What You Don’t Know Won’t Hurt You,Unless You Don’t Know You’re Wrong

The purpose of this investigation was to determine the impact of students’ background knowledge and how they utilized “don’t know” affordances to comprehend and learn from text. In two studies, over 8,000 middle and high school students interacted with a content-area learning environment in which they answered a series of background knowledge questions before they completed a unit on the same topic. Students were given the opportunity to indicate they “did not know” the answers to the knowledge questions. Higher knowledge was related to higher understanding, and the use of the “don’t know” option further explained variability in students’ understanding of the sources beyond background knowledge. When responding to knowledge questions, students who selected incorrect options before the task understood less and were less likely to learn content when given the opportunity compared to students who indicated they did not know. Thus, low knowledge students were still able to comprehend and learn as long as they acknowledged they lacked background knowledge. One’s comprehension and learning can be facilitated or impaired, depending upon the veracity of their knowledge, and whether students choose to acknowledge their lack of background knowledge. Implications of this work are discussed in terms of learning and instruction.     

Can You Back That Up?

Participants evaluated two candidates for the U. S. Senate (one a "shared-ideology" candidate with regard to the participant, the other an "opposing-ideology" candidate), each of which engaged in either a positive campaign (provided positive assessments of the candidate's character) or a negative campaign (provided negative assessments of the opposing candidate's character). Each participant read advertisements in which one candidate provided specific evidence to support his character assertions, whereas the other candidate did not provide such evidence. As predicted, evaluations of the shared-ideology candidate were significantly hurt by the failure to specifically support the character assertions. In contrast, evaluations of the opposing-ideology candidate were not damaged by the failure of the candidate to supply supporting evidence for the character assertions. In addition, effects extending and qualifying the synergistic interaction of the valence of competing campaigns were demonstrated. The roles of message valence, supporting evidence, and the in-group/out-group relationship between communicator and recipient in political communication are discussed.     

“You Just Know It’s the Only Thing You Can Think”: A Conversation with Chodorow

ABSTRACT

Nancy Julia Chodorow (1944–) is a pioneer feminist theorist who brought together academic fields of sociology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis in her work related to feminist theories and psychoanalysis. Her first book, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (1978 Chodorow, N. J. (1978; second ed. 1999). The reproduction of mothering: Psychoanalysis and the sociology of gender. Berkeley: University of California Press. [Google Scholar]), gave primacy to a more generalized account of the developmental and familial origins of prevalent psychological differences between femininity and masculinity from a psychoanalytic sociological viewpoint. Her later books, Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities: Freud and Beyond (1994 Chodorow, N. J. (1994). Femininities, masculinities, sexualities: Freud and beyond. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. [Google Scholar]), The Power of Feelings: Personal Meaning in Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Culture (1999 Chodorow, N. J. (1999). The power of feelings: Personal meaning in psychoanalysis, gender, and culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. [Google Scholar]), and Individualizing Gender and Sexuality: Theory and Practice (2012 Chodorow, N. J. (2012). Individualizing gender and sexuality: Theory and practice. New York and London: Routledge.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), bring in a rich interplay among socio-structural influences (i.e., culture) as well as intra- and inter-psychic dynamic processes, emphasizing more the importance of individuality and subjectivity. Based on an interview I had with Chodorow on the development of her thought, this paper gives Chodorow’s account of her personal history and academic background, current manifestations in feminist social science research and feminist psychoanalysis based on her contribution and legacy, and reflective narratives on the unfolding of feminist and psychoanalytic theories from the 1970s onward. Chodorow’s note to the next generation of feminist psychotherapists is also included.     

Can Sadness Be Good for You?

The subtle relationship between feeling and thinking, affect and cognition has fascinated philosophers and writers since time immemorial, yet, empirical research on this topic was relatively neglected by psychologists until recently. There have been many claims emphasising the beneficial cognitive and behavioural consequences of positive affect. Many recent works suggest that negative affect may also facilitate optimal performance in many situations, consistent with evolutionary theories suggesting the adaptive signalling function of various affective states. This paper reviews traditional and current psychological theories linking affect to social thinking and behaviour. A variety of empirical studies from our laboratory will also be presented, demonstrating that in many situations, negative affect promotes optimal performance in cognitive and social tasks, including tasks such as memory, social judgements, motivation, and strategic interpersonal behaviours. These results will be interpreted in terms of a dual‐process theory that predicts that negative affect promotes a more accommodative, vigilant, and externally focused thinking strategy. The relevance of these findings for recent affect–cognition theories will be discussed, and the practical implications of negative affect promoting improved social thinking and performance in a number of applied fields will be considered.     

“If You Can’t Follow,You’re Out.” The Perspectives of People with Mental Health Problems on Citizenship

Applied Research in Quality of Life - The new paradigm of ‘community care’ promotes the integration of people with mental health problems in society. This reconversion in social care...     

How Can You Best Measure Reaction Times?

Comparing many ways of measuring and analyzing reaction times reveals that the chosen method influences both the judged reaction time and, more importantly, conclusions about how the reaction time depends on the circumstances under study. The task was to lift one's finger in response to a tone. The response amplitude was either constrained or not. Constraining the amplitude made the response less vigorous. When the response was less vigorous it took longer to move far enough to release a switch or exceed the elasticity of the finger pulp. Although using a micro-switch would have made the reaction time appear to be longer for the constrained movement, reaction times determined in the most reliable ways were not systematically longer for the constrained movement. The most reliable method is to use extrapolation of the change in the average force that the finger exerts on the surface to estimate the reaction time.     

“Why Can’t You Control Yourself?” Fat Should Be a Feminist Issue

This article is a comment on Fikkan and Rothblum’s (2011) article “Is Fat a Feminist Issue? Exploring the Gendered Nature of Weight Bias.” They argued that fat women in North America experience significantly more prejudice and discrimination than fat men do, marshaled evidence to support their argument in several domains (e.g., employment, education, romantic relationships, health care, the media), and wondered why feminist scholars have not paid much attention to the oppression of fat women. Here I suggest several reasons why fat women experience more prejudice and discrimination than fat men do: the objectification of women, gender-related aspects of health behavior and knowledge about health and illness, and the importance of self-control to the performance of femininity. I also suggest that there is some overlap in negative stereotypes of both feminists and fat women, which might lead to a desire to distance oneself from both. However, feminists should recognize the intersectionality of fat oppression and the way it colludes with the sexualization and objectification of women in popular culture. Thus, fat should be a feminist issue.     

You Can’t Drink a Word: Lexical and Individual Emotionality Affect Subjective Familiarity Judgments

For almost 30 years, subjective familiarity has been used in psycholinguistics as an explanatory variable, allegedly able to explain many phenomena that have no other obvious explanation (Gernsbacher in J Exp Psychol General 113:256–281, 1984). In this paper, the hypothesis tested is that the subjective familiarity of words is reflecting personal familiarity with or importance of the referents of words. Using an empirically-grounded model of affective force derived from Wundt (Grundriss der Psychologie [Outlines of Psychology]. Engelmann, Leibzig, 1896) and based in a co-occurrence model of semantics (which involves no human judgment), it is shown that affective force can account for the same variance in a large set of human subjective familiarity judgments as other human subjective familiarity judgments, can predict whether people will rate new words of the same objective frequency as more or less familiar, can predict lexical access as well as human subjective familiarity judgments do, and has a predicted relationship to age of acquisition norms. Individuals who have highly affective reactivity [as measured by Carver and White’s (J Pers Soc Psychol 67(2):319–333, 1994) Behavioral Inhibition Scale and Behavioral Activation Scales] rate words as significantly more familiar than individuals who have low affective reactivity.     

How Tolerant Can You Be? Carnap on Rationality

In this paper I examine a neglected question concerning the centerpiece of Carnap's philosophy: the principle of tolerance. The principle of tolerance states that we are free to devise and adopt any well‐defined form of language or linguistic framework we please. A linguistic framework defines framework‐internal standards of correct reasoning that guide us in our first‐order scientific pursuits. The choice of a linguistic framework, on the other hand, is an ‘external’ question to be settled on pragmatic grounds and so not itself constrained by these (framework‐internal) standards. However, even if choosing a framework is a practical matter, we would nevertheless expect the process of framework selection to be subject to rational norms. But which norms might those be? And where do they come from? I begin by showing that these questions are crucial to the success of Carnap's entire philosophical project. I then offer a response on behalf of the Carnapian which guarantees the rationality of the process of framework selection, while remaining true to Carnap's firm commitment to tolerance.     

Damned If You Do; Damned If You Don’t!

This paper discusses the Principle of Normative Invariance: ‘An action’s moral status does not depend on whether or not it is performed.’ I show the importance of this principle for arguments regarding actualism and other variations on the person-affecting restriction, discuss and rebut arguments in favor of the principle, and then discuss five counterexamples to it. I conclude that the principle as it stands is false; and that if it is modified to avoid the counterexamples, it is gutted of any interest or power.

You May Worry,But Can You Recognize Threats When You See Them?; Neuroticism,Threat Identifications,and Negative Affect

The present studies sought to investigate the hedonic consequences of threat-identification skills at low and high levels of neuroticism. Such skills were assessed in terms of both speed (Study 1) and accuracy (Study 2) of identifying threatening objects in cognitive tasks. As predicted, threat-identification skills interacted with trait neuroticism in predicting subjective experiences. Specifically, individuals high in neuroticism experienced lower levels of negative affect during their everyday lives if they were also skilled in identifying threats in the cognitive tasks (Studies 1-2). Such skills did not matter at low levels of neuroticism. This interactive pattern was also replicated in the context of life domain satisfaction (Study 2). The results support the view that avoidance motivation encompasses multiple component processes, including some that are cognitive in nature, and specifically extends self-regulatory views of neuroticism. Of most importance, our data indicate that threat-identification skills can be hedonically beneficial, rather than costly, at high levels of neuroticism.     

Cornerstones: You’d better believe them

Crispin Wright??s ??Unified Strategy?? for addressing some familiar sceptical paradoxes exploits a subtle distinction between two different ways in which we can be related to a proposition: (full-blown) belief and (mere) acceptance. The importance of the distinction for his strategy stems from his conviction that we cannot acquire any kind of evidence, either empirical or a priori, for the ??cornerstones?? of our cognitive projects, i.e., for those basic presuppositions of our inquiries that we must be warranted to endorse if we are to claim warrant for any of the beliefs formed as a result of such inquiries: regarding the idea of a non-evidential warrant to believe a proposition as a kind of ??conceptual solecism??, he doesn??t set himself the task of showing that we are evidentially warranted to believe such presuppositions, but only that of showing that we are non-evidentially warranted to accept them. In the present paper, I argue that such choice involves a fatal departure from a basic principle governing doxastic commitment??a principle that requires that we regard cornerstones propositions as propositions we are rationally committed to believe, not just entitled to accept. I press the point by presenting the Acceptance Argument, a sceptical paradox whose consideration leads to the conclusion that the Unified Strategy is caught between the Scylla of incoherently invoking a rather dubious form of epistemic alchemy and the Charybdis of placing an unexpected and apparently ad hoc restriction on the doxastic commitments we undertake by believing the things we believe. My final suggestion is that the Unified Strategy might be spared this dilemma only by undergoing a rather radical revision??a revision that would require setting aside the distinction between belief and acceptance to re-conceptualise its goal unabashedly in terms of (non-evidentially) warranted belief.     

You can see what ‘I’ means

This paper takes up the question of whether we can visually represent something as having semantic value. Something has semantic value if it represents some property, thing or concept. An argument is offered that we can represent semantic value based on a variety of number-color synesthesia. This argument is shown to withstand several objections that can be lodged against the popular arguments from phenomenal contrast and from the mundane example of reading.     

How to Use Your Mind When You Can’t Think: Reply to Commentaries by Davies and Cooper

There is much area of agreement between the author and the discussants. The author addresses areas of concern and questions raised in the commentaries. These topics include the use of reverie, how I have defined maternal desire, concerns about the avoidance of negative transference, the analyst’s own dissociation, and compassion.     

‘You Do You’ Feminism: Lesbian,Bisexual, and Queer Women’s Perspectives on the Dildo

Historically, feminists have engaged in a contentious debate about the dildo. Some assert that it is an oppressive tool of the patriarchy whereas others proclaim that it is a practical means of expressing lesbian, bisexual, and queer women’s sexuality. To gain some perspective into the current status of this debate, seven non-heterosexual women were interviewed about their attitudes toward dildos. Interviews were examined using inductive thematic analysis, and viewed through the lens of social constructionism. Rather than taking sides in the dildo debates, participants embraced a you do you ideology (i.e., there is no “right” or “wrong” answer when it comes to choosing whether to use or not use dildos). Three themes clustered around this overarching ideology: dildos are optional (à la carte dildo), meanings of dildos are contextually and phenomenologically determined (contextuality of the dildo), and dildos have theoretical implications (critically conscious queers). Participants’ eschewal of the binarized debate about the dildo may be entwined with changing understandings of feminist, gender, and queer theory.     

I’m Happy, Hope You’re Happy Too.

While most empirical studies show stable and high levels of subjective well-being in Western societies, other studies have documented an apparently contradictory feeling of a loss of sense of community and high levels of discontent with the way society functions. Based on an analysis of the Social Cohesion Indicators survey (SCIF, Belgium), we demonstrate that subjective well-being and one’s view on society are two distinct concepts. Both measurements are related, however, with some spill-over effects from individual well-being toward the assessment of society. Most notably, ethnocentrism does not have an impact on subjective well-being, but it has a strong negative impact on the view on society. Ethnocentrism has a strong effect on the distribution of discontent with society. We hypothesize that ethnocentric actors might still be satisfied with their own living conditions, but that they feel increasingly alienated from the culturally diverse society they live in.     

What Fitness Can’t Be

Recently advocates of the propensity interpretation of fitness have turned critics. To accommodate examples from the population genetics literature they conclude that fitness is better defined broadly as a family of propensities rather than the propensity to contribute descendants to some future generation. We argue that the propensity theorists have misunderstood the deeper ramifications of the examples they cite. These examples demonstrate why there are factors outside of propensities that determine fitness. We go on to argue for the more general thesis that no account of fitness can satisfy the desiderata that have motivated the propensity account.