Biomedical subjects

William C Pedersen

Publications and source records attributed to William C Pedersen.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

The displaced aggression questionnaire.

Previous measures of aggressive personality have focused on direct aggression (i.e., retaliation toward the provoking agent). An original self-report measure of trait displaced aggression is presented. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses provided support for a 3-factor conceptualization of the construct. These analyses identified an affective dimension (angry rumination), a cognitive dimension (revenge planning), and a behavioral dimension (general tendency to engage in displaced aggression). The trait measure demonstrated good internal consistency and test-retest reliability as well as convergent and discriminant construct validity. Unlike other related personality measures, trait displaced aggression significantly predicted indirect indicators of real-world displaced aggression (i.e., self-reported domestic abuse and road rage) as well as laboratory displaced aggression in 2 experiments.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2005

Chewing on it can chew you up: effects of rumination on triggered displaced aggression.

Ruminating about a provocation increases the likelihood of displaced aggression following a minor annoyance (trigger). In Study 1, provoked participants who ruminated for 25 min were more aggressive toward a fumbling confederate than were distracted participants. Provocation-induced negative affect was positively related to aggression but only among those who ruminated. Study 2 conceptually replicated Study 1 and also found that the more negatively people reacted to the trigger, the more likely the trigger was to increase displaced aggression. Study 3 replicated the findings of Studies 1 and 2 by using an 8-hr rumination period. All 3 studies suggest that ruminating about a provocation increases the likelihood that a minor triggering annoyance will increase displaced aggression.

Aggression↗

PubMed2004

Variation among developmental dyslexics: evidence from a printed-word-learning task.

A word-learning task was used to investigate variation among developmental dyslexics classified as phonological and surface dyslexics. Dyslexic children and chronological age (CA)- and reading level (RL)-matched normal readers were taught to pronounce novel nonsense words such as veep. Words were assigned either a regular (e.g., "veep") or an irregular (e.g., "vip") pronunciation. Phonological dyslexics learned both regular and exception words more slowly than the normal readers and, unlike the other groups, did not show a regular-word advantage. Surface dyslexics also learned regular and exception words more slowly than the CA group, consistent with a specific problem in mastering arbitrary item-specific pronunciations, but their performance resembled that of the RL group. The results parallel earlier findings from Manis, Seidenberg, Doi, McBride-Chang, & Petersen [Cognition 58 (1996) 157-195] indicating that surface dyslexics and phonological dyslexics have a different profile of reading deficits, with surface dyslexics resembling younger normal readers and phonological dyslexics showing a specific phonological deficit. Models of reading and reading disability need to account for the heterogeneity in reading processes among dyslexic children.

Articulation Disorders↗

PubMed2003

Artificial a theoretical model of triggered displaced aggression.

A tit-for-tat matching rule (Axelrod, 1984) describes much interpersonal behavior. Yet, in daily life a retaliatory aggressive response to a trivially mild provocation often inappropriately exceeds that expected from the matching rule. The concept of triggered displaced aggression can explain these exceptions to the matching principle. Building from the Cognitive Neoassociationistic model of aggressive behavior (Berkowitz, 1989, 1990, 1993), we developed a theoretical framework of social and personality factors that moderate and mediate the disjunctively escalated retaliation that can result from triggered displaced aggression. Major explanatory factors in our analysis of such effects are as follows: (a) aspects of the Time 1 provocation and the immediate situation in which it occurred; (b) characteristics of initial provocations and personality factors of the actor that produce the ruminative thought that will temporally extend the effects of a Time 1 provocation, allowing them to interact with a delayed Time 2 minor triggering event; and (c) actions and attributes of the target of displaced aggression that augment these effects.

Aggression↗

PubMed2002

Evolved sex differences in the number of partners desired? The long and the short of it.

Do men seek more short-term mates than women? Buss and Schmitt (1993) showed a pattern of mean difference in the ideal number of sexual partners men and women desired over various time frames. We replicated these mean sex differences (e.g., ideal number over the next 30 years: Ms = 7.69 and 2.78 for men and women, respectively), but in both data sets the sampling distributions were highly skewed. In Study 1, we found few sex differences in medians across time frames (e.g., ideal number over the next 30 years: Mdn = 1 for both men and women). In Study 2, most college men (98.9%) and women (99.2%) said they wanted to settle down with one mutually exclusive sexual partner at some point in their life, ideally within the next 5 years. Neither medians in number of partners desired overall before settling down (replicating Study 1) nor medians in short-term partners desired before settling down (Mdn = 0) differed significantly by gender. Rather, men and women concurred: Short-term mating is not what humans typically seek.

Adult↗