The neural correlates of alcohol-related aggression.

Alcohol intoxication is implicated in approximately half of all violent crimes. Over the past several decades, numerous theories have been proposed to account for the influence of alcohol on aggression. Nearly all of these theories imply that altered functioning in the prefrontal cortex is a proximal cause. In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment, 50 healthy young men consumed either a low dose of alcohol or a placebo and completed an aggression paradigm against provocative and nonprovocative opponents. Provocation did not affect neural responses. However, relative to sober participants, during acts of aggression, intoxicated participants showed decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex, caudate, and ventral striatum, but heightened activation in the hippocampus. Among intoxicated participants, but not among sober participants, aggressive behavior was positively correlated with activation in the medial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These results support theories that posit a role for prefrontal cortical dysfunction as an important factor in intoxicated aggression.

Brief mindfulness induction reduces inattentional blindness.

Prior research has linked mindfulness to improvements in attention, and suggested that the effects of mindfulness are particularly pronounced when individuals are cognitively depleted or stressed. Yet, no studies have tested whether mindfulness improves declarative awareness of unexpected stimuli in goal-directed tasks. Participants (N=794) were either depleted (or not) and subsequently underwent a brief mindfulness induction (or not). They then completed an inattentional blindness task during which an unexpected distractor appeared on the computer monitor. This task was used to assess declarative conscious awareness of the unexpected distractor's presence and the extent to which its perceptual properties were encoded. Mindfulness increased awareness of the unexpected distractor (i.e., reduced rates of inattentional blindness). Contrary to predictions, no mindfulness×depletion interaction emerged. Depletion however, increased perceptual encoding of the distractor. These results suggest that mindfulness may foster awareness of unexpected stimuli (i.e., reduce inattentional blindness).

Alcohol outlet business hours and violent crime in New York state.

AIMS: Alcohol-related harm places a significant strain on victims, perpetrators and society. The present research reports on how licensed alcohol outlet business hours may influence the reported incidence of interpersonal violence and the associated burden of disease. METHODS: We examined the relationship between alcohol outlet business hours and violent crime in 2009 in New York State (excluding New York City). Regression analyses modeled the burden of disease for the violence associated with outlet business hours. RESULTS: Every 1 h increase in weekly outlet business hours was associated with a greater reported incidence of violent crimes generally, more reported aggravated assaults and more reported non-gun violence. The estimated cost from having licensed premises open after 1 a.m. was $194 million in 2009. CONCLUSION: The findings suggest that alcohol outlet business hours affect the incidence of reported violence even in regions that would not be considered to have severe problems with alcohol-fueled violence.

Unemployment, Employability and COVID19: How the Global Socioeconomic Shock Challenged Negative Perceptions Toward the Less Fortunate in the Australian Context.

Unemployed benefit recipients are stigmatized and generally perceived negatively in terms of their personality characteristics and employability. The COVID19 economic shock led to rapid public policy responses across the globe to lessen the impact of mass unemployment, potentially shifting community perceptions of individuals who are out of work and rely on government income support. We used a repeated cross-sections design to study change in stigma tied to unemployment and benefit receipt in a pre-existing pre-COVID19 sample (n = 260) and a sample collected during COVID19 pandemic (n = 670) by using a vignette-based experiment. Participants rated attributes of characters who were described as being employed, working poor, unemployed or receiving unemployment benefits. The results show that compared to employed characters, unemployed characters were rated substantially less favorably at both time points on their employability and personality traits. The difference in perceptions of the employed and unemployed was, however, attenuated during COVID19 with benefit recipients perceived as more employable and more Conscientious than pre-pandemic. These results add to knowledge about the determinants of welfare stigma highlighting the impact of the global economic and health crisis on perception of others.

The impact of self-control training on neural responses following anger provocation.

Self-control training (SCT) is one way to enhance self-controlled behavior. We conducted a novel and exploratory functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment to examine how SCT affects neural responses in a situation that elicits a self-control response: anger provocation. Forty-five healthy young men and women completed two-weeks of SCT or a behavioral monitoring task and were then insulted during scanning. We found significant changes in functional activation and connectivity using a lenient error threshold, which were not observed using a stricter threshold. Activation in the posterior insula was greater for the control compared to the SCT group at post-provocation, trait aggression correlated with neural responses to SCT, and SCT was associated with specific amygdala-cortical connections. Neural changes occurred even though SCT did not affect participants' performance on an inhibition task, reports of trying to control their anger, or their experience of anger. This dissociation prevented clear interpretation about whether the neural changes were indicative of specific anger or anger control processes. Although replication with high-powered studies is needed, we provide evidence that SCT affects neural responses in the context of anger provocation.

Using Longitudinal Survey Data to Estimate Mental Health Related Transitions to a Disability Pension: Analysis of an Australian Household Panel Study.

OBJECTIVE: This study examined the association between mental ill-health and subsequent receipt of a disability pension in Australia, and assessed how the strength of the association varied in relation to the duration between mental health measurement and reported disability pension receipt. METHODS: Eight thousand four hundred seventy-four working-age adults not receiving a disability pension at baseline were followed for up to 11 years; 349 transitioned onto a disability pension. Discrete-time survival analysis considered baseline and time-varying (12-month lagged) measures of mental ill-health. RESULTS: Proximal measures of mental ill-health were more strongly associated with subsequent pension receipt than baseline measures (odds ratio: 6.6 vs 3.9) and accounted for a significantly greater proportion of pension transitions (35% vs 21%). CONCLUSION: Mental ill-health is an independent risk factor for disability pension receipt, and proximal circumstances better capture this association than mental health measured earlier.

No experimental evidence for visual prior entry of angry faces, even when feeling afraid.

Threatening stimuli prevent attentional disengagement. Less clear is whether threat captures attention in addition to holding it. One way to measure attentional capture is to examine visual prior entry. Visual prior entry occurs when one stimulus is consciously recognized as appearing prior to other stimuli. Using a temporal order judgments paradigm, we examined whether threatening, angry faces would experience visual prior entry. Such a finding would provide evidence for attentional capture by threat. We further examined whether such attentional capture by threat was contingent on feeling afraid. Using Bayesian analyses, we found moderate support for the null hypothesis in 2 experiments (Ns = 44, 63). Angry faces did not capture attention, and there was no effect of feeling afraid because of watching a horror movie (Experiment 1) or anticipatory fear about giving a speech in front of an expert panel (Experiment 2). These studies were supplemented with a meta-analysis that suggests the visual prior entry effect is very small, if indeed it exists. Thus, the visual prior entry effect for threatening faces is likely a much smaller effect than the extant literature suggests. (PsycINFO Database Record

Time-of-day effects in implicit racial in-group preferences are likely selection effects, not circadian rhythms.

Time-of-day effects in human psychological functioning have been known of since the 1800s. However, outside of research specifically focused on the quantification of circadian rhythms, their study has largely been neglected. Moves toward online data collection now mean that psychological investigations take place around the clock, which affords researchers the ability to easily study time-of-day effects. Recent analyses have shown, for instance, that implicit attitudes have time-of-day effects. The plausibility that these effects indicate circadian rhythms rather than selection effects is considered in the current study. There was little evidence that the time-of-day effects in implicit attitudes shifted appropriately with factors known to influence the time of circadian rhythms. Moreover, even variables that cannot logically show circadian rhythms demonstrated stronger time-of-day effects than did implicit attitudes. Taken together, these results suggest that time-of-day effects in implicit attitudes are more likely to represent processes of selection rather than circadian rhythms, but do not rule out the latter possibility.

Patterns of Welfare Attitudes in the Australian Population.

The study of community attitudes toward welfare and welfare recipients is an area of increasing interest. This is not only because negative attitudes can lead to stigmatization and discrimination, but because of the relevance of social attitudes to policy decisions. We quantify the attitudes toward welfare in the Australian population using attitude data from a nationally representative survey (N = 3243). Although there was broad support for the social welfare system, negative attitudes are held toward those who receive welfare benefits. Using canonical correlation analysis we identify multivariate associations between welfare attitudes and respondent demographic characteristics. A primary attitudinal dimension of welfare positivity was found amongst those with higher levels of education, life instability, and personal exposure to the welfare system. Other patterns of negative welfare attitudes appeared to be motivated by beliefs that the respondent's personal circumstances indicate their deservingness. Moreover, a previously unidentified and unconsidered subset of respondents was identified. This group had positive attitudes toward receiving government benefits despite having no recent experience of welfare. They did, however, possess many of the characteristics that frequently lead to welfare receipt. These results provide insights into not only how attitudinal patterns segment across the population, but are of relevance to policy makers considering how to align welfare reform with community attitudes.

Temporal alcohol availability predicts first-time drunk driving, but not repeat offending.

Alcohol availability has been linked to drunk driving, but research has not examined whether this relationship is the same for first-time and repeat offenses. We examined the relationship between the business hours of alcohol outlets licensed to serve alcohol for on-premises consumption and misdemeanor-level (first offense) and felony-level drunk driving (repeat offense) charges in New York State in 2009. Longer outlet business hours were associated with more misdemeanor drunk driving charges, but were not associated with felony drunk driving charges. The per capita density of on-premises alcohol outlets did not affect misdemeanor or felony drunk driving charges. The results suggest that temporal alcohol availability may be an impelling factor for first-time drunk driving, but other factors likely influence repeat drunk driving behaviors.