Forgiving Warriors: Does Outgroup Threat Reduce Ingroup Aggression Among Males?

In order to defend against outgroups, males and females respond to outgroup threat with different strategies. Specifically, males have been shown to respond to outgroup threat with increased ingroup solidarity and cooperation which is likely reflective of their ancestral role as warriors. What remains unknown is whether this cooperative warrior mindset among males not only increases ingroup prosociality, but also decreases ingroup aggression. Aggression against ingroup members under outgroup threat would likely disadvantage the ingroup by reducing the ingroup’s collective formidability. Further, prosocial motivations inhibit aggression. As such, I hypothesized that sex and outgroup threat would interact such that males, but not females, would respond to outgroup threat with reduced aggression towards ingroup members. To test this hypothesis, 41 male and 60 female participants were induced to either feel outgroup threat or no threat. All participants were then provoked by an ingroup member and then given a chance to aggress against that individual. Failing to support my hypothesis, outgroup threat did not interact with sex to predict aggression against ingroup members. This interactive effect was not further moderated by personality factors relevant to aggression. I discuss my findings in context of statistical power and the punishment of deviant ingroup members

Does the Pain of Rejection Promote the Pleasure of Revenge? A Neural Investigation of Cingulo-Striatal Contributions to Violence

Aggression is a dynamic and costly feature of human behavior. One reliable cause of aggression is social rejection, though the underlying mechanisms of this effect remain to be fully understood. Previous research has identified two psychological processes that are independently linked to aggressive retaliation: pain and pleasure. Given recent findings that pain magnifies the experience of pleasure, I predicted that the pain of rejection would promote the pleasure of aggression and thus, aggression itself. I also expected that this indirect effect of aggressive pleasure would only be observed among individuals with weaker self-regulatory abilities that are necessary to cope with rejection’s sting. To test these hypotheses, I performed a functional neuroimaging experiment in which I acquired neural signatures of social pain and aggressive pleasure, as well as behavioral measures of aggression itself and self-regulatory abilities. Using a moderated-mediation approach, I observed that, among individuals high in self-regulatory abilities, neural signatures of social pain predicted less aggressive retaliation in response to social rejection. This effect was mediated by reduced activity in the brain’s reward network during retaliatory aggression. Among individuals low in self-regulatory abilities, no such effects on aggression were observed. These findings suggest that social pain can buffer individuals against aggressive behavior, but only when people have the self-regulatory ability to do so. Much of human action is motivated by pain and pleasure, understanding their roles in aggression is a critical step in eliminating such violence

Additive decompositions for rings of modular forms

We study rings of integral modular forms for congruence subgroups as modules over the ring of integral modular forms for the full modular group. In many cases these modules are free or decompose at least into well-understood pieces. We apply this to characterize which rings of modular forms are Cohen--Macaulay and to prove finite generation results. These theorems are based on decomposition results about vector bundles on the compactified moduli stack of elliptic curves.Comment: Complete revision. Comments welcome. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1609.0926

A Parameterized Simulation of Doppler Lidar

Upcoming missions to explore planetary bodies in the solar system will require accurate position and velocity data during descent in order to land safely at a predesignated site. A Doppler lidar instrument could provide measurements of the altitude, attitude, and velocity of the landing vehicle to supplement the data collected by other instruments. A flexible simulation tool would aid the tasks of designing and testing the functionality of such an instrument. LadarSIM is a robust parameterized simulation tool developed for time of flight lidar at Utah State University\u27s Center for Advanced Imaging Ladar. This thesis outlines how LadarSIM was modified to include a simulation of Doppler lidar. A study is performed using LadarSIM to determine the effects of varying certain parameters of a Doppler lidar system. Point clouds of landing scenarios generated by the simulation with different scanning patterns are shown