The Founding Monsters comic book was created as a science-friendly graphical storytelling framework that tells the story of the Founding Fathers and their obsession with prehistoric megafauna, especially mastodons and giant ground sloths. Founding Monsters combines sequential art (e.g. comic book style) with historical and scientific data. The first mastodon (Mammut americanum) fossils were found in New York in the early 18th century. Later in the 18th century, Thomas Jefferson was sent fossils from what...

Risk perception is the likelihood of experiencing a health-related outcome and is one of the main components of the Health Belief Model, as well as other health behavior models. Risk perception is associated with a number of preventative and health-related behavior outcomes including health care service use, uptake of screening, diet and exercise. Perceived risk has been studied in relationship to health outcomes such as cancer and diabetes, but little research has assessed perceived risk...

Course site for Engaging Students in Scholarly Communications

Aggression is a costly and pervasive social phenomenon that comes in many forms. Contemporary theories of aggression point to the involvement of cognitive processes in aggressive behavior (Bushman & Anderson, 2002; Finkel & Hall, 2018). Empirical work testing the involvement of such processes in aggression has largely focused on the cognitive accessibility and the acquisition of scripts for aggression, leaving the role of other processes untested (e.g., Todorov & Bargh, 2002; Wilkowski & Robinson, 2010)....

There is now substantial evidence to confirm the notion that executive function skills make immense contributions to children’s early learning and scholastic achievements (Blair, 2002; Bull et al., 2008; Gathercole et al., 2004; Latzman et al., 2010; Lorsbach et al., 1996; Ozonoff & Jensen, 1996). One of the most central components of cognitive functioning involves the skill of executive ‘decision-making’. Originally indexed by the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) and later reformed as “Hungry Donkey” referring...

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There is minimal literature investigating the relationship between gender differences and vulnerable narcissism because various previous studies indicated that males are closely associated with narcissistic features. The purpose of this study is to observe whether the relationship between vulnerable narcissism and spiteful punishments that is moderated by self-esteem threat is influenced by the addition of gender as a variable. Data was collected from the Amazon Mechanical Turk program participants and included the measures of the...

Title Network Analysis of Trait Aggression - BFI, BPAQ, DD Description This project seeks to determine where trait aggression belongs among the broader "Big 5" personality traits of openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Data-driven approaches such as network analysis techniques allow for the estimation of the importance of certain variables (or “nodes”) in a given network. Recent advances in personality research have shown the utility of this analytic framework in the context...

Individuals who are affected by alcohol use disorder (AUD) are at increased risk for other drug use disorders (Hasin et al., 2007), and each additional criterion met for AUD further heightens the likelihood of using multiple substances (Hedden et al., 2010). Previously identified predictors of illicit substance use and dependence among individuals affected by AUD include male gender, younger age, earlier drug and alcohol use onset, maternal alcohol problems, higher levels of neuroticism, primary depression...

Aggression, herein defined as any attempt to harm another person that the aggressor believes does not wish to be harmed in the intended form or to the intended degree, is an anti-social phenomenon that is nonetheless perpetrated from time to time by normally prosocial individuals. Researchers have spent decades and published thousands of papers studying the antecedents and moderators of aggression including provocation (e.g., Raine et al., 2006) trait aggressive tendencies (e.g., Buss & Perry,...

Mindfulness meditation, defined as the act of training one’s attention to present-moment experiences, has been used to effectively treat a wide range of psychological and physical conditions. To date few studies have investigated the impact of mindfulness meditation on neural circuitry during meditation practice itself. Consequently, it is unknown if mindfulness instruction noticeably affects neural processes observable during resting state. Standardized instructions in mindfulness guide the listener to attend to present-moment body sensations, note when...

At its most basic level, revenge can be defined as acts of harm against a target in response to a perceived offense by said target (McCullough et al., 2013). Revenge may seem a natural impulse (e.g., Thompson et al., 2016), and some have argued that revenge evolved in humans as one of the first mechanisms for deterring antisocial behavior (McCullough et al., 2013). However, individuals differ as to the degree to which they are inclined...

This study aims to investigate the pattern of change over time in cognitive flexibility in middle childhood. This study will identify different developmental trajectories of cognitive flexibility and examine possible predictors for the different trajectories. This study will conduct secondary data analyses. The pre-existing data will be derived from the project “Exploring the Malleability of Executive Control” run by the INSTRUCT research lab in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge. This initial...

In our initial study we found evidence that Factor 1 psychopathy showed a stronger, positive association with subjective social status and belief in hierarchy than Factor 2 psychopathy. Similarly Factor 2 psychopathy was negatively related to respect for hierarchy, but Factor 1 was not. As such, these findings indicated a substantial difference in relation to the factors of psychopathy as they relate to components of social status. This purpose of this study is to examine...

This study aims to follow-up on the first study by achieving two goals: (1) to replicate the findings from Study 1; and (2) to investigate whether cultural worldview (such as just world belief and system justification) would moderate the association between perceived discrimination and health outcomes. Note: Study 1 aimed to assess whether the personal/group discrimination discrepancy is still evident among ethnic/racial minority college students with the cultural and racial context created by the 45...