it has typically looked at the isolated effects of either power or status, not both. We wanted to understand how those two aspects of hierarchy interact. We predicted that when people have a role that gives them power but lacks status—and the respect that comes with that status—then it can lead to demeaning behaviors. Put simply, it feels bad to be in a low status position and the power that goes with that role gives them a way to take action on those negative feelings."

Social hierarchy, the study says, does not on its own generate demeaning tendencies. In other words, the idea that power always corrupts may not be entirely true. Just because someone has power or, alternatively, is in a "low status" role does not mean they will mistreat others. Rather, "power and status interact to produce effects that cannot be fully explained by studying only one or the other basis of hierarchy."

One way to overcome this dynamic, according to the authors, is to find ways for all individuals, regardless of the status of their roles, to feel respected and valued. The authors write: "…respect assuages negative feelings about their low-status roles and leads them to treat others positively." Opportunities for advancement may also help. "If an individual knows he or she may gain a higher status role in the future, or earn a bonus for treating others well, that may help ameliorate their negative feelings and behavior," Fast said.

The researchers conclude, however, that, "Our findings indicate that the experience of having power without status, whether as a member of the military or a college student participating in an experiment, may be a catalyst for producing demeaning behaviors that can destroy relationships and impede goodwill."

We like to think that others agree with us. It's called "social projection," and it helps us validate our beliefs and ourselves. Psychologists have found that we tend to think people who are similar to us in one explicit way—say, religion or lifestyle—will act and believe as we do, and vote as we do. Meanwhile, we exaggerate differences between ourselves and those who are explicitly unlike us.

But what about people whose affiliation is unknown—who can't easily be placed in either the "in-group" or the "out-group"? A new study finds that we think the silent are also our side. Dutch voters, especially those most committed to their parties, were found to believe that people who do not cast a ballot support their own party —even when they know surveys suggest the opposite. The findings will appear in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science.

"Non-voters are an ambiguous group," says Namkje Koudenburg, a graduate student at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands, who studies social validation and the intriguing subject of "what it means when people remain silent." That ambiguity allows voters and politicians to exaggerate the influence or size of their own party.

The researchers—Koudenburg, along with Groningen colleagues Tom Postmes and Ernestine H. Gordijn—demonstrated this phenomenon in two studies. In the first, 116 voters were recruited at local polling places during city council elections in 2010. After casting votes, the participants were asked what party they'd vote for in Parliamentary elections three months later; what percentage of votes they estimated their party would win; and then what percentage it would win if non-voters were to participate. The result: In this second, all-inclusive tally, voters expected their support base to be 17 percent larger than in the first.

The second study took place several weeks before national elections, when presumably political passions were higher. In three cities, 207 participants approached on the streets told interviewers which of the seven major parties they intended to vote for. Two questions assessed their commitment to voting for that party. They were then given the actual forecasts of the distribution of votes among those parties and told that not everyone would vote. Asked how many votes their own party would get if everyone cast a ballot, respondents again overestimated. And the more partisan voters overestimated even more.

"People want to validate their opinions, to believe their opinions are right," says Koudenburg. "They are also motivated to promote their party's success," which entails convincing others that it represents the majority's beliefs. The researchers aren't certain whether these exaggerations are conscious strategies or unconscious wishes, she avers. Further research might help sort that out.

In the meantime, Koudenburg says, the study suggests one problem caused by non-voting: Voters, candidates, and the political leaders who win can claim greater popular affirmation for their positions than might really exist. By enlarging the imaginary "in-group," citizens "can use low turnout to strengthen their biases."

Popular media's hypersexualization of women may be worse than you think

A study by University at Buffalo sociologists has found that the portrayal of women in the popular media over the last several decades has become increasingly sexualized, even "pornified." The same is not true of the portrayal of men. These findings may be cause for concern, the researchers say, because previous research has found sexualized images of women to have far-reaching negative consequences for both men and women.

Erin Hatton, PhD, and Mary Nell Trautner, PhD, assistant professors in the UB Department of Sociology, are the authors of "Equal Opportunity Objectification? The Sexualization of Men and Women on the Cover of Rolling Stone," which examines the covers of Rolling Stone magazine from 1967 to 2009 to measure changes in the sexualization of men and women in popular media over time.

The study will be published in the September issue of the journal Sexuality & Culture and is available at http://www.springerlink.com/content/k722255851qh46u8.

"We chose Rolling Stone," explains Hatton, "because it is a well-established, pop-culture media outlet. It is not explicitly about sex or relationships; foremost it is about music. But it also covers politics, film, television and current events, and so offers a useful window into how women and men are portrayed generally in popular culture."

After analyzing more than 1,000 images of men and women on Rolling Stone covers over the course of 43 years, the authors came to several conclusions. First, representations of both women and men have indeed become more sexualized over time; and, second, women continue to be more frequently sexualized than men. Their most striking finding, however, was the change in how intensely sexualized images of women -- but not men -- have become.

In order to measure the intensity of sexualized representations men and women, the authors developed a "scale of sexualization." An image was given "points" for being sexualized if, for example, the subject's lips were parted or his/her tongue was showing, the subject was only partially clad or naked, or the text describing the subject used explicitly sexual language. Based on this scale, the authors identified three categories of images: a) those that were, for the most part, not sexualized (i.e., scoring 0-4 points on the scale), b) those that were sexualized (5-10 points), and c) those that were so intensely sexualized that the authors labeled them "hypersexualized" (11-23 points).

In the 1960s they found that 11 percent of men and 44 percent of women on the covers of Rolling Stone were sexualized. In the 2000s, 17 percent of men were sexualized (an increase of 55 percent from the 1960s), and 83 percent of women were sexualized (an increase of 89 percent). Among those images that were sexualized, 2 percent of men and 61 percent of women were hypersexualized. "In the 2000s," Hatton says, "there were 10 times more hypersexualized images of women than men, and 11 times more non-sexualized images of men than of women."

"What we conclude from this is that popular media outlets such as Rolling Stone are not depicting women as sexy musicians or actors; they are depicting women musicians and actors as ready and available for sex. This is problematic," Hatton says, "because it indicates a decisive narrowing of media representations of women. We don't necessarily think it's problematic for women to be portrayed as 'sexy.' But we do think it is problematic when nearly all images of women depict them not simply as 'sexy women' but as passive objects for someone else's sexual pleasure."

These findings are important, the authors say, because a plethora of research has found such images to have a range of negative consequences: "Sexualized portrayals of women have been found to legitimize or exacerbate violence against women and girls, as well as sexual harassment and anti-women attitudes among men and boys," Hatton says. "Such images also have been shown to increase rates of body dissatisfaction and/or eating disorders among men, women and girls; and they have even been shown to decrease sexual satisfaction among both men and women. For these reasons, we find the frequency of sexualized images of women in popular media, combined with the extreme intensity of their sexualization, to be cause for concern."

Psychologists examine disturbing trends, offer tips on coping

People who are cyberstalked or harassed online experience higher levels of stress and trauma than people who are stalked or harassed in person, according to a presentation at the American Psychological Association's 119th Annual Convention.

"Increasingly, stalkers use modern technology to monitor and torment their victims, and one in four victims report some form of cyberstalking, such as threatening emails or instant messaging," said Elizabeth Carll, PhD, in a talk entitled, "Electronic Harassment and Cyberstalking: Intervention, Prevention and Public Policy."

Emotional responses to the stress and trauma experienced by victims may include high levels of ongoing stress, anxiety, fear, nightmares, shock and disbelief, helplessness, hyper-vigilance, changes in eating, and sleeping difficulties, Carll said. "It is my observation that the symptoms related to cyberstalking and e-harassment may be more intense than in-person harassment, as the impact is more devastating due to the 24/7 nature of online communication, inability to escape to a safe place, and global access of the information," Carll said.

U.S. Department of Justice statistics reveal that some 850,000 adults, the majority female, are targets of cyberstalking each year, according to Carll. Citing various other sources, she gave examples of the pervasiveness, including:

• 40 percent of women have experienced dating violence via social media, which can include harassing text messages and disturbing information about them posted on social media sites;
• 20 percent of online stalkers use social networking to stalk their victims.
• 34 percent of female college students and 14 percent of male students have broken into a romantic partner's email.

"The same technologies used to harass can also be used to intervene and prevent harassment," she said, adding that some states are considering mandating the use of GPS tracking devices on offenders to allow victims to keep tabs on them. "Imagine a cell phone application that can tell you if someone threatening you is nearby," Carll said. "That could be life-saving." Law enforcement, legal assistance and other social service providers need training to use direct and electronic methods to intervene and prevent electronic harassment, and victims need training in the safe use of technology, she said.

In another session Friday, researchers released results of a study that found 36 percent of students had been cyberbullied at least once in the past year. Researchers examined data collected in 2009 from 1,112 students, ages 12 to 19, 405 female, from schools in Seoul and the Keonggi area of South Korea. Of these, 225 were in elementary school, 678 in middle school and 209 in high school. The students completed a questionnaire about their cyberbullying experiences, self-esteem and how they regulate their emotions.

"The results revealed that cyberbullying makes students socially anxious, lonely, frustrated, sad and helpless," said presenter YeoJu Chung, PhD, of South Korea's Kyungil University. The research explored how adolescents emotionally deal with cyberbullying. Students who said they ruminated, or obsessed, about the negative event were more likely to suffer serious stress from cyberbullying. In addition, people who blamed themselves for the situation were more likely to ruminate. Students who refocused on positive thoughts were able to cope and recover more quickly, according to the study.

Students reported that they were more negatively affected by cyberbullying when it was anonymous and in "one-sided sites such as blogs and cyber boards." The research also showed that students who are victims of cyberbullying will often subsequently bully others online. "Lots of adolescents have trouble recovering from negative effects of cyberbullying," said Chung. "We can help them use emotion regulation skills to recover, rather than become bullies themselves."

Parental moderation encouraged for children

Scientists have known for years that playing violent video games causes players to become more aggressive. The findings of a new University of Missouri (MU) study provide one explanation for why this occurs: the brains of violent video game players become less responsive to violence, and this diminished brain response predicts an increase in aggression. "Many researchers have believed that becoming desensitized to violence leads to increased human aggression. Until our study, however, this causal association had never been demonstrated experimentally," said Bruce Bartholow, associate professor of psychology in the MU College of Arts and Science.

During the study, 70 young adult participants were randomly assigned to play either a nonviolent or a violent video game for 25 minutes. Immediately afterwards, the researchers measured brain responses as participants viewed a series of neutral photos, such as a man on a bike, and violent photos, such as a man holding a gun in another man's mouth. Finally, participants competed against an opponent in a task that allowed them to give their opponent a controllable blast of loud noise. The level of noise blast the participants set for their opponent was the measure of aggression.

The researchers found that participants who played one of several popular violent games, such as "Call of Duty," "Hitman," "Killzone" and "Grand Theft Auto," set louder noise blasts for their opponents during the competitive task – that is, they were more aggressive – than participants who played a nonviolent game. In addition, for participants that had not played many violent video games before completing the study, playing a violent game in the lab caused a reduced brain response to the photos of violence – an indicator of desensitization. Moreover, this reduced brain response predicted participants' aggression levels: the smaller the brain response to violent photos, the more aggressive participants were.

Participants who had already spent a lot of time playing violent video games before the study showed small brain response to the violent photos, regardless of which type of game they played in the lab. "The fact that video game exposure did not affect the brain activity of participants who already had been highly exposed to violent games is interesting and suggests a number of possibilities," Bartholow said. "It could be that those individuals are already so desensitized to violence from habitually playing violent video games that an additional exposure in the lab has very little effect on their brain responses. There also could be an unmeasured factor that causes both a preference for violent video games and a smaller brain response to violence. In either case, there are additional measures to consider."

Bartholow said that future research should focus on ways to moderate media violence effects, especially among individuals who are habitually exposed. He cites surveys that indicate that the average elementary school child spends more than 40 hours a week playing video games – more than any other activity besides sleeping. As young children spend more time with video games than any other forms of media, the researchers say children could become accustomed to violent behavior as their brains are forming. "More than any other media, these video games encourage active participation in violence," said Bartholow. "From a psychological perspective, video games are excellent teaching tools because they reward players for engaging in certain types of behavior. Unfortunately, in many popular video games, the behavior is violence."
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Other authors in the study include Christopher Engelhardt, graduate student in the MU Department of Psychological Sciences, and researchers from The Ohio State University and VU University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. The journal article, "This Is Your Brain on Violent Video Games: Neural Desensitization to Violence Predicts Increased Aggression Following Violent Video Game Exposure," will be published in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Despite growing concern about the effects of media violence on children, violent television shows and movies continue to be produced and marketed to them. An Indiana University research study concludes that violence doesn't add anything to their enjoyment of such programs and their characters.

In a research study published in the journal Media Psychology, Andrew J. Weaver, an assistant professor of telecommunications in IU's College of Arts and Sciences, and colleagues tested a common view presented by media producers that children like to watch violent programming. "Violence isn't the attractive component in these cartoons, which producers seem to think it is. It's more other things that are often associated with the violence. It's possible to have those other components, such as action specifically, in non-violent ways," Weaver said in an interview. "I think we should be concerned about violent content in cartoons in terms of the potential effect. This is one way that we can get around that from a producer's point of view. You don't have to cram violence into these cartoons to get kids to like them. They'll like them without the violence, just as much if not more," he said.

Violent cartoons have been a staple of Saturday morning programming for decades and now are readily available on cable television channels specializing in children's shows and cartoons. Many classic cartoons, such as those in the "Looney Tunes" series, have featured slapstick violence. But in recent years, action programs such as "Pokemon" and "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers" have drawn much attention both because of their violent content and their popularity with young people. Some content analyses have found that as many as 70 percent of children's television shows have violent content. "For many producers and media critics, the question is not if children love violence, but rather why children love violence," Weaver and his co-authors wrote in the paper. "Our goal in this study was to examine children's liking of violent content while independently manipulating the amount of action, which is often confounded with violence in the existing research."

Co-authors include Jakob Jensen of Purdue University, Nicole Martins of IU, Ryan Hurley of North Carolina State University and Barbara Wilson of the University of Illinois. The researchers used a sample group of 128 school children, ranging in age from five to 11 and from kindergarten to the fourth grade. There were a nearly equal number of boys and girls. Research assistants showed each child one of four versions of a five-minute animated short created for the study and then led them through a questionnaire. The short was designed to resemble familiar slapstick cartoons. Four different versions of the cartoon were used. Six violent scenes were added to one version, which was carried out by both characters and in response to earlier aggression. Nine action scenes were added to another version. Two other versions had lower amounts of action or violence.

What they found was violent content had an indirect negative effect on whether boys enjoyed a program, due to how they identified with the characters. "That was a little surprising," said Weaver, the father of two young sons. "There is a lot of talk about boys being more violent and more aggressive, for whatever reason, social or biological, and yet we found that they identified with the characters more when they were non-violent . . . They liked the characters more and they enjoyed the overall cartoon more. This is good news. If producers are willing to work on making cartoons that aren't violent so much as action packed, they can still capture their target audience better . . . and without the harmful consequences."

On the other hand, among girls violence did not decrease wishful identification of the characters. Weaver believes this may be because such slapstick cartoons are geared more toward boys than girls. Also, girls perceived the characters as boys, even though they were created without sexual attributes. "They're not going to identify with what they perceive to be male characters, whether they are violent or not," he said. "They didn't prefer the more violent programming. They were just using other cues besides the character's violent or non-violent behavior to determine how much they enjoyed the show."

Weaver would like to apply his research to characters in more female-oriented programs, like "The Powerpuff Girls." He also recognizes that violence is seen by producers as an easy means to introduce action and conflict into a story. "Alternatives could be things related to speed -- characters going fast, moving quickly. It was one way that we manipulated action in this study," he said. "If you can increase action without increasing violence, which clearly is possible as we did it in this study, then you can increase the enjoyment without potential harmful effects that violence can bring. The cartoon the researchers used, "Picture Perfect Thief," featured a villain called Eggle, who attempted to steal a painting created by a hero called Orangehead. Eggle ultimately fails and the hero's painting wins first place in an art show. It was created by a friend using Macromedia Flash.

Having power over others and having choices in your own life share a critical foundation: control, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The paper finds that people are willing to trade one source of control for the other. For example, if people lack power, they clamor for choice, and if they have an abundance of choice they don't strive as much for power.

"People instinctively prefer high to low power positions," says M. Ena Inesi of London Business School. "Similarly, it feels good when you have choice, and it doesn't feel good when choice is taken away." Inesi and her coauthors suspected that the need for personal control might be the factor these two seemingly independent processes have in common. Power is control over what other people do; choice is control over your own outcomes.

Inesi co-wrote the study with Simona Botti, also of London Business School, David Dubois of HEC Paris, and Derek D. Rucker and Adam D. Galinsky, both of Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

To find out if power and choice are two sides of the same coin, the researchers conducted a series of experiments that looked at whether lacking one source of control (e.g., power) would trigger a greater need for the other (e.g., choice).

For instance, in one experiment, participants started out by reading a description of a boss or an employee and had them think about how they would feel in that role. That meant some people were made to feel powerful and some were made to feel powerless. Then the participants were told they could buy eyeglasses or ice cream from a store that had three options or a store that had fifteen options. People were willing to go through great lengths (i.e., drive farther or wait longer) to access the store with more options. Lacking power made people thirsty for choice.

In another set of experiments, when people were deprived of choice, they displayed a thirst for power – for instance, by expressing greater desire to occupy a high-power position. Additional experiments found that people can be content with either power or choice—or both—but that having neither makes them distinctly dissatisfied.

Inesi believes this discovery—that power and choice are interchangeable—can be useful in the workplace. "You can imagine a person at an organization who's in a low-level job," she says. "You can make that seemingly powerless person feel better about their job and their duties by giving them some choice, in the way they do the work or what project they work on." This research gets at "the fundamental and basic importance of control in people's lives."

When people are feeling badly about themselves, they're more likely to show bias against people who are different. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, examines how that works.

"This is one of the oldest accounts of why people stereotype and have prejudice: It makes us feel better about ourselves," says Jeffrey Sherman of the University of California, Davis, who wrote the study with Thomas Allen. "When we feel bad about ourselves, we can denigrate other people, and that makes us feel better about ourselves."

Sherman and Allen used the Implicit Association Test (IAT)—a task designed to assess people's automatic reactions to words and/or images—to investigate this claim. In order to reveal people's implicit prejudice, participants are asked to watch a computer monitor while a series of positive words, negative words, and pictures of black or white faces appear. In the first part of the test, participants are asked to push the "E" key for either black faces or negative words and the "I" key for white faces or positive words. For the second task, the groupings are reversed—participants are now supposed to associate positive words with black faces and negative words with white faces.

Determining prejudice in the IAT is pretty straightforward: If participants have negative associations with black people, they should find the second task more difficult. This should be especially true when people feel bad about themselves.

But what psychologists don't agree on is how this works. "People were using the exact same data to make completely different arguments about why," Sherman says. There are two possibilities: either feeling bad about yourself activates negative evaluations of others, or it makes you less likely to suppress those biases.

In their experiment, Sherman and Allen asked participants to take a very difficult 12-question test that requires creative thinking. No one got more than two items correct. About half of the participants were given their test results and told that the average score was nine, to make them would feel bad about themselves. The other half were told that their tests would be graded later. All of the participants then completed the IAT and, as expected, those who were feeling bad about their test performance showed more evidence of implicit prejudice.

But Sherman and Allen took it a step farther. They also applied a mathematical model that reveals the processes that contribute to this effect. By plugging in the data from the experiment, they were able to determine that people who feel bad about themselves show enhanced prejudice because negative associations are activated to a greater degree, but not because they are less likely to suppress those feelings.

The difference is subtle, but important, Sherman says. "If the problem was that people were having trouble inhibiting bias, you might try to train people to exert better control," he says. But his results suggest that's not the issue. "The issue is that our mind wanders to more negative aspects of other groups. The way around that is to try and think differently about other people. When you feel bad about yourself and catch yourself thinking negatively about other groups, remind yourself, 'I may be feeling this way because I just failed a test or something.'"

The Super Bowl annually produces the year's largest TV audience, making it a prime event for advertisers to debut their flashy, new commercials. But ads with violent content aired during a sporting event that also contains violence may amplify aggressive thoughts in kids, the authors of a new Iowa State University study say.

Five ISU researchers authored the study, "Television Commercial Violence: Potential Effects on Children," which was published in the most recent edition of The Journal of Advertising. It found that kids who viewed violent ad content also had more aggressive thoughts, so the Super Bowl's football violence may have a compounding effect on kids.

"You put it [violent content in TV commercials] in the context of football -- which we generally think about as sport, not violence -- and I think there is potential for kids to respond to this aggressively," said Russell Laczniak, a professor of marketing in ISU's College of Business and one of the study's authors.

"There is the opportunity for parents to co-view and we found that co-viewing and discussion can lower children's tendency to respond aggressively," he continued. "But given the context of people being at Super Bowl parties, I'm not sure parents are going to take time to talk with their children about the violence."
Focus groups and an experimental study

Deanne Brocato, an assistant professor of marketing; Douglas Gentile, an associate professor of psychology; graduate student Julia Maier; and Mindy Ji-Song, a former ISU assistant professor; also collaborated on the study. Their research encompassed focus groups of 42 children and 40 parents to investigate their perceptions of media violence and how TV commercial violence may influence children; and an experimental study of 165 children (ages eight to 12, split between the sexes) to determine the kids' aggressive thoughts after they viewed TV commercials containing violence. The researchers defined violence as "actions depicting intentional harm to victims who would not wish to be harmed."

In the focus groups, parents expressed little concern with the effects of violent commercials on children. Both the parents and children associated violence with actions that resulted in "blood." Both also indicated that realism was an important characteristic of violence. Cartoon or animated scenes depicting violence were perceived as being more fantasy than violence by the subjects.

"Sex and selling made them [focus group parents] mad, but their definition of violence was if it didn't have blood and gore and wasn't realistic -- as opposed to cartoon violence -- then it wasn't violent," Brocato said. "Parents also had issues with movie trailers as a separate category."

In the experimental study, children were surveyed on their media viewing habits and then shown one of eight videos containing both children's content and either violent ads or non-violent ads. The researchers then measured the subjects' aggressive thoughts through their responses to a post-viewing questionnaire. They determined that exposure to ads containing violent content clearly increased the amount of aggressive thoughts that were generated by the children.
Parents should be concerned about violent ads

The researchers conclude that parents should be concerned about their children's exposure to violent content through TV ads. Previous literature -- including a 2002 study by ISU psychologists Craig Anderson and Brad Bushman [now at The Ohio State University] -- found that violent cognitions may start a process that reinforces kids' aggressive knowledge and may make them more likely to engage in aggressive acts.

"It increases the risk and the [aggressive] tendencies they have," Brocato said. "You're allowing your kids to have higher potential to engage in this activity and it puts them at a higher risk because they become desensitized to the violence."

Because the study also found that parents play such a pivotal role in how media and advertising consumption affect children, the authors recommend three things parents can do to mitigate the effects of violent media on their children:
1. Limit the amount of time viewing the content
2. Limit the media content to non-aggressive, age-appropriate media
3. Active mediation -- where parents discuss media thoughtfully with their children.

And given the potential double-dose during the Super Bowl telecast, parents may want to take action with their kids Sunday.

Concordia study finds link between self acceptance, stress hormones and bullying

Young adults who are lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB) are at far higher risk for severe mental health problems than their heterosexual peers. New research from Concordia University suggests that the stress of being rejected or victimized because of sexual orientation may disrupt hormonal responses in lesbians, gays and bisexuals.

Recently published as a doctoral thesis in clinical psychology, this investigation examined environmental risks and protective factors that counterbalanced them in LGB youth. "Compared to their heterosexual peers, suicide rates are up to 14 times higher among lesbian, gay and bisexual high school and college students," says Michael Benibgui, who led this investigation as part of his PhD thesis at Concordia's Department of Psychology and Centre for Research in Human Development.

"Depression and anxiety are widespread," he continues. "To learn why this occurs, we studied the physiological impact of homophobic social environments on a group of healthy young LGB adults."

Self loathing, stress hormones and bullying linked

The study examined the link between living in a homophobic environment and 'internalized homophobia,' e.g., feeling negatively about oneself because of one's sexual identity as LGB.

Individuals who experienced more LGB-related stress – arguments about sexual identity, bullying or discrimination – had higher internalized homophobia and showed increased production of the stress hormone cortisol compared to peers in more positive environments.

What's more, LGB youth who showed more internalized homophobia and abnormal cortisol activity also experienced increased symptoms of depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts. "This study is among the first to clearly link the experience of homophobia with abnormal cortisol activity," says Benibgui.

Benibgui says abnormal cortisol activity in LGB youth, combined with the vicious cycle of stress, could be further influenced by a complex set of biological, psychological and social factors. "This study shows a clear relation between abnormal cortisol levels and environmental stressors related to homophobia," he says.

Protective factors of social networks

Benibgui also identified protective factors that can help safeguard mental health in young gays, lesbians and bisexuals. His research confirms that social support from parents and peers have protective effects. "LGB young adults who experienced more homophobic discrimination, yet felt accepted and supported by their peers, showed very few symptoms of depression," he says.

These findings underline the impact – both physical and mental – that homophobia may have on LGB young adults. "The effect on mental health of bullying in schools has received much attention," says Benibgui. "Our study supports the notion that homophobic bullying can lead to physical and mental health problems."

Preventative interventions are needed to protect vulnerable lesbian, gay or bisexual youth, Benibgui stresses, to discourage homophobic and heterosexist behaviors from peers and communities.

Paul Hastings, a former Concordia psychology professor who supervised Benibgui's thesis research, says that this study should push the conversation about the impact of homophobia.

"This study is one part of a much larger and greatly needed dialogue on the impacts that prejudice, discrimination and victimization have on healthy development and well-being in young people," says Dr. Hastings, an international member of the Centre for Research in Human Development and now a professor at the University of California, Davis. "We need to promote acceptance and respect for the diversity of our population – including sexual diversity – at all levels: government, community, schools and homes."

Playing a violent video game can increase aggression, and when a player keeps thinking about the game, the potential for aggression can last for as long as 24 hours, according to a study in the current Social Psychological and Personality Science (published by SAGE).

Violent video game playing has long been known to increase aggression. This study, conducted by Brad Bushman of The Ohio State University and Bryan Gibson of Central Michigan University, shows that at least for men, ruminating about the game can increase the potency of the game's tendency to lead to aggression long after the game has been turned off.

The researchers randomly assigned college students to play one of six different video games for 20 minutes. Half the games were violent (e.g., Mortal Kombat) and half were not (e.g., Guitar Hero). To test if ruminating about the game would extend the games' effect, half of the players were told over "the next 24 hours, think about your play of the game, and try to identify ways your game play could improve when you play again."

Bushman and Gibson had the participants return the next day to test their aggressiveness. For men who didn't think about the game, the violent video game players tested no more aggressive than men who had played non-violent games. But the violent video game playing men who thought about the game in the interim were more aggressive than the other groups. The researchers also found that women who played the violent video games and thought about the games did not experience increased aggression 24 hours later.

This study is the first laboratory experiment to show that violent video games can stimulate aggression for an extended period of time. The authors noted that it is "reasonable to assume that our lab results will generalize to the 'real world.' Violent gamers usually play longer than 20 minutes, and probably ruminate about their game play in a habitual manner."

Acclaimed journalist, author and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich explores the darker side of positive thinking in Smile or Die (10:22 min YouTube video)

The Real Concern When Couples Fight
Fights between couples are personal. So it makes sense that the passionate ones are rarely about the actual content but rather are typically about something else entirely.

60-Second Psych from Scientific American podcasts
26 June 2010

Minority children often encounter racism in their daily lives, and those who experience discrimination more often have more symptoms of depression, according to a study to be presented Sunday, May 2 at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

"Unfortunately, minority children perceive discrimination often in their lives," said Lee M. Pachter, DO, co-author of the study and professor of pediatrics at Drexel University College of Medicine and St. Christopher's Hospital for Children in Philadelphia. "Fifty-five years after Brown v. Board of Education and the civil rights movement, racism is still common in their lives."

Dr. Pachter and his colleagues surveyed 277 minority children ages 9-18 years to determine the contexts in which they perceive racism and the relationship between discrimination, depression and self-esteem. Participants filled out questionnaires that included 23 scenarios in which they might perceive discrimination, such as being followed by a store security guard, getting poor service in a restaurant or being accused of doing something wrong at school. About two-thirds of the children were Latino or African American, and 19 percent were multiracial.

Results showed that 88 percent had at least one experience with racism, and nearly 12 percent had experienced racial discrimination in at least half of the situations described in the survey. The most common forms of discrimination were racial remarks, being called insulting names and being followed by security guards in stores. Experiences were similar for Latinos and African Americans, boys and girls, and younger and older children.

"Not only do most minority children experience discrimination, but they experience it in multiple contexts: in schools, in the community, with adults and with peers." Dr. Pachter said. "It's kind of like the elephant in the corner of the room. It's there, but nobody really talks about it. And it may have significant mental and physical health consequences in these children's lives."

Researchers also administered the Child Depression Inventory and the Rosenberg Self Esteem Questionnaire to 52 minority children. They found a significant correlation between perceived racism and depression, self-esteem and depression, but not between racism and self-esteem. The next step is to look at whether discrimination creates stress that leads to racial/ethnic disparities in physical and mental health, Dr. Pachter said.

Children with the genetic condition known as Williams syndrome have unusually friendly natures because they lack the sense of fear that the rest of us feel in many social situations. Now, a study reported in the April 13th issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, suggests that children with Williams Syndrome are missing something else the rest of us have from a very tender age: the proclivity to stereotype others based on their race.

The findings support the notion that social fear is at the root of racial stereotypes. The researchers say the results might also aid in the development of interventions designed to reduce discriminatory attitudes and behavior towards vulnerable or marginalized groups of society.

"This is the first study to report the absence of racial stereotypes in any human population," said Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg of the Central Institute of Mental Health, Mannheim/University of Heidelberg, who coauthored the paper with Andreia Santos and Christine Deruelle of the Mediterranean Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in Marseille.

Previous studies have shown that stereotypes are found ubiquitously in typically developing children—as early as age 3—as they are in adults, Meyer-Lindenberg explained. Even children with autism display racial stereotypes, despite profound difficulties in daily social interaction and a general failure to show adapted social knowledge.

In their study, the researchers showed children a series of vignettes with people differing in race or gender and asked the children to assign positive or negative features to those pictured. Typical children made strongly stereotypical assignments both for sex roles and for race, confirming the results of previous studies. On the other hand, children with Williams syndrome showed no evidence for racial bias.

"The unique hypersociable profile of individuals with Williams syndrome often leads them to consider that everybody in the world is their friend," Meyer-Lindenberg said. "In previous work, we have shown that processing of social threat is deficient in people with the syndrome. Based on this, we suspected that they would not show a particular preference for own-race versus other-race characters. The finding that racial stereotypes in children with Williams syndrome were completely absent was nevertheless surprising in its degree."

The children with Williams syndrome did make stereotypical sex role assignments just like normal children. That finding suggests that different forms of stereotyping arise from different brain mechanisms, the researchers say, and that those mechanisms are selectively affected in some way by the genetic alteration that causes Williams syndrome (the loss of about 26 genes on chromosome 7).

New study finds sexual minority youth bullied more than heterosexual youth

The act and victimization of bullying continues to be a problem among today's youth. While many children are experiencing this form of violence, it is more prevalent in children that are different from the social norm. As medical professionals continue to further their understanding of bullying, research shows a high rate of sexual minority youth who experience this harmful activity.

A new study conducted by doctors at Nationwide Children's Hospital found that sexual minority youth, or teens that identify themselves as gay, lesbian or bisexual, are bullied two to three times more than heterosexuals.

According to the study that is now available online in the Journal of Adolescent Health, sexual minority youth are more vulnerable to a variety of physical and mental domains such as bullying or suicidal thoughts. Plus, the study found that many older adolescents reported being bullied.

"There is a need for health care professionals, and others who work with children, to be aware that sexual minority youth are more likely to be victims of bullying and other forms of violence," said Elise Berlan, MD, lead author and physician in Adolescent Medicine at Nationwide Children's Hospital. "Parents should also take time to communicate with their children about sensitive topics such as sexuality, peer relations and violence."

Researchers examined the relationship between sexual orientation and bullying from the Growing Up Today Study (GUTS), an on-going study of American adolescents, which included information on more than 7,500 adolescents. While examining the results from the 2001 survey, the study also showed that youth identifying themselves as gay or lesbian were less likely to bully others and more likely to report being bullied than heterosexual teens.

Children that are different from the social norm often become targets of social isolation, harassment and bullying. Recommended strategies to identify this type of abusive behavior include encouraging clinicians to routinely inquire about sexual orientation and their experiences with bullying, interpersonal violence and abuse; screening sexual minority youth for depression, suicidality and involvement in high-risk behaviors; and increasing the support of school policies to ensure a safe learning environment for all students.

"Students, parents, schools and community organizations can work to create environments that are supportive and accepting of all students, regardless of their sexual orientation," said Berlan, also a faculty member at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. "Schools, in particular, need to work to increase the awareness of bullying."

A new study from the University of New Hampshire finds that U.S. children are routinely exposed to even more violence and abuse than has been previously recognized, with nearly half experiencing a physical assault in the study year. "Children experience far more violence, abuse and crime than do adults," said David Finkelhor, director of the UNH Crimes against Children Research Center and the study director. "If life were this dangerous for ordinary grown-ups, we'd never tolerate it."

The research was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) and supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The research results are presented in the journal Pediatrics and an Office of Justice Programs/OJJDP bulletin titled "Children's Exposure to Violence: A Comprehensive National Survey."

UNH researchers asked a national sample of U.S. children and their caregivers about a far broader range of exposures than has been done in the past. According to the research, three out of five children were exposed to violence, abuse or a criminal victimization in the last year, including 46 percent who had been physically assaulted, 10 percent who had been maltreated by a caregiver, 6 percent who had been sexually victimized, and 10 percent who had witnessed an assault within their family.

The authors contend that earlier studies of violence exposure only inquired about individual crimes – looking only at bullying or child maltreatment or sexual abuse. In contrast, this study asked about all such exposures as well as additional ones that are rarely, if ever, covered such as dating violence and witnessing domestic violence.

The study found that more than a third of the children had had two or more different kinds of exposures in the past year and 11 percent had five or more. "Studies have missed the fact that there are a surprisingly large group of very repeatedly and variously victimized kids whom we should be doing a better job to help and protect," Finkelhor said.

The researchers urge teachers, police, doctors, counselors, and parents to ask children about a broader range of possible victimization experiences, especially children who had been identified as victims already. They also call for new efforts to create safer schools, homes and other youth environments.

The study was conducted in 2008 and involved interviews with caregivers and youth about the experiences of a nationally representative sample of 4,549 children ages 0-17. In addition to Finkelhor, the authors include Heather Turner, professor of sociology at UNH, Richard Ormrod, research professor of geography at UNH, and Sherry Hamby, research associate professor of psychology at Sewanee, the University of the South.

The link between cyber-bullying and an increase in violence among young women will be featured in a new book, Offending Youth: Sex, Youth and Crime, published in November. Professor Kerry Carrington, head of Queensland University of Technology's School of Justice, has collected 45 years of data and can confirm, contrary to general academic opinion, young women are fast catching up to boys in violent crime.

Professor Carrington will present her findings at a talk on Thursday, September 24 in Brisbane. At that time, Professor Carrington will discuss whether increases in cyber-bullying are related to increases in female delinquency and boys' continuing monopoly over sexually violent crimes. The book also includes chapters on the over-representation of Indigenous youth in the juvenile justice system, dispelling unfounded myths and fears about ethnic youth gangs, and key contemporary patterns of delinquency and the response to these by juvenile justice agencies.

Professor Carrington said her data backed up anecdotal reports that violence among girls was increasing. "There's been a long dispute whether it was happening, but this data shows a pattern of statistics that point to a clear trend," Professor Carrington said. "And it is not just in Australia, but across Europe, the UK and US as well."

Professor Carrington said there were different theories about why this was the case, including treating girls' crime equally with boys' crime and increasing female participation in what used to be traditional masculine roles, but these did not adequately explain the recent sharp increase. "Increases in violence began when girls began moving into drug and street cultures in the 1980s, but the most significant increases in violence was in the past decade," she said. "Girls are taking to cyber space, e-technology and mobile phones with a passion and evidence shows girls are more likely to use these to bully. These technologies massively inflame conflict between girls. Increasingly, girls are bashing other girls, and videos of these are being put onto YouTube. Bullying used to end at the end of school, but now it follows you home and can escalate over night."

Professor Carrington said a long-standing reluctance to accept increasing violence between girls meant there were few specific programs to address it. "The majority of rehabilitation programs focus on boys' delinquencies which may not be as effective in dealing with violent girls," she said. Professor Carrington said from 1960 to 2007, the ratio of young women to young men appearing before the NSW Children's Courts for criminal matters has narrowed from 1 in 14 to1 in 5, and girls continued to narrow the gap in violent crime. "Boys' crime rates are falling in overall terms, but within that, rates of sexual violence are of an increasing concern," she said. Girls' crime rates are increasing overall and girls' violence, usually directed towards other girls, is increasing."

Children entering first grade with signs of depression and anxiety or excessive aggression are at risk of being chronically victimized by their classmates by third grade. That's the finding of a new longitudinal study that appears in the May/June 2009 issue of the journal Child Development.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Victoria, looked at more than 400 Canadian children beginning in the autumn of first grade. The children were asked about their experiences being bullied (such as being hit, pushed, and shoved, or being teased and excluded from play). Their teachers were asked to report on the children's symptoms of depression and anxiety, as well as on their displays of physical aggression. The researchers returned at the end of first, second, and third grades, at which time they asked the children and their teachers to report on the same issues.

Most children (73 percent) showed few symptoms of depression and anxiety over the three years. But 7 percent of the children showed continuously high levels. The remaining 20 percent showed moderate symptoms at first, but these increased over time. Victimization by depressed and anxious children wasn't evident until third grade.

Children with more depressed and anxious symptoms in first and second grade were more likely to be victimized by third grade. Surprisingly, children who were more aggressive at the start of first grade also were prone to depression and anxiety by third grade. These children also were more likely to be victimized by their peers, perhaps in retaliation for their own acts of aggression.

"Children's early mental health problems can set the stage for abuse by their peers," according to Bonnie J. Leadbeater, professor of psychology at the University of Victoria, who led the study. "Just as some children learn to read with greater difficulty than others and require extra assistance when they begin to lag behind their peers, young children with mental health problems show signs that they cannot manage the complex social world of elementary school. Treating children's mental health problems may go a long way toward reducing bullying."

Women experiencing physical abuse from intimate partners spent 42 percent more on health care per year than non-abused women, according to a long-term study of more than 3,000 women. And the costs don't end when the abuse does. The study revealed that women who suffered physical abuse five or more years earlier still spent 19 percent more per year on health care than women who were never abused. "Along with all the physical and emotional pain it causes, domestic violence also comes with a substantial financial price," said Amy Bonomi, co-author of the study and associate professor of human development and family science at Ohio State University.

The study is the largest to date to examine health care costs and utilization based on the timing and type of domestic violence that women suffer, Bonomi said. The study, co-authored with researchers from the Group Health Cooperative and the University of Washington in Seattle, was published online this week in the journal Health Services Research. It will appear in an upcoming print edition.

The research examined data from 3,333 randomly selected women who belonged to Group Health, a health care system in the Pacific Northwest. Women in the study were surveyed about whether they experienced any physical or emotional abuse from intimate partners and if so, when it occurred. Researchers then studied patterns of health care use and costs by the women over an 11-year period, from 1992 through 2002.

"We were able to track health care costs for quite a long time, giving us a good picture of how much domestic violence is actually costing our health care system," Bonomi said. Women experiencing ongoing physical abuse had the highest health care costs -- 42 percent higher than non-abused women. "It's likely that these women need more health care because they are seeking care for immediate injuries and associated health problems," Bonomi said. Women who had been physically abused within the last five years, but not currently, had 24 percent higher yearly health costs. Abuse that occurred more than five years ago resulted in 19 percent higher costs.

The study separately examined women who experienced psychological abuse, which included verbal threats and chronic controlling behavior. Those suffering psychological abuse within the past five years, but not currently, had yearly health care costs that were 33 percent higher than those of non-abused women. "It's possible that it takes additional time for women with psychological abuse to seek care for their experiences," Bonomi said.

Another striking finding was that all abused women, whether they experienced physical or psychological abuse, used significantly more mental health services than non-abused women, Bonomi said. Women suffering ongoing physical abuse were about 2.5 times more likely to visit a mental health provider in the past year than were non-abused women. The rate for psychologically abused women was two times higher. "This lends support to the idea that mental health providers should always ask women about their abuse history when they first come in for treatment," Bonomi said.

But mental health was just one of several areas in which abused women used more services. Physically abused women used significantly more primary care, pharmacy, specialty care, laboratory and radiology services. For psychologically abused women, more services were needed in specialty care, pharmacy, and radiology.

Group Health, the health care system whose members were surveyed for the study, provides health and insurance services to more than 500,000 people in the Pacific Northwest.

The Boston Center for Refugee Health and Human Rights (BCRHHR) at Boston Medical Center recently treated many of the large number of Tibetan refugee monks who fled violent religious persecution. These individuals arrived in Boston suffering from symptoms of traumatic stress, interfering with their meditative practice. The monks were diagnosed by their traditional healers as having srog-rLung, a life-wind imbalance. Recognizing that barriers exist between western and eastern medicine, the BCRHHR researched and implemented its own complementary therapy options to heal them. These findings appear online in the March issue of Mental Health, Religion and Culture.

According to Tibetan medicine, a srog-rLung disturbance has the potential to develop into a serious mental illness, leaving the victim at odds with the balance of the universe as well as jeopardizing his personal health. Symptoms of srog-rLung include uncontrollable crying, worrying, excessive mental, physical or verbal activity and an unhappy mind. Other conditions affecting the monk’s health include anxiety, depression and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Research in cross-cultural health settings, particularly refugee health services, shows that successful treatment is contingent on a combination of the patient’s interpretation of the illness and biomedical categories. This allows the patient to actively participate in his or her own healing. Cross-cultural psychiatric assessment is also necessary in determining appropriate treatment options, as treatment can be detrimental if not harmonized with the religious context in which mental illness will develop for these monks. The BCRHHR used traditional healers to obtain a dual diagnosis for the development of holistic therapy that responds to both PTSD and srog-rLung.

“This research and treatment involving patients accustomed only to traditional medicine, presented an opportunity for the acceptance of non-traditional therapeutic approaches,” explains Michael Grodin, MD, professor of health law, bioethics and human rights at Boston University School of Public Health, and professor of psychiatry, sociomedical sciences and community medicine at Boston University School of Medicine. “The difference between Tibetan and Western disease pathologies represents the need for evidence-based complementary therapies, such as the Tibetan monks in exile and other religious refugee populations,” said Grodin.

Tibetan Buddhist tradition dictates that the cure for suffering is enlightenment, attainable through meditation. When this occurs, the body is freed from anxieties and fears. The monks who were treated for PTSD and srog-rLung are finding that meditation, once second nature, has become difficult after nights filled with flashbacks that put the monks in a state of hyper-vigilance for the next day.

According to the researchers, in order to provide complimentary therapy for the monks, eastern and western medicine needed to be integrated to properly address both conditions. The spiritual aspect of the Tibetan medical model, which is at the core of the monks’ experience of illness, guided this research. Ancient Tibetan Bon tradition of yogic practice was used to induce the mind into a relaxed state necessary to purify oneself through motion. This yogic practice combines movement of the body and controlled breath with movements of the mind to bring mental stability and offers an alternative to the monks’ inability to eliminate invasive thoughts. Another therapy that was used is singing bowl therapy—a form of music therapy, as sound has a direct connection to the heart, which aligns with srog-rLung experienced by the monks.

Grodin said the refugee health center at BMC integrated techniques of western medicine, such as anti-depressant prescribing and psychotherapy, with Tibetan healing practices, including medicines prescribed by Tibetan Amchi, meditation advice, Tai Chi and Qi Gong exercises. Grodin is trained in traditional Chinese medicine, such as acupuncture and meditation.

Other authors on the publication were Adriana Lee Benedict of Harvard College and Linda Mancini of the LamRim Buddhist Center and the BCRHHR.

The Declaration of Independence may proclaim that all men are created equal, but American whites tend to distribute their prejudice unequally toward certain members of minority groups, according to new research.

A series of six studies conducted by University of Washington and Michigan State University psychologists shows that whites react more negatively to racial minority individuals who strongly identify with their racial group than to racial minority individuals who weakly identify with their group. The research, published in the current issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, provides an explanation for why some Blacks report personally experiencing more prejudice than others.

"Research has shown that the more minorities identify with their group, the more prejudice they report experiencing," said Kaiser. "Most research has explained this finding by focusing on factors within minorities that make some individuals more susceptible to perceiving prejudice than others. Our studies provide an alternative explanation by showing that whites react more negatively toward strongly identified minorities than weakly identified ones."

The researchers believe strongly identified minorities are not paranoid in claiming they experience increased levels of prejudice and weakly identified minorities are not being self-deceptive when they report experiencing low levels of prejudice, said Cheryl Kaiser, a UW assistant psychology professor and lead author of the paper. Instead, they just may simply be reporting on reality as they experience it.

"Take a situation where a person is ambiguously rejected for a new job," she said. "A person with a strong minority identification might wonder if the rejection was due to prejudice while one with a weak minority identification might not. If you experience more prejudice you expect more prejudice. These things work in tandem and feed each other."

Kaiser and her colleague recruited nearly 400 college students for the six studies that measured whites' attitudes toward Blacks and Latinos. They also were surveyed on their general attitudes about Blacks or Latinos, depending on the study. In the studies, minorities were either described as being strongly identified (where their group was very important and a central aspect of their self) or weakly identified (where their group was less important and not at the core of their self).

She said individuals typically want to be around others who share their values and exclude people who don't share those values or world views. The research indicated that whites perceived strongly identified minorities as less likely to share similar worldviews with them relative to weakly identified minorities.

"We are not arguing that minorities should not identify with their group," said Kaiser. "Such identification can be important and provides meaning, self worth and identity. Some research about prejudice has tended to lump members of minorities into homogenous groups. But there is a lot of heterogeneity. People differ in looks, language ability, attitudes and many other ways, but we tend not to pay attention to these factors. That's why it is important to identify those subsets in groups, why people react to them and what are the active ingredients of prejudice. Whites need to understand that they distribute prejudice unevenly and target those who strongly self-identify as being Black."

Violent video games and movies make people numb to the pain and suffering of others, according to a research report published in the March 2009 issue of Psychological Science. The report details the findings of two studies conducted by University of Michigan professor Brad Bushman and Iowa State University professor Craig Anderson.

The studies fill an important research gap in the literature on the impact of violent media. In earlier work, Bushman and Anderson demonstrated that exposure to violent media produces physiological desensitization---lowering heart rate and skin conductance---when viewing scenes of actual violence a short time later. But the current research demonstrates that violent media also affect someone's willingness to offer help to an injured person, in a field study as well as in a laboratory experiment.

"These studies clearly show that violent media exposure can reduce helping behavior," said Bushman, professor of psychology and communications and a research professor at the U-M Institute for Social Research. "People exposed to media violence are less helpful to others in need because they are 'comfortably numb' to the pain and suffering of others, to borrow the title of a Pink Floyd song," he said.

In one of the studies, 320 college students played either a violent or a nonviolent video game for approximately 20 minutes. A few minutes later, they overheard a staged fight that ended with the "victim" sustaining a sprained ankle and groaning in pain. People who had played a violent game took significantly longer to help the victim than those who played a nonviolent game---73 seconds compared to 16 seconds. People who had played a violent game were also less likely to notice and report the fight. And if they did report it, they judged it to be less serious than did those who had played a nonviolent game.

In the second study, the participants were 162 adult moviegoers. The researchers staged a minor emergency outside the theater in which a young woman with a bandaged ankle and crutches "accidentally" dropped her crutches and struggled to retrieve them. The researchers timed how long it took moviegoers to retrieve the crutches. Half were tested before they went into the theater, to establish the helpfulness of people attending violent vs. nonviolent movies. Half were tested after seeing either a violent or a nonviolent movie. Participants who had just watched a violent movie took over 26 percent longer to help than either people going into the theater or people who had just watched a nonviolent movie.

New research helps explain link between social rejection and aggressive behavior

People who feel socially rejected are more likely to see others' actions as hostile and are more likely to behave in hurtful ways toward people they have never even met, according to a new study. The findings may help explain why social exclusion is often linked to aggression – which sometimes boils over dramatically, as in the case of school shootings, for example.

"Prior case studies show the majority of school shooters have experienced chronic peer rejection," said the study's lead author, C. Nathan DeWall, Ph.D., from the University of Kentucky. "And while not everyone who feels rejected reacts violently, we found they tend to act out aggressively in other ways. We wanted to help explain psychologically why this happens." A full report of the study appears in the January issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association.

DeWall conducted four separate experiments with 190 participants, all college students.

In one experiment, 30 participants completed a personality test and were given bogus feedback about the results. A third of the participants, the excluded group, were told their personalities would mean they would probably end up alone later in life. The rest of the participants, the control group, were either told they would have many lasting and meaningful relationships or were given no feedback at all.

All participants were then instructed to read a personal essay supposedly written by another participant, whom they did not know. The essay was about an event in which the author's actions could be perceived as either assertive or hostile and the participants rated their impression of the author's actions. They were also told that the author was up for a research assistant position and were asked whether they thought the author would be a good candidate, based on what they had read.

Participants who were told they were going to have a lonely life perceived the author's actions as significantly more hostile and gave a much more negative evaluation than those in the control groups. The authors also note that the participants' moods did not seem to differ among the different groups, which led them to conclude that the participants' emotional response to their personality results did not play a role in how they performed in the experiments.

In another experiment, 32 students underwent the same bogus personality evaluation and rated the same essay from the previous experiment. Again, some were told they would lead a lonely life while others were assigned to the control groups. This time, participants were led to believe they were playing a reaction-time computer game with another person in the lab whom they could not see and had never met. During the game, the loser of each trial was forced to listen to a blast of white noise through headphones. The participants could set the noise's intensity level and duration.

Those who were told they were going to have a lonely life blasted a higher level of the painful noise than those in the control groups. "Across all experiments, the participants who experienced some form of social rejection acted in similar ways," said DeWall. "This suggests these people feel betrayed by others. In turn, they see otherwise neutral actions as hostile and behave badly towards others."

Prior research has examined whether emotions play a role in this type of aggression, but this study's researchers say their findings do not support this idea. "Excluded people see the world through blood-colored glasses and it is our hope that this research can lead to a better understanding of why rejection causes aggression and what we can do to prevent such unwanted and harmful behavior," said DeWall.