Bradley M. Waite

Television viewing and attentional abilities in fourth and fifth grade children

Abstract To evaluate the common assumption that television viewing is related to attentional difficulties in school, 70 fourth and fifth grade students recorded a “television diary” for one week and reported their preferred television shows. Parents estimated their childs television viewing time and reported their childs preferred shows. Assessment of attentional difficulties included teacher ratings, parent ratings, standardized tests, and classroom observations. It was found that the amount of television a child viewed was significantly related to teacher ratings of attentional difficulties, but not to parent ratings, classroom observations or a standardized test. Type of shows viewed did not relate to any attentional outcome variable. There was a clear relationship between fourth and fifth grade childrens ability to pay attention in school, as assessed by their teacher, and the amount of time they spent watching television.

Volunteering in Research: Student Satisfaction and Educational Benefits

Participating in a research activity by volunteering in a research study or by writing a short research paper as part of a course requirement relates to favorable perceptions of psychology and research, greater knowledge of procedures associated with participation, and other demographic and situational variables. College students who volunteered to participate in a research study were more satisfied with their experiences than those who wrote papers as part of their research activity. Gender, grade expected, employment status, major, class size, and number of participation events related to satisfaction with experiences and perceptions of psychology and research. The findings are relevant to academic departments implementing or evaluating the existence of a participant pool.

Serum Cholesterol Concentrations and Mood States in Violent Psychiatric Patients: An Experience Sampling Study

The well-documented negative association between serum cholesterol and aggressive behavior has led Kaplan to propose a cholesterol–serotonin hypothesis of aggression. According to this hypothesis, low dietary cholesterol intake leads to depressed central serotonergic activity, which itself has been reported in numerous studies of violent individuals. In the present study, 25 violent psychiatric patients participated in a microbehavioral experience sampling procedure to examine differences in self-reports of affective and cognitive experiences as a function of serum cholesterol concentrations. For 7 days, they wore signaling devices that emitted an average of seven signals a day. Following each signal, patients filled out a mood questionnaire. Total serum cholesterol (TSC) concentration was positively associated with measures of affect, cognitive efficiency, activation, and sociability, suggesting a link between low TSC and dysphoria. These findings are consistent with the cholesterol–serotonin hypothesis and with the substantive literature linking both aggression and depression to depressed central serotonergic activity.

Mobile Media Use, Multitasking and Distractibility

Portable media devices are ubiquitous and their use has become a core component of many people’s daily experience, but to what effect? In this paper, the authors review research on the ways in which media use and multitasking relate to distraction, distractibility and impulsivity. They review recent research on the effects of media multitasking on driving, walking, work, and academic performance. The authors discuss earlier research concerning the nature of media’s impact on attention and review cognitive and neuropsychological findings on the effects of divided attention. Research provides clear evidence that mobile media use is distracting, with consequences for safety, efficiency and learning. Greater use of media is correlated with higher levels of trait impulsivity and distractibility, but the direction of causality has not been established. Individuals may become more skilled at media multitasking over time, but intervention is currently required to improve the safe and effective use of mobile media.

The everyday experience of an institutionalized sex offender: an idiographic application of the Experience Sampling Method

The Experience Sampling Method (ESM) is a novel assessment strategy that allows random sampling of thoughts, affects, and behaviors. In ESM studies subjects wear beepers that signal at randomly generated, preprogrammed times at which subjects fill out a questionnaire containing items related to current activity, location, thought content, mood states, etc. The ESM was used to examine the relationship between mood states and thought content in a hospitalized sex offender. The patient exhibited a very high frequency of thoughts with sexual content, as well as thoughts indicative of anger against women, personal inadequacy, and distress. He appeared to be a poor judge of his state of optimal well-being. Whereas he considered support from others to be related to optimal well-being, it was actually sexual thoughts about a woman that were associated with his optimal well-being. The present case study illustrates the value of the ESM in the study of complex thought—affect—behavior relationships.

Serum Cholesterol Concentrations and Non-Physical Aggression in Healthy Adults

Although physical aggression in humans and other primates appears to be negatively associated with total serum cholesterol (TSC) concentrations, the relationship between other forms of aggression and TSC is less clear. A plurality of studies have reported a positive association, some have reported no association, and a minority have reported a negative association. Some authors have speculated that the variability in findings is attributable to inconsistencies in the definitions and measurement of what has often been termed “verbal” aggression. Buss and Perry have developed the Aggression Questionnaire, a theoretically-derived and empirically validated self-report measure of aggression that breaks aggression into subcomponents. One hundred and seventy-one college students and university personnel were recruited to participate in a cholesterol screening health initiative and then invited to participate in a study of mood and cholesterol. They completed a Demographic Questionnaire, and the Aggression Questionnaire. Regression analyses with age and Body Mass Index (BMI) as covariates revealed that anger, hostility, and verbal aggression significantly predicted TSC. Physical aggression did not. This finding suggests that non-physical forms of aggression may constitute a risk factor for coronary artery disease and one that may be worthy of targeting through behavioral interventions such as anger management training.

Abnormal lateralization in finger tapping and overt aggressive behavior

1. The relationship between abnormal cerebral lateralization and overt aggressive behavior was examined in 41 violent psychiatric patients in a maximum-security hospital. 2. Cerebral lateralization was measured using the Finger Oscillation Test from the Halstead-Reitan Neuropsychological Battery, and aggressive behavior was measured during a six-month period of hospitalization using the Overt Aggression Scale. 3. Patients with the most abnormal pattern of lateralization exhibited the highest frequency as well as the highest severity of overt aggressive behavior. This pattern could not be explained by the influence of age, race, IQ, history of head trauma, brain damage, or psychiatric diagnosis. History of seizures, alcohol abuse, and drug abuse, however, were found to be intervening variables in the lateralization-aggression link. Once their influence was removed using analysis of covariance, there was no relationship between lateralization and aggression. 4. The results suggest that it is unlikely that there is a direct causal relationship between abnormal lateralization and aggressive behavior.

Loneliness in a Maximum-Security Forensic Hospital: An Experience Sampling Analysis

This study investigated correlates of loneliness in 25 incarcerated psychiatric patients in a maximum-security hospital to clarify relations between loneliness and other contextual and interpersonal variables. Forensic inpatients reported the greatest frequency of loneliness and negative emotional states when they were alone. Significant positive correlations were found between reported loneliness and subjective variables such as rejection, helplessness, worthlessness, and anxiety. A significant negative correlation was found between reported loneliness and sociability. Patients reported the greatest frequency of loneliness during leisure-type activities. Leisure time was filled with activities, such as television watching, that did not make people feel sociable but instead fostered negative emotional states. The findings indicate that activities that are goal-directed and enhance sense of worth decrease feelings of helplessness and worthlessness. Unexpectedly, reported loneliness was not related to any of the personality measures used, suggesting that the subjective experience of loneliness may not be related to personality traits.

Off-task multitasking, note-taking and lower- and higher-order classroom learning

Abstract We examined whether multitasking via concurrent off-task text messaging during an academic presentation impacted students’ performance on tests assessing lower-order and higher-order learning. College students (N = 183) were assigned to one of two conditions involving either concurrent texting or not texting during an academic presentation, or to a no presentation condition. Students in presentation conditions were encouraged to take hand-written notes. Between-participants analyses revealed that students who saw the presentation performed better on learning measures than the control group who did not see the presentation, indicating that students did learn from the presentations. Non-texters scored significantly higher than texters on multiple choice tests of factual, lower-order information (e.g., knowledge, comprehension), but not on essays requiring higher-order application, analysis, evaluation, and synthesis of information. Within-participants analyses demonstrated that texters performed more poorly on lower-order questions that were based on information presented at times when they were texting. Non-texters took more quality notes than texters; amount of quality notes was positively related to test scores of all types. The amount of quality notes taken partially mediated the relationship between texting condition and multiple choice test scores. It appears that multitasking with media devices during an academic presentation interferes with note-taking and the encoding of information specific to the presentation.

Own-Gender Bias in Change Detection for Gender Specific Images

*Faculty mentor Change blindness is defined as the “inability to report a change that has occurred between two visual stimuli” (Werner & Thies, 2000, p. 163). The changes made to stimuli can be surfacelevel changes in color or rotation (Cole, Kentridge, & Heywood, 2004; Hollingworth, 2003; Rensink, O’Regan, & Clark, 1997; Werner & Thies, 2000), or more dramatic alterations, such as exchanging a person who is engaged in a social interaction. In Simons and Levin (1998), pedestrians on a college campus were giving directions to a confederate when two individuals carrying a door passed between them interrupting their conversation. Unbeknownst to the pedestrian, the confederate switched with one of the individuals carrying the door. The new confederate then resumed the conversation with the pedestrian. The majority of the pedestrians (8 out of 15) failed to notice that they had spoken to two different individuals. How can individuals miss such glaring changes in their environment? The fact that changes this extreme can be missed demonstrates the limitations of our attentional system, which has important implications for tasks that require sustained attentional focus, such as driving. It further suggests that foundational tenets on which society functions, such as the belief in the accuracy of eyewitness accounts of events, are potentially problematic themselves. When individuals encounter a visual scene, their evaluation depends, in part, upon environmental sensory information, or bottom-up processing (Gerrig & Zimbardo, 2002). By contrast, top-down processes are personal experiences, expectations, ABSTRACT. Change blindness is a phenomenon that occurs when individuals fail to notice changes that take place in the visual world. Although individual differences in change blindness have been relatively well-studied, no one has examined differences in detection for gender1-relevant images. In the present study, men and women (N = 53) determined whether subtle changes were present in three types of images: male-oriented, female-oriented, and gender-neutral. Images were presented using a modified flicker paradigm. As expected, there were no overall differences in change detection across biological sex or image type. However, men and women more accurately detected changes for images that pertained to their gender, F(1, 51) = 4.78, p = 0.03, η2 = .09. Men detected more changes in male-oriented images (M = 3.30, SD = 0.86) than female-oriented images (M = 3.10, SD = 0.86). Conversely, women detected more changes in female-oriented (M = 3.50, SD = 0.69) images than male-oriented images (M = 3.20, SD = 0.69). All remaining interactions were not significant, all F’s < 2.24, and all p’s > .14. These findings are consistent with research positing an own-gender bias and extend previous research indicating that top-down processes can partially explain change blindness. Own-Gender Bias in Change Detection for Gender-Specific Images