Psychology Commons^™

America's Newest Boogeyman For Deviant Teen Behavior: Violent Video Games And The First Amendment, Joseph C. Alfe, Grant D. Talabay

Pace Intellectual Property, Sports & Entertainment Law Forum

Are violent video games harming America’s youth? Is it possible a series of interconnected circuit boards can influence children (or even adults) to become, themselves, violent? If so, how should our society-- and government-- respond?

To properly answer this last query, violent video games must be viewed through the lens of the First Amendment. Simply put: do games depicting grotesque acts of depravity so profound as to negatively influence the psyche warrant the full constitutional protections ordinarily guaranteed under the mantle of free speech and expression? Are these guarantees without limit? If not, how far may the government go in …

Negative Punishment During Alternative Reinforcement Does Not Reduce Subsequent Resurgence, Alexander Houchins, Catherine L. Williams, Claire C. St. Peter

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Resurgence of previously suppressed behavior can occur when differential reinforcement is discontinued. Recent research has investigated strategies to mitigate resurgence, such as punishing the target response during alternative reinforcement. Loss of reinforcers contingent on the target response (response cost) does not appear to attenuate resurgence, but these effects had not been replicated with other negative-punishment procedures, such as timeout. This study investigated effects of timeout on subsequent resurgence when adults responded to earn points during a computer task. Timeout did not affect subsequent resurgence. These findings, in combination with previous research, suggest that negative punishment may not reduce the likelihood …

Alternatives: The Video Game. An Assessment Of Bias And Preferences In Uncertain Situations, Vincent Edwards

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Going against working assumptions of what is "natural", animals have been observed to "gamble" when choosing between a high-risk choice with a high reward, and a consistent alternative with a low reward that feeds them more over time. The Energy Budget Rule (EBR) claims that animals have a foraging goal they must reach to survive, and each attempt to forage has a cost; under certain conditions, a high risk "gamble" is the best option for survival. The present study attempts to observe human choice behavior in a task that tests EBR and assesses shifts in behavior over time as an …