Negative Affectivity, Effortful Control, and Attention to Threat-Relevant Stimuli

There is increasing recognition of temperamental influences on risk for psychopathology. Whereas the link between the broad temperament construct of negative affectivity (NA) and problems associated with anxiety and depression is now well-established, the mechanisms through which this link operate are not well understood. One possibility involves interactions between reactive and effortful components of temperament, as well as cognitive factors, like attentional biases to threat stimuli. This study tested a predicted relation between high levels of NA, low levels of effortful control (EC), and an attentional bias toward threat in children. A sample of 104 4th through 12th graders, selected from a larger screening sample because they reported high or low levels of trait NA and EC, completed a dot probe detection task. Results indicated that EC moderated the relation between NA and attentional bias; only children with low levels of EC and high levels of NA showed an attentional bias to threat stimuli. This pattern was not moderated by grade level or age.

Top-down influences on attentional capture by color changes

Previous studies have shown that a change in an existing object is not as effective in capturing attention as the appearance of a new object. This view was recently challenged by Lu and Zhou (Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 12:567–572, 2005), who found strong capture effects for an object changing its color. We suspected that this finding critically depends on a procedural particularity in Lu and Zhou’s study, namely that the color of the unique item and the color of the no-unique items randomly switched between trials. In the current study we replicate Lu and Zhou’s capture effect (Experiment 1) and show that no capture occurs when the color-to-stimuli assignment is fixed (Experiment 2). Two further experiments suggest that the capture effect in Experiment 1 is not because the unique item switched color (Experiment 3), but because all the no-unique items switched color (Experiment 4). The results are discussed considering top-down modulation and inter-trial priming effects.

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Visualizations in Mathematics

In this paper we discuss visualizations in mathematics from a historical and didactical perspective. We consider historical debates from the 17th and 19th centuries regarding the role of intuition and visualizations in mathematics. We also consider the problem of what a visualization in mathematical learning can achieve. In an empirical study we investigate what mathematical conclusions university students made on the basis of a visualization. We emphasize that a visualization in mathematics should always be considered in its proper context.

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Mindfulness meditation and reduced emotional interference on a cognitive task

The effect of mindfulness meditation (MM) on attentional control in emotional contexts was examined. In Study 1, MM practitioners (N = 28) categorized tones presented 1 or 4 s following the onset of affective pictures. Reaction times (RTs) to tones for affective minus neutral pictures provided an index of emotional interference. Participants with more MM experience showed less interference from affective pictures and reported higher mindfulness and psychological well-being. Study 2 was a controlled, randomized experimental study in which participants (N = 82) received MM training, relaxation meditation (RM) training, or no intervention (waiting-list control; WLC). Behavioral, self-report, and psychophysiological measures were administered before and after a 7-week intervention period. Although both MM and RM resulted in smaller skin conductance responses to unpleasant pictures and increased well-being, reductions in emotional interference from unpleasant pictures were specific to MM. These findings indicate that MM attenuates prolonged reactivity to emotional stimuli.

Are There Stable Factors in Preadolescent Girls’ Externalizing Behaviors?

Relatively little is known about the factor structure of disruptive behavior among preadolescent girls. The present study reports on exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of disruptive girl behavior over four successive data waves as rated by parents and teachers in a large, representative community sample of girls (N = 2,451). Five factors were identified from parent ratings (oppositional behavior/conduct problems, inattention, hyperactivity/impulsivity, relational aggression, and callous-unemotional behaviors), and four factors were identified derived from teacher ratings (oppositional behavior/conduct problems/callous-unemotional behaviors, inattention, hyperactivityimpulsivity, and relational aggression). There was a high degree of consistency of items loading on equivalent factors across parent and teacher ratings. Year-to-year stability of factors between ages five and 12 was high for parent ratings (ICC = 0.70 to 0.88), and slightly lower for teacher ratings (ICC = 0.56 to 0.83). These findings are discussed in terms of possible adjustment to the criteria for children's disruptive behavior disorders found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders.

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Towards a New Epistemology of Mathematics

In this introduction we discuss the motivation behind the workshop “Towards a New Epistemology of Mathematics” of which this special issue constitutes the proceedings. We elaborate on historical and empirical aspects of the desired new epistemology, connect it to the public image of mathematics, and give a summary and an introduction to the contributions to this issue.

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Seeing Through Technology

In examining representations of cities, disease, and human biology, this paper reflects on what technologies reveal of the conditions to which they’re turned.

Early Modern Intentionalism: Replies to LoLordo’s Comments

I clarify Locke’s intentionalism and explain what we might gain by paying more attention to the role of linguistic intentions in the work of the British empiricists.

Trumping the causal influence account of causation

Here is a simple counterexample to David Lewis’s causal influence account of causation, one that is especially illuminating due to its connection to what Lewis himself writes: it is a variant of his trumping example

Wittgenstein on Meaning and Life

This is a paper about the way language meshes with life. It focuses on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later work, and compares it with Leo Tolstoy and Saint Augustine’s confessions. My aim is to better understand in this way what it means to have meaning in language, as well as meaning in life.

Luminous enough for a cognitive home

In this paper I argue that there is no viable alternative to construing our knowledge and justified belief as resting on a foundation restricted to truths about our internal states. Against Williamson and others I defend the claim that the internal life of a cognizer really does constitute a special sort of cognitive home that is importantly different from the rest of what we think we know and justifiably believe.

On that peculiar practice of promising

T. M. Scanlon has alleged that the social practice of promising fails to capture the sense in which when I break my promise I have wronged the promisee in particular. I suggest the practice of promising requires the promisee to have a normatively significant status, a status with interpersonal authority with respect to the promisor, and so be at risk of a particular harm made possible by the social practice of promising. This formulation of the social practice account avoids Scanlon’s concern without collapsing into what Elinor Mason has recently referred to as deflationism about promising.

Character,blameworthiness, and blame: comments on George Sher’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">In Praise of Blame</Emphasis>

In his recent book, In Praise of Blame, George Sher argues (among other things) that a bad act can reflect negatively on a person if that act results in an appropriate way from that person’s “character,” and defends a novel “two-tiered” account of what it is to blame someone. In these brief comments, I raise some questions and doubts about each of these aspects of his rich and thought-provoking account.

Love and the Problem of Evil

The focus of this paper is the virtual certainty that much of what we must prize in loving any human person would not have existed in a world that did not contain much of the evil that has occurred in the history of the actual world. It is argued that the appropriate response to this fact must be some form of ambivalence, but that lovers have reason to prefer an ambivalence that contextualizes regretted evils in the framework of what we welcome in human life.

Bootstrapping and knowledge of reliability

This is a critical discussion of a paper on the problem of bootstrapping by Jose Zalabardo.

BUILDING CHARACTER: A LEADERSHIP ESSENTIAL

Character is an increasingly important topic of discourse and analysis, however, much of the research remains problematic and conceptual. Even less evidence exists of the nature of the relationship between character and leadership. This study examined self-reported character and associated demographic correlates among a sample of 238 Australian business leaders. Exploratory factor analysis identified three dimensions of character consistent with theory. These dimensions were examined in relation to demographic variables. After controlling for social desirability bias, few statistically significant demographic differences were found. Further research is recommended to validate the model of character developed in our paper.

Die Geschichte der „Stellungnahme zur psychoanalytischen Therapie“

Ohne Zusammenfassung

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Aktuelle Probleme der Krankenhausplanung in der Psychosomatischen Medizin und Psychotherapie

Ohne Zusammenfassung

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Intentionalism and Change Blindness

According to reductive intentionalism, the phenomenal character of a conscious experience is constituted by the experience's intentional (or representational) content. In this article I attempt to show that a phenomenon in visual perception called change blindness poses a problem for this doctrine. Specifically, I argue that phenomenal character is not sensitive, as it should be if reductive intentionalism is correct, to fine-grained variations in content. The standard anti-intentionalist strategy is to adduce putative cases in which phenomenal character varies despite sameness of content. This paper explores an alternative antiintentionalist tack, arguing, by way of a specific example involving change blindness, that content can vary despite sameness of phenomenal character.

Punishment as Fair Play

This article defends the fair-play theory of legal punishment against three objections. The first, the irrelevance objection, is the long-standing complaint that fair play fails to capture what it is about crimes that makes criminals deserving of punishment; the others are the recently raised false-equivalence and lacks-integration objections. In response, I sketch an account of fair-play theory that is grounded in a conception of the political order as a meta-cooperative practice—a conception that falls somewhere between contractual and communitarian conceptions—and draw on this account to show how the theory can overcome the objections.