Department of Psychology
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- ItemMeasuring children’s harmonic knowledge with implicit and explicit tests(2022) Corrigall, Kathleen; Tillmann, Barbara; Schellenberg, E. GlennWe used implicit and explicit tasks to measure knowledge of Western harmony in musically trained and untrained Canadian children. Younger children were 6-7 years of age; older children were 10-11. On each trial, participants heard a sequence of five piano chords. The first four chords established a major-key context. The final chord was the standard, expected tonic of the context or one of two deviant endings: the highly unexpected flat supertonic or the moderately unexpected subdominant. In the implicit task, children identified the timbre of the final chord (guitar or piano) as quickly as possible. Response times were faster for the tonic ending than for either deviant ending, but the magnitude of the priming effect was similar for the two deviants, and the effect did not vary as a function of age or music training. In the explicit task, children rated how good each chord sequence sounded. Ratings were highest for sequences with the tonic ending, intermediate for the subdominant, and lowest for the flat supertonic. Moreover, the difference between the tonic and deviant sequences was larger for older children with music training. Thus, the explicit task provided a more nuanced picture of musical knowledge than did the implicit task.
- ItemConfronting assumptions about our grandmothers' legacy and challenges faced by our female ancestors(2021) Honey, P. Lynne; Semenyna, Scott W.The article discusses the target article by T. Reynolds which articulated the tension between cooperation and competition, wherein women's social behaviors are biased toward maintaining support from friends and lovers while competing with them. Topics include sex differences associated with the formation and maintenance of friendships, long-term mating as the measure of success, and limitations of generalizing from western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) samples.
- ItemThe implications of high-conflict divorce on adult–children: five factors related to well-being(2021) Radetzki, Phillip A.; Deleurme, Kendall A.; Rogers, SeanOffspring of divorce are generally more vulnerable to negative mental health outcomes than counterparts of intact marriages. However, not all cases of divorce are equivalent. The present study aimed to contribute to divorce literature by investigating the role of interparental conflict during the divorce process on offspring well-being. A convenience sample of 144 adult undergraduates from divorced families completed questionnaires pertaining to perceptions of interparental conflict and psychological well-being, interpersonal competence, irrational beliefs, materialistic orientations, and emotion dysregulation. Perceptions of interparental conflict during divorce positively correlated with irrational thinking and emotion dysregulation, and negatively correlated with psychological well-being and interpersonal competence. A MANOVA revealed that participants' perceptions of interparental conflict had significant predictive power on all factors of interest except materialism. In the model, interparental conflict had the greatest effect on emotion dysregulation. Participants with perceptions of high interparental conflict had greater impairments in all variables (except materialism, which was non-significant) compared to the low perception group. They also presented greater impairment in interpersonal competence, emotion regulation, and rational thinking than the medium perception group. Overall, the results suggest interparental conflict during divorce is relevant to offspring outcomes, perhaps particularly within emotion regulation.
- ItemUnbreakable resolutions as an effective tactic for self-control: lessons from Mahatma Gandhi and a 19th-century Prussian prince(2021) Powell, Russell A.; Schmaltz, Rodney; Radke, JadeDespite the relative consensus in the self-management literature that personal resolutions are not an effective stand-alone tactic for self-control, some individuals seem capable of using them to exert a remarkable level of control over their behavior. One such individual was Mahatma Gandhi, the famous Indian statesman. Gandhi often used personal resolutions—or “vows”—to commit himself to a range of challenging behaviors, such as extreme diets, sexual abstinence, and fasting. Similarly, Prince Pückler-Muskau, a celebrated 19th-Century adventurer, landscape designer and travel author, described using personal resolutions to unfailingly accomplish numerous tasks in his everyday life. In this article, we examine the historical writings of Gandhi and Pückler-Muskau concerning their use of resolutions. We describe three defining characteristics of their resolutions, which we will refer to as unbreakable resolutions, and outline Gandhi’s advice for making and keeping such resolutions. Our analysis suggests that the effectiveness of unbreakable resolutions may be primarily due to the temporally extended contingencies of reinforcement associated with their use, and can be usefully interpreted from the perspective of delay-discounting and say-do correspondence models of self-control. The implications of this examination for understanding the concept of willpower and for enhancing modern research into self-control training are also discussed. Based on this analysis, we additionally offer a tentative set of guidelines on how to make and keep unbreakable resolutions.
- ItemDoes stalking behavior improve risk prediction of intimate partner violence?(2021) Jung, Sandy; Himmen, Marguerite; Velupillai, Nirudika; Buro, KarenThe present study investigates whether stalking is associated with recidivism risk among IPV offenders and incrementally adds to the predictive validity of existing validated risk measures for predicting recidivism of intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetrators. Using 226 police-reported cases of IPV, the criminal histories of the perpetrators in these cases were examined, and perpetrators were categorized based on their stalking histories. Stalkers and non-stalkers were then compared on their risk scores, and survival analyses were conducted to determine if stalking incrementally improved prediction of recidivism outcomes over and above the Ontario Domestic Assault Risk Assessment (ODARA) and a modified version of the Spousal Assault Risk Assessment (SARA). We found that the SARA significantly differed between stalking and non-stalking perpetrators, but no difference emerged when we examined the ODARA score and recidivism outcomes. We found that stalking did not incrementally increase predictive validity for recidivism outcomes over and above the modified SARA and ODARA. Our findings challenge policies that regard stalking as a risk factor for future IPV and explore how police services may better allocate resources in cases of intimate partner stalking.