Two faces of desert

There are two broadly competing pictures of moral responsibility. On the view I favor, to be responsible for some action is to be related to it in such a way that licenses attributing certain properties to the agent, properties like blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. Responsibility is attributability. A different view understands being responsible in terms of our practices of holding each other responsible. Responsibility is accountability, which “involves a social setting in which we demand (require) certain conduct from one another and respond adversely to one another’s failures to comply with these demands” (Watson, Philos Top 24:227–248, 1996). My concern here is the relation between moral responsibility and desert. Plausibly, if someone is morally responsible for something wrong then they deserve blame, and it is on the basis of them being morally responsible and its being wrong that they deserve blame. In this paper, I try to make progress toward understanding why it would follow that being morally responsible for something supports a desert claim. I propose to do this by exploring how the “two faces” of responsibility should proceed. An important upshot is that we gain a new currency by which to evaluate extant theories of responsibility that might favor one or the other conception: do they carry plausible desert commitments? To illustrate this benefit, I argue that accountability theory carries implausible implications for deserved praise.     

Two faces of narcissism

The present study examines the lack of strong correlations among existing self-report measures of narcissism. A principal-components analysis of 6 MMPI narcissism scales resulted in 2 orthogonal factors, 1 implying Vulnerability-Sensitivity and the other Grandiosity-Exhibitionism. Although unrelated to each other, these 2 factors were associated with such core features of narcissism as conceit, self-indulgence, and disregard of others. Despite this common core, however, Vulnerability-Sensitivity was associated with introversion, defensiveness, anxiety, and vulnerability to life's traumas, whereas Grandiosity-Exhibitionism was related to extraversion, self-assurance, exhibitionism, and aggression. Three alternative interpretations of these results are considered, and an argument for the distinction between covert and overt narcissism is made.     

A factor analysis of verbal ability

The Psychological Record -     

The role of verbal ability in the processing of complex verbal information

Summary This study investigated the relation between psychometric mental-ability test scores and several reaction-time measures; a simple-reaction task, a choice-reaction task, the Posner and Mitchell (1967) letter-identification task, and a variation of the sentence-verification task. Scores on the Raven Advanced Progressive Matrices and the Verbal Subtest of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SATV) were obtained. The less complex information-processing tasks replicate earlier studies in which general intelligence was only marginally related to reaction-time measures. The sentence-verification task systematically varied task complexity. Several direct and derived measures from the task were significantly correlated with psychometric mentalability measures. However, even though a number of precautions were taken to ensure that the sentence-verification task assessed purely verbal-processing efficiency, there was little evidence for an important task-specific relation between verification measures and verbal ability. Moreover, despite its relative verbal complexity, sentence verification did not reflect a greater relationship to verbal ability than other tasks did. Overall, the information-processing efficiency measures used in this study suggested a fairly general, rather than a task-specific, relationship to intellectual ability.The research presented in this paper was conducted while the first author was affiliated with the University of Georgia, U. S. A.     

The effects of verbal labelling on recognition memory for schematic faces

Four experiments investigated the effects of labelling on the encoding and recognition of schematic faces. In Experiments I and II, hard-to-label (H) faces were recognized better after labelling than after observing, whereas easy-to-label (E) faces were not significantly affected. However, E faces were recognized better after labelling when subjects were instructed to attend carefully to all features of the faces during viewing. In Experiments III and IV, which dealt with each kind of face separately, both E and H faces were recognized better after labelling than after observing. An additional improvement in recognition all of faces was found when labelling subjects knew which label was relevant on each recognition trial and were instructed to use it. It was concluded that (a) a verbal label functions mainly to direct attention to specific facial features during viewing, (b)the effect of the label on recognition is positive or negative depending on whether or not it directs attention to features which are functional for the recognition test, (c) the label also forms part of the representation of the face in memory, and (d) a label may serve as a mediator at the time of testing, but only in the presence of specific cues.     

Patterns of intellectual ability in children with verbal deficits

Patterns of intellectual ability were examined in 81 children with verbal deficits identified by a Low Verbal/High Performance WISC profile. The results of verbal and nonverbal tests of intellectual functioning were factor-analyzed, and three groups of children were defined based on patterns of factor scores. Group 1 consisted of children with a Specific Language Disability (SLD) but good Abstract Reasoning ability, while Group 2 included SLD children with good Sequencing-Memory skills. Group 3 children displayed a General Language Disability (GLD) with deficits in both abstract reasoning and sequencing memory. The intellectual patterns were related to cognitive interpretations and found to have educational implications, with Group 1 children reading adequately, Group 2 children showing somewhat poorer reading skills, and Group 3 children reading very poorly. These findings emphasize the importance of identifying subgroups of children with verbal deficits and demonstrate the feasibility of extracting relatively specific cognitive information from global measures of intelligence. The results question the appropriateness of applying traditional assumptions regarding cognitive organization derived from studies of normal children to atypical groups of children.     

Aspects of verbal processing in relation to perceptual disembedding ability

In this study an attempt was made to extend the notion of disembedding from the perceptual to the verbal semantic domain. Fifty-two undergraduates were presented with the Group Embedded Figure Test (GEFT) and with seven verbal tasks. A Factor analysis made on test scores, as well as other factors, evidenced a factor that linked to gether the GEFT and one of the verbal tasks (Word groups). It is argued that both tasks require the restructuring of an organized context according to new given rules, and that disembedding is a mental operation which applies to both verbal and perceptual domains.     

Morningness-eveningness correlates with verbal ability in women but not men

Individuals differ along a continuum of preference for diurnal activity level, known as Morningness-Eveningness. Some evidence suggests that an Eveningness orientation (i.e., preference for later rise and bed times) is weakly associated with higher cognitive ability, but no studies have examined this relationship using clinically accepted, psychometrically valid measures of cognitive ability. The present study examined the correlation between Morningness-Eveningness with scores on the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence (WASI) of 54 healthy volunteers. Lower Morningness (i.e., Greater Eveningness) orientation was correlated (r = -.23) with higher Verbal IQ for the entire sample. When the data were examined separately by sex, the correlation between Morningness-Eveningness and Verbal IQ was significant for women (r = -.44) but not for men (r = -.09).     

Effects of verbal ability and fluid intelligence on children's emotion understanding

This study investigated the role of verbal ability and fluid intelligence on children's emotion understanding, testing the hypothesis that fluid intelligence predicts the development of emotion comprehension over and above age and verbal ability. One hundred and two children (48 girls) aged 3.6–6 years completed the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) that comprised external and mental components, the Coloured Progressive Matrices and the Test for Reception of Grammar. Regression analysis showed that fluid intelligence was not equally related to the external and mental components of the TEC (Pons & Harris, 2000). Specifically, the results indicated that the external component was related to age and verbal ability only, whereas recognition of mental emotional patterns required abstract reasoning skills more than age and verbal ability. It is concluded that the development of fluid intelligence has a significant role in the development of mental component of emotion comprehension.     

Relationships between need for cognition, knowledge, and verbal ability

The authors investigated the relationships between need for cognition, knowledge, and verbal ability. Participants completed scales that measured their need for cognition, verbal ability, and knowledge about people and events that occurred during the Vietnam War era. Correlational analyses showed that the participants' need for cognition scores were modestly but positively correlated with verbal ability and knowledge and that verbal ability and knowledge were also positively correlated. The correlation between need for cognition and knowledge was small but significant when verbal ability was controlled. The conclusion drawn from these results is that need for cognition contributes to the acquisition of knowledge beyond the contribution of verbal ability.     

Visual imagery ability and the recognition of verbal and nonverbal stimuli.

High and low visual imagers, defined as such primarily on the basis of spatial manipulation test performance, were required to identify tachistoscopically-presented pictures, concrete words, and abstract words varying in familiarity. Two recognition paradigms were employed, recognition threshold and recognition latency. High imagers were faster in picture recognition under both paradigms when a nonverbal set or strategy was primed and when pictures were relatively unfamiliar in the threshold paradigm. No relationship was found between imagery ability and word recognition in the visual modality, nor was visual imagery ability related to the auditory recognition of verbal and nonverbal stimuli, such as words and environmental sounds. Commonalities between these findings and others in the imagery ability literature were noted.