Savannah Merold, an advanced doctoral student who recently completed her predoctoral internship at the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, MO, successfully defended her dissertation this week. Savannah's dissertation, "The role of mate seeking motives, status acquisition motives, and dark personality in predicting responses to an aggression-provoking situation," synthesized research from evolutionary and personality psychology. She used vignettes designed to activate social motives thought to be relevant to aggression (e.g., mate seeking, status acquisition), assessed dark personality traits, and examined participants' responses to an aggression-provoking scenario.

Although Savannah found evidence that the vignettes activated the intended motives for women, this was not the case for men. The smaller number of men in the study and some methodological limitations resulted in insufficient statistical power to detect these effects in men. Overall, hypotheses about social motives and dark personalty traits interacting with gender to predict aggressive responses were not supported. Future research in this area is likely to benefit from using much larger and more diverse samples that will permit more extensive examination of gender main effects and interactions.

Congratulations to Savannah on accomplishing this important milestone!

Tags: indirect aggression, dark personalities, gender