Adult Age‐Related Differences in the Misinformation Effect for Context‐Consistent and Context‐Inconsistent Objects

The present study examined age‐related differences in the misinformation effect for objects that were consistent or inconsistent with their environmental settings. Young and older adults viewed one of two slide sequences, each containing context‐consistent items (e.g., a blender in a kitchen setting or a saw in a woodshop setting) and context‐inconsistent items (a saw in a kitchen setting or a blender in a woodshop setting). After receiving misinformation through post‐event narratives, participants received tests of yes/no recognition requiring remember/know judgments (Experiments 1–3) and source monitoring (Experiments 2 and 3) for slide details. Although age‐related differences in the misinformation effect were nonreliable, older adults tended to report misinformation as remembered more often than young adults, and source monitoring tests reduced the misinformation effect for both age groups. Misinformation effects were equivalent or larger for inconsistent objects than for consistent objects. Theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Aesthetic Adjectives: Experimental Semantics and Context‐Sensitivity

One aim of this essay is to contribute to understanding aesthetic communication—the process by which agents aim to convey thoughts and transmit knowledge about aesthetic matters to others. Our focus will be on the use of aesthetic adjectives in aesthetic communication. Although theorists working on the semantics of adjectives have developed sophisticated theories about gradable adjectives, they have tended to avoid studying aesthetic adjectives—the class of adjectives that play a central role in expressing aesthetic evaluations (e.g., ‘beautiful’, ‘ugly’, ‘elegant’). And despite the wealth of attention paid to aesthetic adjectives by philosophical aestheticians, they have paid little attention to contemporary linguistic theories of adjectives. We take our work to be a first step in remedying these lacunae. In this paper, we present four experiments that examine one aspect of how aesthetic adjectives ordinarily function: the context‐sensitivity of their application standards. Our results present a prima facie empirical challenge to a common distinction between relative and absolute gradable adjectives because aesthetic adjectives are found to behave differently from both. Our results thus also constitute a prima facie vindication of some philosophical aestheticians’ contention that aesthetic adjectives constitute a particularly interesting segment of natural language, even if the boundaries of this segment might turn out to be different from what they had in mind.     

Adolescent Diabetic Control: Using the Process‐Person‐Context‐Time Model

This investigation used the Process‐Person‐Context‐Time Model (U. Bronfenbrenner, 1979, 1995) to study adolescent diabetic control. The dependent variable was a blood test measuring diabetic control (i.e., HbA1 C [glycosylated hemoglobin]). Independent variables included adolescent/maternal perceptions of family environment and communication, blood glucose monitoring frequency, age of disease onset, disease duration, race/ethnicity, gender, and mother's education level. Stepwise regression revealed that glucose monitoring and problem communication explained 17% of the variance.     

Context‐Constrained Judgment of the Perceived Risk of HIV/AIDS1

This study introduces a computer method for assessing perception of stimuli presented in a constrained context. The method is illustrated through experiments on perception of the risk of becoming infected with HIV and AIDS. In five experiments, context‐constrained judgments (CCJ) or context‐independent judgments were obtained from 258 undergraduates. Participants judged the risk of contracting HIV/AIDS for a variety of target populations, including themselves. The CCJ method results in greater response discrimination among the salience of perceived risk factors than does a context independent method. This outcome has potential implications for education and intervention programs to control the spread of HIV.     

Cyberattacks as Casus Belli: A Sovereignty‐Based Account

Since cyberattacks are nonphysical, standard theories of casus belli — which typically rely on the violent and forceful nature of military means — appear inapplicable. Yet, some theorists have argued that cyberattacks nonetheless can constitute just causes for war — generating a unilateral right to defensive military action — when they cause significant physical damage through the disruption of the target's computer systems. I show that this view suffers from a serious drawback: it is too permissive concerning the types of actions that generate casus belli since many essentially peaceful and non‐violent mechanisms can nonetheless cause physical damage. I resolve this difficulty by developing a sovereignty‐based account of casus belli and applying it to cyberwarfare. I argue that legitimate states have a constrained right to unilaterally respond with military force to unfriendly actions that bypass or overwhelm the political deliberations of the target state in order to force a change in behaviour contrary to the determinations of the people of the target state. This new account of casus belli avoids the problems of the consequence‐based view by plausibly restricting the types of unfriendly action that give rise to casus belli and yet offers an attractive explanation for why some cyberattacks nonetheless do generate a potential right to a unilateral defensive response.     

A Wittgensteinian Role‐Based Account of Assertion

According to an “orthodox” reading proposed by Dummett and more recently endorsed by Lugg and Price, the later Wittgenstein rejects the idea of grouping together certain utterances as a single class of assertions. We offer an alternative commentary on the Philosophical Investigations §§21–24, developing what we call a Wittgensteinian role‐based account of assertion. We then examine whether this role‐based account can solve the problem of on‐stage utterances. In the course of this, the merits of the account are shown and compared to an alternative proposal offered by Searle.     

A Multi‐Factor Account of Degrees of Awareness

In this paper we argue that awareness comes in degrees, and we propose a novel multi‐factor account that spans both subjective experiences and perceptual representations. At the subjective level, we argue that conscious experiences can be degraded by being fragmented, less salient, too generic, or flash‐like. At the representational level, we identify corresponding features of perceptual representations—their availability for working memory, intensity, precision, and stability—and argue that the mechanisms that affect these features are what ultimately modulate the degree of awareness. We conclude the paper by demonstrating why the original interpretations of certain empirical findings that apparently pose problems for our account are, in fact, flawed.     

Depletion from Self‐Regulation: A Resource‐based Account of the Effect of Value Incongruence

Value incongruence between employees and organizations has been identified as a negative work condition. An attitude‐based account suggests that value incongruence gives rise to negative attitudes toward organizations and thus causes low performance. To complement this mechanism, we propose a resource‐based account based on ego‐depletion theory, which suggests that value incongruence consumes an individual's regulatory resources and leads to low work performance. In support of this view, results from 2 survey studies and a vignette experiment reveal that value incongruence is positively associated with ego depletion, which in turn is negatively related to work performance. The mediation effect of ego depletion is independent of the attitude‐based mechanism as represented by job satisfaction and affective commitment. Consistent with the affective consistency perspective, the relationship between value incongruence and ego depletion is stronger among employees high in positive affectivity and weaker among employees high in negative affectivity. The corresponding moderated mediation analysis shows that the indirect effects of value incongruence on work performance through ego depletion vary as a function of positive and negative affectivity. This investigation unravels the self‐regulatory consequence of value incongruence and shows that the resource‐based mechanism of value incongruence operates differentially as a function of dispositional affectivity.     

A Presuppositional Account of Causal and Temporal Interpretations of <Emphasis Type="Italic">and</Emphasis>

Despite extensive studies, the issue concerning the pragmatic mechanisms leading to causal and temporal interpretations of and remains problematic and has not yet been addressed in its totality within one framework. This paper proposes a solution based on presuppositional mechanisms built into a comprehensive analysis that accounts for both the various interpretations of and-sentences as well as those of other types of sentences involving similar interpretations. This account is a specific part of a unified solution to the knotty problem of different manners of conveying causal and temporal relations both with connectives and also with juxtaposed sentences. It is formulated within the Relevance Nomological Model which provides a general framework for the analysis of causal constructions such as the connective because and why-questions.     

Bulgakov's Account of Creation: Neglected Aspects,Critics and Contemporary Relevance

The article focuses on a central, yet neglected dimension of the ‘Sophia Debate’ in twentieth‐century Russian Orthodox theology: Bulgakov's panentheistic account of creation and its critique by Nikolai Lossky. Bulgakov understood the doctrine of creation to be negatively defined as creatio ex nihilo and positively defined as creatio ex Deo. Bulgakov's sophiology seeks to relate God and the world through the intermediate concept of Sophia, balancing an account of God's being in the world with an account of the world's eternal foundation in God. Lossky objected that Bulgakov's account underemphasizes novelty, contingency and the free character of creation. Lossky's objections notwithstanding, Bulgakov's version of panentheism – especially its trinitarian, antinomian and kenotic dimensions – finds significant points of contact with contemporary accounts of creation.     

For the Win: Risk‐Sensitive Decision‐Making in Teams

Risk‐sensitivity theory predicts that decision‐makers should prefer high‐risk options in high need situations when low‐risk options will not meet these needs. Recent attempts to adopt risk‐sensitivity as a framework for understanding human decision‐making have been promising. However, this research has focused on individual‐level decision‐making, has not examined behavior in naturalistic settings, and has not examined the influence of multiple levels of need on decision‐making under risk. We examined group‐level risk‐sensitive decision‐making in two American football leagues: the National Football League (NFL) and the National College Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I. Play decisions from the 2012 NFL (Study 1; N = 33 944), 2013 NFL (Study 2; N = 34 087), and 2012 NCAA (Study 3; N = 15 250) regular seasons were analyzed. Results demonstrate that teams made risk‐sensitive decisions based on two distinct needs: attaining first downs (a key proximate goal in football) and acquiring points above parity. Evidence for risk‐sensitive decisions was particularly strong when motivational needs were most salient. These findings are the first empirical demonstration of team risk‐sensitivity in a naturalistic organizational setting. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Competition Account of Achievement‐Value

A great achievement makes one's life go better independently of its results, but what makes an achievement great? A simple answer is—its difficulty. I defend this view against recent, pressing objections by interpreting difficulty in terms of competitiveness. Difficulty is determined not by how hard the agent worked for the end but by how hard others would need to do in order to compete. Successfully reaching a goal is a valuable achievement because it is difficult, and it is difficult because it is competitive. Hence, both virtuosic performances and lucky successes can be valuable achievements.