Background: Alcohol-related sexual assault is a pressing health concern on U.S. college campuses. The unrelenting prevalence of campus sexual assault has led to a greater focus on how to empower college women to resist unwanted sexual advances within alcohol-infused contexts. Alcohol-aggression expectancies have emerged as one potential barrier to…

Women face heightened risk of sexual assault and a growing body of research has suggested that bystanders play a key role in preventing violence against women. To date, research has not fully explored bystander responses "following" a sexual assault event. Using self-categorization theory, this study employed an experimental design with…

This essay highlights the interconnected nature of social media use and mental health challenges for women college students and provides recommendations to practitioners for supporting healthy social media use through efforts to disrupt perceptions of social media norms. Vignettes of three students who participated in a qualitative study the…

Objective: High rates of sexual victimization among college students necessitate further study of factors associated with sexual assault risk detection. The present study examined how social information processing relates to sexual assault risk detection as a function of sexual assault victimization history. Participants: 225 undergraduates…

Experiencing an early pubertal transition has been shown to increase the risk for internalizing and externalizing outcomes among girls. It is less clear how the expectations of other individuals can be critical determinants of vulnerability for early developers. This study used an experimental design to examine whether the expectations of teachers…

Objective: To examine associations between menstrual cycle phase, negative mood, sexual risk recognition deficits (assessed via an analogue risk vignette), and in vivo emotion dysregulation. Participants: Participants were 714 college women recruited between February 2007 and December 2009. Methods: Participants were randomly assigned to a…

The present study examined whether and which facets of emotion dysregulation serve an intervening role in the association between prior victimization and risk perception in an analogue sexual assault vignette. Participants were 714 university women who completed self-report measures of sexual victimization, emotion dysregulation, and a…

This study evaluated the effects of a sexual victimization history and the contextual features of sexual activity and alcohol use on the effectiveness of women's responses to 44 written vignettes describing diverse dating and social situations. One hundred and one undergraduate women reported their history of sexual victimization and provided…

The objective of this study was to determine whether female victims of physical forms of intimate partner violence (IPV) displayed deficits in risk recognition, or the ability to detect danger, in physically violent dating encounters. A total of 182 women watched a video depicting a psychologically and physically aggressive encounter between…

An efficacious treatment is diminished in value if consumers do not seek it out and adhere to it, making treatment acceptability an important predictor of the effectiveness of treatment. This study examined the acceptability of treatments for depression to 67 female high school students. All participants read a vignette describing a depressed…

To detect that a conversational turn is intended to be ironic is a difficult challenge in everyday language comprehension. Most authors suggested a theory of mind deficit is crucial for irony comprehension deficits in psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia; however, the underlying pathophysiology and neurobiology are unknown and recent research…

The belief that women and men are held to different standards of sexual conduct is pervasive in contemporary American society. According to the sexual double standard, boys and men are rewarded and praised for heterosexual sexual contacts, whereas girls and women are derogated and stigmatized for similar behaviors. Although widely held by the…