Videogame Assisted Emotional Regulation Training: An ACT with RAGE-Control Case Illustration

This paper describes the treatment of an adolescent girl (age 16) who received the ACT with RAGE-Control intervention during her treatment in an urban inpatient psychiatry unit. ACT with RAGE-Control utilizes five traditional Cognitive Behavioral techniques combined with an active biofeedback videogame designed to strengthen a patient’s self-regulatory capacities while facing simulated stress in a virtual environment. The treatment is delivered as daily individual psychotherapy sessions over five consecutive days of an inpatient psychiatric admission. The following case illustrates the theory and techniques of the ACT with RAGE-Control intervention.     

Empty Looks or Paying Attention? Exploring Infants' Visual Behavior during Encoding of an Elicited Imitation Task

Recently, there has been an increased interest in the relationship between looking time during encoding and subsequent memory performance in imitation tasks. Hitherto, the results have been inconclusive: one line of research supporting the link between looking time and performance and another line finding no relation. The existing studies may, however, have been restricted by using small samples, limited looking time measures, and short retention intervals. We here examined the relationship between the encoding process by means of looking time as well as pupil dilation (by means of eye‐tracking technology) in sixty‐eight 20‐month‐old infants participating in an elicited imitation task and their subsequent memory performance (at an encoding test and at a 2‐week delayed recall test). Additional twenty‐two infants provided baseline measures. Simple looking time (assessed as fixation duration) did not correlate consistently with subsequent memory measures. In some cases, however, looking time correlated negatively with imitation scores. In contrast, positive correlations were found between pupil dilation and some of the memory measures, suggesting that pupil dilation may be a more sensitive tool compared to looking time measures.     

Love,Sex, and Personality Pathology: A Life History View of Personality Pathologies and Sociosexuality

Love and sex are fundamental needs of most people, yet little research has examined such aspects of life in relation to personality pathologies. We examined the associations between pathological personality traits (i.e., negative affectivity, disinhibition, antagonism, psychoticism, and detachment) and sociosexuality (i.e., short-term mating orientation, long-term mating orientation, and sexual behavior) among 702 university students. In addition, we examined the mediating role of life history speed and tested whether sex moderated the associations that these pathological personality traits had with sociosexuality. Detachment, antagonism, disinhibition, and psychoticism had positive associations with short-term mating interests and negative associations with long-term mating interests. Life history speed mediated the associations that detachment and disinhibition had with short-term mating orientation and long-term mating orientation. Although sex did moderate the association that negative affectivity had with previous sexual behavior, we found no evidence that these mediational processes differed between men and women. Results are discussed in terms of the way personality traits shape the sociosexuality of men and women using a life history paradigm.     

Popularity Contagion Among Adolescents

This study aimed to support the theory of popularity contagion, which posits that popularity spreads among friends spontaneously and regardless of behavioral changes. Peer nominations of status and behavior were collected annually between 6th and 12th grades from a total of 1062 adolescents. Longitudinal hypotheses were mostly supported using path analyses, showing (1) that individual popularity could be predicted by friends’ popularity levels over time, even when controlling for stability of individual popularity; (2) that this prediction was not accounted for by behavioral contagion of aggressive or prosocial behaviors; and (3) that individual social preference generally could not be predicted by friends’ preference levels over time. Implications, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.     

In search of message design best practices: The Silver Anvil Award winners archive

We investigated specific award-winning public relations efforts to derive best practices that bridge industry practices with academic research and pedagogy. The data for this project were the winning entries for the annual Public Relations Society of America's (PRSA) Silver Anvil Award, which is considered the top award recognizing excellence in public relations. We found, however, that the archive of award winners does not provide sufficiently definitive information about what defines any public relations discourse genre or why any genre as used is “excellent.” This archival research provides us with a key rationale for employing rhetorical, narrative, and linguistic theories prospectively to guide public relations message design and planning, theories which hitherto have been used to judge campaigns post hoc or retrospectively.     

Technische Softwaredokumentation unter ?konomischen Gesichtspunkten – Ein formal-deduktiver Ansatz

Only a very low priority seems to be given to software documentation. For example, about 80% of the software systems in production worldwide are badly documented. In contrast empirical studies confirm that an adequate technical documentation reduces the error rate of subsequent changes during software maintenance. This leads to the question about the optimal scale of investment in technical documentation in any software project. In research, this decision problem has been largely neglected. Since underlying cause-effect relationships may be empirically hard to detect, this paper proposes a new deductive approach, which compares the present value of payments for the documentation and bug fixing. The basis of this model is the phenomenon of error propagation from one component to adjacent components through its dependencies. As a result the following hypothesis can be inferred: It is always beneficial to document too much rather than comparatively too little even for an arbitrarily low quality of documentation and for any required rate of interest. This hypothesis shows robustness even against some changes in assumptions.     

Falsificationism is not just ‘potential’ falsifiability,but requires ‘actual’ falsification: Social psychology,critical rationalism,and progress in science

Based on an analysis of ten popular introductions to social psychology, we will show that Karl Popper's philosophy of ‘critical rationalism’ so far has had little to no traceable influence on the epistemology and practice of social psychology. If Popper is quoted or mentioned in the textbooks at all, the guiding principle of ‘falsificationism’ is reduced to a mere ‘falsifiability’ and some central elements of critical rationalism are left out – those that are incompatible with positivism and inductivism. Echoing earlier attempts to introduce Popper to social psychology by Paul Meehl and Tom Pettigrew, we will argue that a discussing Popper's ideas in more depth could help social psychology to move forward in view of the ‘crisis of confidence’ (Pashler and Wagenmakers, 2012) that has emerged recently in view of the ‘Stapel affair’ and the reports of failures to replicate social psychological experiments in high‐powered replication attempts.