This study assessed the initial feasibility, acceptability, and efficacy of an intervention aimed at reducing depression and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in a sample of low-income pregnant women with recent intimate partner violence (IPV). Fifty-four women were randomly assigned to the intervention or control group. The intervention consisted of four sessions during pregnancy and one "booster" session within 2 weeks of delivery. Based on principles of Interpersonal Psychotherapy, the intervention was designed to help participants improve their interpersonal relationships, including their social support networks, and master their role transition to motherhood. Assessments were administered at four time points (intake, 5-6 weeks post-intake, 2 weeks postpartum, 3 months postpartum) to assess for depression, PTSD, and IPV. The intervention did not significantly reduce the likelihood of a major depressive episode, PTSD, or IPV during pregnancy or up to 3-month postpartum. However, we found moderate effects for the intervention in reducing symptoms of PTSD and depression during pregnancy and a large effect for PTSD symptoms from pregnancy up to 3 months postpartum. This study suggests some initial support for our intervention. Larger randomized trials are needed to further examine the intervention both during and after pregnancy.

Are emotionally aggressive conflicts perceived to be more unacceptable than conflicts involving verbal or baseline levels of psychological aggression? Participants (n = 189) read a hypothetical marital conflict that varied the husband's level of aggression. Results show that participants did not perceive the perpetrator's behavior in the emotional aggression condition to be any worse than the verbal aggression condition and, in most cases, no worse than the baseline condition. More traditional participants and participants who were perpetrators of psychological aggression had more positive perceptions of the perpetrator; just world beliefs and participant sex did not predict perceptions. This study suggests that people do not perceive emotional aggression to be nearly as harmful as it actually is.

Language can be viewed as a complex set of cues that shape people's mental representations of situations. For example, people think of behavior described using imperfective aspect (i.e., what a person was doing) as a dynamic, unfolding sequence of actions, whereas the same behavior described using perfective aspect (i.e., what a person did) is perceived as a completed whole. A recent study found that aspect can also influence how we think about a person's intentions (Hart & Albarracín, 2011). Participants judged actions described in imperfective as being more intentional (d between 0.67 and 0.77) and they imagined these actions in more detail (d = 0.73). The fact that this finding has implications for legal decision making, coupled with the absence of other direct replication attempts, motivated this registered replication report (RRR). Multiple laboratories carried out 12 direct replication studies, including one MTurk study. A meta-analysis of these studies provides a precise estimate of the size of this effect free from publication bias. This RRR did not find that grammatical aspect affects intentionality (d between 0 and −0.24) or imagery (d = −0.08). We discuss possible explanations for the discrepancy between these results and those of the original study.