East Carolina University : Research and Creative Achievement Week 2012
The Impact of Perceived Inequality and Trait Aggression on Workplace Aggression, John Granecki, Mark Bowler, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC 27858 The objective of the current study was to explore the relationship between trait aggression and perceptions of inequality, or injustice, as it relates to the endorsement of active and passive workplace aggression (WPA). Specifically, participants' implicit aggression was measured via the Conditional Reasoning Test of Aggression (CRT-A) and their explicit aggression was measured via the anger-hostility scale of the NEO PI-R. After completing these measures, participants responded to a series of 12 counterbalanced vignettes detailing situations of workplace inequity for which they rated the justification of active and passive aggressive responses, as well as the overall fairness of the situation. This allowed for the determination of the relationship between perceptions of inequality and endorsement of workplace aggression. Moreover, first measuring for implicit and explicit aggression facilitated analyses that differentiated the interaction of traits and situations on aggressive behaviors (Kennedy, Homant, & Homant, 2004). Overall, we expected to find that individuals who scored high on both measures of aggression will endorse the overtly aggressive acts, whereas those who scored high on the implicit measure of aggression but low on the explicit measure of aggression to only endorse the only passive aggressive acts. We also predicted that those who score low on both implicit and explicit measures of aggression would endorse neither the overt or covert acts of aggression.
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The Effects of Paternal High Fat (HF) Diet on Neurobehavioral Function in Mice, Joshua E. Hauserman1:3, Iola D. Conchar1, Tiffany Phasukkan1, Jeremy Edwards1, Elena Pak2, Alexander Murashov2, Tuan D. Tran1;1 Multidisciplinary Studies Program in Neuroscience, 2 Department of Physiology, Brody School of Medicine, 3 Department of Psychology, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC 27858 Obesity is an increasingly important global public health problem and a risk factor for morbidity and mortality. Many studies have examined the maternal contributions of transgenerational epigenetic effects, showing that epigenetic mechanisms of a high-fat diet may contribute to negative impacts on glucose regulation which demonstrate neurobehavioral impairments and cognitive dysfunction (Greenwood et al., 2008, 2005, 1996). Interestingly, some evidence shows that obese and diabetic fathers are more likely to have obese offspring predisposed to diabetes (Harjutsalo et al., 2006; Loombda et al., 2008) and more recently, it has been shown that the offspring of obese fathers have higher body fat composition and lower glucose tolerance (Parker et al., 2010), further bolstering the notion that nongenetic transgenerational effects may be contributing to enduring physical and metabolic deficits in affected offspring. Yet there is paucity of information about whether paternal contributions may also underlie some of the neurobehavioral deficits in offspring. The present study examined the effect of paternal high-fat (HF) diet on susceptibility to brain and cognitive deficits in adult offspring. Adult male C57BL/6J mice were placed on a diet regimen for 12 weeks: (1) 60% fat chow (high-fat, HF); (2) 10% fat chow (control); or (3) a motor exercise group on 10% fat chow. The males were mated with normal C57BL/6J females and their adult offspring were examined for changes in physical, glucose, and neurobehavioral measures. Each mouse will undergo two well-studied learning paradigms (1) spatial learning in the Morris water maze and (2) trace eyeblink classical conditioning (TECC), both of which assess hippocampal function. Afterwards, their hippocampi will be examined for cell loss in key populations essential for 230
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