Academic entitlement decreases engagement in and out of the classroom and increases classroom incivility attitudes.

Previous research has indicated that academic entitlement can serve as a barrier between students and the benefits of a university education. As entitled students function as consumers and externalize responsibility for their learning outcomes, they risk lower grades and anti-intellectualism attitudes. This study explored how academic entitlement can be damaging to the student via engagement and social interaction deficits, as well as to faculty and the university at large through a lack of civility and appropriate classroom behaviors. One hundred ninety-seven undergraduate students completed scales on academic entitlement, student and schoolwork engagement, social adjustment to college, emotion regulation, plagiarism attitudes, classroom citizenship, and classroom incivility behaviors. Increased academic entitlement was associated with decreased engagement in and out of the classroom; poor social adjustment to university; poor academic emotion regulation strategies; a lack of appropriate classroom behaviors; and a greater acceptance of plagiarism, academic dishonesty, and incivility. Future research exploring how academic entitlement decreases university affiliation, commitment, and retention is recommended.

Registered Replication Report: Hart & Albarracín (2011).

Language can be viewed as a complex set of cues that shape people's mental representations of situations. For example, people think of behavior described using imperfective aspect (i.e., what a person was doing) as a dynamic, unfolding sequence of actions, whereas the same behavior described using perfective aspect (i.e., what a person did) is perceived as a completed whole. A recent study found that aspect can also influence how we think about a person's intentions (Hart & Albarracín, 2011). Participants judged actions described in imperfective as being more intentional (d between 0.67 and 0.77) and they imagined these actions in more detail (d = 0.73). The fact that this finding has implications for legal decision making, coupled with the absence of other direct replication attempts, motivated this registered replication report (RRR). Multiple laboratories carried out 12 direct replication studies, including one MTurk study. A meta-analysis of these studies provides a precise estimate of the size of this effect free from publication bias. This RRR did not find that grammatical aspect affects intentionality (d between 0 and -0.24) or imagery (d = -0.08). We discuss possible explanations for the discrepancy between these results and those of the original study.

HIGHER MODIFIED BECK DEPRESSION INVENTORY SCORES ARE ASSOCIATED WITH BODY, EATING, AND EXERCISE COMPARISONS BUT DECREASED EXERCISE AMOUNTS.

Previous research has indicated that exercise can lead to decreased depression symptoms. The relationship of depression with right frontal lobe activity and self-image (body, eating, and exercise) were investigated as reasons why depressive symptoms might lead to decreased exercise. 120 college students (79 women) completed design fluency tasks followed by a set of questionnaires on depression and exercise. High (M = 23.03, SD = 5.92) and low quartiles (M = 3.11, SD = 1.59) were created using the Modified Beck Depression Inventory (mBDI) for primary analyses. The group with higher mBDI scores produced fewer unique designs (suggesting lower right frontal activity) and was more likely to make comparisons based on body shape, eating, and exercise. The group with higher mBDI scores reported significantly less strenuous and moderate exercise. These findings indicate that the relationship between exercise and depression could work in both directions. While exercise can be used as a potential treatment to decrease depression, increased depressive symptoms could be a hindrance to exercise.

Personality, sex of participant, and face-to-face interaction affect reading of informed consent forms.

Students (N = 183) participated in a study designed to determine if each student read the informed consent form. Approximately 12% of students in the online condition followed the procedure compared with 38% in the laboratory phase. Participants with higher trait worry and those with lower emotion reappraisal were more likely to follow the procedure, while women were more likely to read the form than men. Across conditions, most students do not read informed consent documents, particularly in online formats. These findings of this research support the idea that women tend to be more information-seeking than men in health and research settings and those with higher trait worry tend to read the consent forms to alleviate uncertainty and trust concerns.

Group administration influences design but not written word fluency testing.

Quicker assessments of right and left frontal lobe function, such as the examination of performance on design and language fluency tasks, respectively, lend themselves to a group administration setting. However, the influence of social facilitation factors on a dissociation model in these group settings is not well understood. One hundred college students (71 women) completed design and written word fluency tasks while sitting beside a faster or slower working confederate. Questionnaires related to trait worry, emotion regulation, state depression, anxiety and stress were completed following these tasks. Students in the fast condition produced significantly more unique designs, but there was no condition difference on written word fluency. This finding indicated that performance on a design task, which requires relative right frontal activation, may decrease if the subject is paired with a slow working confederate. High trait worriers demonstrated reduced performance on the design task (as indicated by higher design error ratios) but preserved performance on the word task. This supported a single dissociation in that performance on these tasks indicates compromised right hemisphere function and preserved left hemisphere function, respectively, in high trait worriers.

Cardiovascular activity during laboratory tasks in women with high and low worry.

Worry has been related to delayed stress recovery and cardiovascular disease risk. Cardiovascular responses to a range of laboratory tasks were examined in this study of high and low worriers. Undergraduate women were recruited with the Penn State Worry Questionnaire to form low (n=19) and high (n=22) worry groups. These individuals engaged in six laboratory tasks (orthostatic stress, supine rest, hand cold pressor, mental arithmetic, and worry and relaxation imagery) while heart rate (HR), HR spectral analysis, impedance cardiography, and blood pressure were acquired. The only significant group difference found was a consistently greater HR across tasks in high worriers (p<.05). No group by condition interactions emerged. High trait worry in healthy young women appears to be marked by elevated HR in the absence of autonomic abnormalities. These findings are discussed relative to the literature on worry, with particular reference to its health implications.