Is there a universal need for positive self-regard?

It is assumed that people seek positive self-regard; that is, they are motivated to possess, enhance, and maintain positive self-views. The cross-cultural generalizability of such motivations was addressed by examining Japanese culture. Anthropological, sociological, and psychological analyses revealed that many elements of Japanese culture are incongruent with such motivations. Moreover, the empirical literature provides scant evidence for a need for positive self-regard among Japanese and indicates that a self-critical focus is more characteristic of Japanese. It is argued that the need for self-regard must be culturally variant because the constructions of self and regard themselves differ across cultures. The need for positive self-regard, as it is currently conceptualized, is not a universal, but rather is rooted in significant aspects of North American culture. Conventional interpretations of positive self-regard are too narrow to encompass the Japanese experience.     

Is Kant a Moral Constructivist or a Moral Realist?

Abstract: The dominant interpretation of Kant as a moral constructivist has recently come under sustained philosophical attack by those defending a moral realist reading of Kant. In light of this, should we read Kant as endorsing moral constructivism or moral realism? In answering this question we encounter disagreement in regard to two key independence claims. First, the independence of the value of persons from the moral law (an independence that is rejected) and second, the independence of the content and authority of the moral law from actual acts of willing on behalf of those bound by that law (an independence that is upheld). The resulting position, which is called not ‘all the way down’ constructivism, is attributed to Kant.     

Is a multiple self healthy or pathological?

In a sample of 144 undergraduate students, scores on Sackeim and Gur's measure of self-deception were associated with neuroticism scores (r = .50) on the Big Five Inventory, while scores on Altrocchi's measure of having a plural self were associated with neuroticism and openness scores (rs = .35 and .18, respectively). A multiple self, therefore, appears to have positive and negative features.     

Is youth spiritual development a universal developmental process? An international exploration

This article describes a new conceptual approach to youth spiritual development, positing it as a universal aspect of positive youth development, and presents initial empirical evidence for the cross-cultural validity of this theory. Based on an international survey with 6725 youth in eight countries, it provides a global portrait of the spiritual lives of 12–25 year olds. The development and psychometric properties of core spiritual development and religious/spiritual engagement across nations and religious traditions are described. Finally, a person-centered analytic technique is used to explore profiles of the unique ways spiritual development manifests itself in the lives of young people. Results suggest that spiritual development is an active process among the majority of youth across diverse religious and cultural backgrounds, with most having spiritual development unfold without particularly strong engagement in explicitly religious or spiritual practices.     

A note: Is it a catch or a fumble?

Following Whiting' (1986) comments on Fischman and Schneider (1985) and Smyth and Marriott (1982), this note addresses the questions of expertise in catching, the effects of sight of the hand on timing and positioning, and the difficulties of comparing performance in different experiments on catching.     

Dialectic – a universal for consciousness?

Dialectic is a word of many meanings but used here in the classical sense of the apposition of thesis and antithesis leading to synthesis. The first, counterfactual phase is expressible symbolically by the symmetric difference $, “one or the other, but not both”. The second, synthesis phase is taken here to correspond to the complement ∼$, consisting of commonality and context within the universe of discourse. After a brief discussion of parallels between “events” in quantum theory and the dialectical pair ($, ∼$), it is argued that the latter is more fundamental for brain and mind. Consciousness is “carved at the joints” as comprising basic awareness (=not-unconscious), self-awareness, perception and cognition factored by attention, and emotion. The dialectical pair ($, ∼$) is then referred to Working Memory and Long-Term Memory, categories both mathematical and psychological, knowledge and learning, negotiation and dialogue, problem solving, affect and emotion, and brain structure and function. Coupling previous work by the author for the ($, ∼$) model with the present analysis, it is concluded that the dialectical pair provides a universal for consciousness parallel to its known universal property for the most general sorts of equivalences in mathematics.     

Is Liang Shuming 梁漱溟 Ultimately a Confucian or Buddhist?

Liang Shuming has been proclaimed the forerunner of Contemporary Neo-Confucianism. However, assessing Liang’s identity appears a much more complicated task. Taking a closer look at his copious writings on religion, this paper shows how Liang conceived the role of religion at the different steps of humanity’s quest. Applying this frame of understanding to twentieth century China, Liang saw a discrepancy between the task required in our present time and what the future was holding. Therefore, while he engaged the world in a certain way, he was still holding privately another belief. This “secret” of Liang reshuffles traditional boundaries between the secular and transcendence.     

Are current theories of panic falsifiable?

The authors examine 6 theories of panic attacks as to whether empirical approaches are capable of falsifying them and their heuristic value. The authors conclude that the catastrophic cognitions theory is least falsifiable because of the elusive nature of thoughts but that it has greatly stimulated research and therapy. The vicious circle theory is falsifiable only if the frightening internal sensations are specified. The 3-alarms theory postulates an indeterminate classification of attacks. Hyperventilation theory has been falsified. The suffocation false alarm theory lacks biological parameters that unambiguously index dyspnea or its distinction between anticipatory and panic anxiety. Some correspondences postulated between clinical phenomena and brain areas by the neuroanatomical hypothesis may be falsifiable if panic does not depend on specific thoughts. All these theories have heuristic value, and their unfalsifiable aspects are capable of modification.     

Calculate or wait: Is man an eager or a lazy intuitive statistician?

Research on people's ability to act as intuitive statisticians has mainly focused on the accuracy of estimates of central tendency and variability. In this paper, we investigate two hypothesised cognitive processes by which people make judgements of distribution shape. The first claims that people spontaneously induce abstract representations of distribution properties from experience, including about distribution shape. The second process claims that people construct beliefs about distribution properties post hoc by retrieval from long-term memory of small samples from the distribution, implying format dependence with accuracy that differs depending on judgement format. Results from two experiments confirm the predicted format dependence, suggesting that people are often constrained by the post hoc assessment of distribution properties by sampling from long-term memory. The results, however, also suggest that, although post hoc sampling from memory seems to be the default process, under certain predictable circumstances people do induce abstract representations of distribution shape.     

Is visual image segmentation a bottom-up or an interactive process?

Visualimage segmentation is the process by which the visual system groups features that are part of a single shape. Is image segmentation a bottom-up or an interactive process? In Experiments 1 and 2, we presented subjects with two overlapping shapes and asked them to determine whether two probed locations were on the same shape or on different shapes. The availability of top-down support was manipulated by presenting either upright or rotated letters. Subjects were fastest to respond when the shapes corresponded to familiar shapes—the upright letters. In Experiment 3, we used a variant of this segmentation task to rule out the possibility that subjects performed same/different judgments after segmentation and recognition of both letters. Finally, in Experiment 4,we ruled out the possibility that the advantage for upright letters was merely due to faster recognition of upright letters relative to rotated letters. The results suggested that the previous effects were not due to faster recognition of upright letters; stimulus familiarity influenced segmentation per se. The results are discussed in terms of an interactive model of visual image segmentation.     

Is stimulus competition an acquisition deficit or a performance deficit?

Traditionally, blocking (X-outcome, followed by XY-outcome, resulting in attenuated conditioned responding to Y, relative to XY-outcome alone) has been explained in terms of the X-outcome association’s preventing the acquisition of the Y-outcome association. This view is challenged by models that view stimulus competition as a deficit in the expression of the acquired Y-outcome association. Here, we provide evidence that blocking is a performance deficit in which the Y-outcome association, the to-be-blocked stimulus, can affect behavioral control by the blocking stimulus (i.e., attenuate responding to X). The results are discussed in terms of acquisition and performance models of stimulus competition.     

Suffering a Loss Is Good Fortune: Myth or Reality?

We sometimes decide to take an offered option that results in apparent loss (e.g., unpaid overtime). Mainstream decision theory does not predict or explain this as a choice we want to make, whereas such a choice has long been described and highly regarded by the traditional Chinese dogma “吃亏是福” (suffering a loss is good fortune). To explore what makes the dogma work, we developed a celebrity anecdote‐based scale to measure “Chikui” (suffering a loss) likelihood and found that:(i) people with higher scores on the Chikui Likelihood Scale (CLS) were more likely to report higher scores on subjective well‐being and the Socioeconomic Index for the present and (ii) the current Socioeconomic Index could be positively predicted not only by current CLS scores but also by retrospective CLS scores recalled for the past, and the predictive effect was enhanced with increasing time intervals. Our findings suggest that “suffering a loss is good fortune” is not a myth but a certain reality. © 2017 The Authors Journal of Behavioral Decision Making Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.     

Developmental dyslexia in different languages: language-specific or universal?

Most of the research on developmental dyslexia comes from English-speaking countries. However, there is accumulating evidence that learning to read English is harder than learning to read other European orthographies (Seymour, Aro, & Erskine, 2003). These findings therefore suggest the need to determine whether the main English findings concerning dyslexia can be generalized to other European orthographies, all of which have less irregular spelling-to-sound correspondences than English. To do this, we conducted a study with German- and English-speaking children (n=149) in which we investigated a number of theoretically important marker effects of the reading process. The results clearly show that the similarities between dyslexic readers using different orthographies are far bigger than their differences. That is, dyslexics in both countries exhibit a reading speed deficit, a nonword reading deficit that is greater than their word reading deficit, and an extremely slow and serial phonological decoding mechanism. These problems were of similar size across orthographies and persisted even with respect to younger readers that were at the same reading level. Both groups showed that they could process larger orthographic units. However, the use of this information to supplement grapheme-phoneme decoding was not fully efficient for the English dyslexics.     

Is Keeping a Secret or Being a Secretive Person Linked to Psychological Symptoms?

This prospective study explored whether keeping a major secret, self-concealment (i.e., the predisposition to keep secrets), and social support at Time 1 predicted symptomatology levels 9 weeks later (Time 2) among a sample of 86 undergraduates. The results showed that the process of keeping a secret actually predicted fewer symptoms, whereas the personality variable of self-concealment predicted more symptoms at Time 2, even when the analyses controlled for social support. However, the predictive effects of both secret keeping and self-concealment were wiped out when the analyses statistically controlled for initial symptomatology, which was positively linked to self-concealment from the outset. These findings challenge conventional wisdom about the dangers of keeping a major secret and suggest that, instead, the kind of person who is secretive simply might be more vulnerable to symptoms.     

Is self‐esteem a universal need? Evidence from The People's Republic of China

In a provocative article, Heine et al. concluded that self-esteem needs are less important in collectivistic, East Asian countries than in individualistic, Western ones. Their conclusion was based, in part, on evidence that: (i) self-esteem scores are less positively biased in Japan than in Western countries; and that (ii) low self-esteem is less predictive of psychological distress in Japan than in Western countries. The present research examined whether these cultural differences occur in another collectivistic culture: The People's Republic of China. Two meta-analyses were conducted. Study 1 found that, for young and old alike, self-esteem was positively biased, with most participants reporting high levels of self-esteem. Study 2 found that low self-esteem in China is associated with three indicators of psychological distress: depression, anxiety and low subjective well-being. These findings are consistent with results in Western samples and suggest that high self-esteem may indeed be a universal psychological imperative.     

Is understanding explanatory or objectual?

Jonathan Kvanvig has argued that “objectual” understanding, i.e. the understanding we have of a large body of information, cannot be reduced to explanatory concepts. In this paper, I show that Kvanvig fails to establish this point, and then propose a framework for reducing objectual understanding to explanatory understanding.