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Loss of Control and Self-Regulation: The Role of Childhood Lessons
Noah VanBergen & Juliano Laran
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper demonstrates that a loss of personal control leads to an increase in self-regulatory behavior. This occurs because a loss of control puts consumers at a deficit relative to one of the major lessons they learn during their childhood, which is to have control over the outcomes of their actions. This deficit triggers a compensatory process focused on following other lessons consumers believe they learned during their childhood. As exerting self-regulation is another major lesson parents emphasize, consumers engage in self-regulatory behavior to compensate for a loss of personal control. However, when consumers believe their parents emphasized self-regulation less strongly during childhood (i.e., they believe their parents had a more permissive style), a loss of control can reduce self-regulatory behavior. These findings have implications for what we know about the effects of childhood experiences on adult consumer behavior, the importance of individuals' beliefs about childhood experiences in determining adult behavior, the consequences of low personal control, and the antecedents of self-regulatory behavior.
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The Role of Social Novelty in Risk Seeking and Exploratory Behavior: Implications for Addictions
Simon Mitchell et al.
PLoS ONE, July 2016
Abstract:
Novelty preference or sensation seeking is associated with disorders of addiction and predicts rodent compulsive drug use and adolescent binge drinking in humans. Novelty has also been shown to influence choice in the context of uncertainty and reward processing. Here we introduce a novel or familiar neutral face stimuli and investigate its influence on risk-taking choices in healthy volunteers. We focus on behavioural outcomes and imaging correlates to the prime that might predict risk seeking. We hypothesized that subjects would be more risk seeking following a novel relative to familiar stimulus. We adapted a risk-taking task involving acceptance or rejection of a 50:50 choice of gain or loss that was preceded by a familiar (pre-test familiarization) or novel face prime. Neutral expression faces of males and females were used as primes. Twenty-four subjects were first tested behaviourally and then 18 scanned using a different variant of the same task under functional MRI. We show enhanced risk taking to both gain and loss anticipation following novel relative to familiar images and particularly for the low gain condition. Greater risk taking behaviour and self-reported exploratory behaviours was predicted by greater right ventral putaminal activity to novel versus familiar contexts. Social novelty appears to have a contextually enhancing effect on augmenting risky choices possibly mediated via ventral putaminal dopaminergic activity. Our findings link the observation that novelty preference and sensation seeking are important traits predicting the initiation and maintenance of risky behaviours, including substance and behavioural addictions.
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Early School Adjustment and Educational Attainment
Katherine Magnuson et al.
American Educational Research Journal, August 2016, Pages 1198-1228
Abstract:
Although school attainment is a cumulative process combining mastery of both academic and behavioral skills, most studies have offered only a piecemeal view of the associations between middle-childhood capacities and subsequent schooling outcomes. Using a 20-year longitudinal data set, this study estimates the association between children's academic skills, antisocial behaviors, and attention problems - all averaged across middle childhood - and their long-term educational outcomes. After adjusting for family and individual background measures, we find that high average levels of math and reading achievement, and low average levels of antisocial behavior problems, are positively associated with later attainment. Associations between attention problems and attainment are small. Associations are attenuated somewhat when sibling differences in these skills and behaviors are related to sibling differences in attainment outcomes.
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Alcohol-Related Genes Show an Enrichment of Associations With a Persistent Externalizing Factor
James Ashenhurst et al.
Journal of Abnormal Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research using twins has found that much of the variability in externalizing phenotypes - including alcohol and drug use, impulsive personality traits, risky sex, and property crime - is explained by genetic factors. Nevertheless, identification of specific genes and variants associated with these traits has proven to be difficult, likely because individual differences in externalizing are explained by many genes of small individual effect. Moreover, twin research indicates that heritable variance in externalizing behaviors is mostly shared across the externalizing spectrum rather than specific to any behavior. We use a longitudinal, "deep phenotyping" approach to model a general externalizing factor reflecting persistent engagement in a variety of socially problematic behaviors measured at 11 assessment occasions spanning early adulthood (ages 18 to 28). In an ancestrally homogenous sample of non-Hispanic Whites (N = 337), we then tested for enrichment of associations between the persistent externalizing factor and a set of 3,281 polymorphisms within 104 genes that were previously identified as associated with alcohol-use behaviors. Next, we tested for enrichment among domain-specific factors (e.g., property crime) composed of residual variance not accounted for by the common factor. Significance was determined relative to bootstrapped empirical thresholds derived from permutations of phenotypic data. Results indicated significant enrichment of genetic associations for persistent externalizing, but not for domain-specific factors. Consistent with twin research findings, these results suggest that genetic variants are broadly associated with externalizing behaviors rather than unique to specific behaviors.
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The Effects of Financial Education on Impulsive Decision Making
William DeHart et al.
PLoS ONE, July 2016
Abstract:
Delay discounting, as a behavioral measure of impulsive choice, is strongly related to substance abuse and other risky behaviors. Therefore, effective techniques that alter delay discounting are of great interest. We explored the ability of a semester long financial education course to change delay discounting. Participants were recruited from a financial education course (n = 237) and an abnormal psychology course (n = 80). Both groups completed a delay-discounting task for $100 during the first two weeks (Time 1) of the semester as well as during the last two weeks (Time 2) of the semester. Participants also completed a personality inventory and financial risk tolerance scale both times and a delay-discounting task for $1,000 during Time 2. Delay discounting decreased in the financial education group at the end of the semester whereas there was no change in delay discounting in the abnormal psychology group. Financial education may be an effective method for reducing delay discounting.