Preexposure to the CS alone,US alone,or CS and US uncorrelated: Latent inhibition,blocking by context or learned irrelevance?

Three experiments on conditioned suppression in rats examined the extent to which preexposure to the CS, the US, or uncorrelated presentations of both interfere with future conditioning. Experiment 1 suggested that the interference caused by preexposure to the US alone may result from blocking by contextual cues: signaling the US during preexposure attenuated the interference. Experiment 2 demonstrated that signaling the US by another stimulus did not attenuate the interference caused by exposure to uncorrelated presentations of CS and US. Experiment 3 replicated the results of Experiments 1 and 2 and directly compared the magnitude of these deficits. The results of these experiments imply that the effects of exposure to uncorrelated presentations of CS and US are not reducible to the sum of the effects of exposure to CS or US alone.     

Defend or repair? Explaining responses to in-group moral failure by disentangling feelings of shame, rejection, and inferiority

Research on shame about in-group moral failure has yielded paradoxical results. In some studies, shame predicts self-defensive motivations to withdraw. In other studies, shame predicts pro-social motivations, such as restitution. We think that this paradox can be explained by disentangling the numerous appraisals and feelings subsumed under the label "shame." In 2 studies, we asked community samples of Norwegians about their in-group's discrimination against the Tater minority. Confirmatory factor analysis validated the measures of the appraisals and feelings used in Study 1 (N = 206) and Study 2 (N = 173). In both studies, an appraisal of the in-group as suffering a moral defect best predicted felt shame, whereas an appraisal of concern for condemnation of the in-group best predicted felt rejection. In both studies, felt rejection best predicted self-defensive motivation, whereas felt shame best predicted pro-social motivation. Implications for conceptualizing and studying shame are discussed.     

Detecting Design: Fast and Frugal or All Things Considered?

Within the Cognitive Science of Religion, Justin Barrett has proposed that humans possess a hyperactive agency detection device that was selected for in our evolutionary past because ‘over detecting’ (as opposed to ‘under detecting’) the existence of a predator conferred a survival advantage. Within the Intelligent Design debate, William Dembski has proposed the law of small probability, which states that specified events of small probability do not occur by chance. Within the Fine-Tuning debate, John Leslie has asserted a tidiness principle such that, if we can think of a good explanation for some state of affairs, then an explanation is needed for that state of affairs. In this paper I examine similarities between these three proposals and suggest that they can all be explained with reference to the existence of an explanation attribution module in the human mind. The forgoing analysis is considered with reference to a contrast between classical rationality and what Gerd Gigerenzer and others have called ecological rationality.

Exhausting or exhilarating? Conflict as threat to interests,relationships and identities

Some conflicts are experienced as depleting and exhausting whereas others are experienced as stimulating and invigorating. We explored the possibility that the focus of perceived threat in conflict determines whether it produces taxing stress or vitalizing arousal. Studies 1 and 2 established that attending to threats to interests, relationships, and identities during interpersonal conflict differentially relates to motivational goals, empathy and perspective-taking, femininity, and a collectivistic self-construal. Study 2 also found that perceived threats to relationships are associated with lower challenge appraisals and energy mobilization. Studies 3 and 4 experimentally manipulated threats to different targets and demonstrated causal effects of threat perceptions on self-reported energy mobilization and the consumption of comfort foods. Taken together, these studies demonstrate that conflicts which threaten relationships are experienced as significantly more depleting than conflicts that threaten either tangible interests or elements of individuals' identities, and explain when, why and for whom conflict is exhausting.     

When is being known or adored by romantic partners most beneficial? Self-perceptions, relationship length, and responses to partner's verifying and enhancing appraisals

An experiment tested the hypothesis that relationship length moderates preferences for both verifying and enhancing appraisals from romantic partners, particularly for people with negative self-perceptions. One hundred and three romantically involved couples participated in this research. Participants with both negative and positive self-perceptions were randomly assigned to receive either verifying or enhancing feedback ostensibly created through comparison of their self-ratings and their partner's appraisals. The critical test was for those with negative self-ratings who received verifying feedback. For these participants, results revealed that those in longer relationships felt their partners were seeing the best in them more than did those in shorter relationships, whereas the opposite pattern of results was observed for those who were enhanced. Individuals with negative self-ratings who were verified also reported greater feelings of intimacy in the relationship when in long-term relationships. The importance of relationship length in moderating responses to partner's appraisals is discussed.     

Citizenship for children: By soil,by blood,or by paternalism?

Do states have a right to exclude prospective immigrants as they see fit? According to statists the answer is a qualified yes. For these authors, self-determining political communities have a prima facie right to exclude, which can be overridden by the claims of vulnerable groups such as refugees and children born in the state’s territory. However, there is a concern in the literature that statists have not yet developed a theory that can protect children born in the territory from being excluded from the political community. For if the self-determining political community has the right to decide who should form the self in the first place, then that right should count against both newcomers by immigration and newcomers by birth. Or so the concern goes. In this essay, I defend statism against this line of criticism and provide a liberal justification for the inclusion of children born within the state’s borders. My account leads to some surprising implication for citizenship law, as well as immigration arrangements in the area of asylum and unauthorized immigration.     

Comparing to ingroup and outgroup members: Do we assimilate,contrast, or neither?

Previous work studying social comparisons suggests that people are likely to assimilate to ingroup members (e.g. Ledgerwood & Chaiken, 2007) but can also contrast from ingroup members if outgroup members are present (Blanton, Miller, & Dye, 2002). The present research built upon these findings by including a no-comparison control group to test for true contrast and assimilation effects. Across two studies, women primed with a gender-math stereotype received false feedback about their performance on a math task; and in some conditions, they learned of the performance of ostensible male and/or female co-participants. Relative to a no-comparison control, we did not see evidence of ingroup assimilation in either study. However, in both studies, we found that participants were likely to contrast their self-evaluations away from downward targets, regardless of group membership. This suggests that self-enhancement motivations may be stronger than the drive for ingroup assimilation.     

Neurolinguistics and neuroimaging: forward to the future,or is it back?

Books reviewed in this article:
Michael Gazzaniga (ed.), Cognitive Neuroscience: A Reader
Alec Marantz, Yasushi Miyashita, and Wayne O'Neil (ed.), Image, Language, Brain: Papers From the First Mind Articulation Project Symposium
Colin Brown and Peter Hagoort, The Neurocognition of Language     

Use or misuse of the selection task? Rejoinder to Fiddick,Cosmides, and Tooby

Sperber, Cara, and Girotto (Cognition 52 (1995) 3) argued that, in Wason's selection task, relevance-guided comprehension processes tend to determine participants' performance and pre-empt the use of other inferential capacities. Because of this, the value of the selection task as a tool for studying human inference has been grossly overestimated. Fiddick, Cosmides, and Tooby (Cognition 77 (2000) 1) argued against Sperber et al. that specialized inferential mechanisms, in particular the "social contract algorithm" hypothesized by Cosmides (Cognition 31 (1989) 187), pre-empt more general comprehension abilities, making the selection task a useful tool after all. We rebut this argument. We argue and illustrate with two new experiments, that Fiddick et al. mix the true Wason selection task with a trivially simple categorization task superficially similar to the Wason task, yielding methodologically flawed evidence. We conclude that the extensive use of various kinds of selection tasks in the psychology of reasoning has been quite counter-productive and should be discontinued.     

Protection,payback, or both? Emotional and motivational mechanisms underlying avoidance by victims of transgressions

In the wake of an interpersonal offense, victims often feel motivated to avoid their perpetrators, and the more severe the offense, the more pronounced this motivation is. On the surface, avoidance appears to serve a self-protective function such that victims, compelled by a sense of fear and apprehension, withdraw from their wrongdoers to prevent further harm. However, avoidance might also serve a retaliatory purpose in which victims shun their offenders out of anger and hostility, using interpersonal aloofness as a means of payback. In the present pair of studies, we examined victims’ self-reports of recent offense experiences and tested the mediating roles of fear and anger in the relationship between offense severity and avoidance motivations. Study 1 revealed that anger, not fear, was the emotion that mediated this relationship. Study 2 replicated this finding and also showed that the link between anger and avoidance was mediated both by revenge and self-protection motives, which demonstrates the complex nature of avoidance following a transgression.     

Better or just different? Positive social identity by discrimination against,or by differentiation from outgroups

The object of this study is to explore to what degree the question of ingroup favouritism, brought to light in the framework of ‘social identity theory’, is dependent upon the methods used for measuring this variable. The influence of this factor on ingroup bias was tested under the following three conditions: ‘complementary assessment’, ‘separate assessment’ and ‘choice of dimensions’. This last condition gave the subjects the opportunity to choose which dimensions would be used for assessment. It was found that the degree of ingroup bias is different for each of the three conditions. The results indicate that it is only under certain circumstances that the ingroup distinguishes itself as ‘better’ at the expense of the outgroup. This occurs only if the subjects are not given the opportunity to assess both groups on non-corresponding dimensions, and therefore do not have the possibility to rate them ‘equally good’ but ‘different’.     

Is scientific research driven by opportunity,problems, or observations?

With the recent rise of the philosophy of scientific practices, SSK (Sociology of Scientific Knowledge), and feminist approaches to the philosophy of science, a new perspective is gradually coming into being, holding that the starting point for scientific research is opportunity. Opportunistic features in solar neutrino experiments, Opportunistic features of complexity studies emerging from economics, and the measurement of insects’ flight can prove the above perspective from different angels. It is important and significant to determine whether the starting point for scientific research is opportunity, a problem, or an observation.     

Professional Education and Professional Ethics Right to Die or Duty to Live?

Despite the undeniable ethical dimensions of paid occupations — trades and services — other than the traditional professions, it is still natural to associate courses of professional ethics with medicine, law, nursing or teaching, rather than auto-repair, supermarket assistance or window-cleaning. Indeed, it seems plausible to hold that if there is anything more to the traditional distinction of professions from trades or other services than considerations of social and economic status, it might well reside in the distinctive ethical or moral character and implications of such occupations as medicine, law and education. This paper undertakes to explore, via examination of some of the commonly suggested criteria of professionalism, the nature of such implications and the extent to which they justify continued deployment of a distinctive occupational category of 'profession'. On the assumption that they do, however, the paper is also concerned to examine critically the consequences for education in professional ethics of any such distinctive ethics of profession.     

Fairness or discrimination in intergroup behaviour? a reply to Branthwaite,Doyle and Lightbown

Branthwaite, Doyle and Lightbown (1979) argue that minimal intergroup behaviour represents a compromise or balance between fairness and discrimination, that fairness and discrimination are opposed, generic norms of intergroup relations and that one factor affecting their relative weight is status position since, apparently, different status groups attempt to equalize their positions by varying the degree to which they are fair or discriminatory. This reply reviews evidence to show that minimal groups are never fair but always discriminatory to varying degrees and that a generic norm of intergroup fairness is unnecessary to explain why that discrimination rarely approaches maximum. It also argues that the concept of opposed, generic norms has neither empirical nor theoretical value. Finally, it cites findings that the basic tendency in intergroup behaviour is not to equalize but to accentuate evaluative differences between groups (whether of similar or different status) in favour of the ingroup.     

Better to be optimistic,mindful, or both? The interaction between optimism,mindfulness, and task engagement

This paper investigates the relationships between optimism, mindfulness, and task engagement. Specifically, we hypothesized that optimism, mindfulness, and their interaction would facilitate individuals’ task engagement. We tested our research model in four studies: two surveys among gig workers and two experiments. The results of the two surveys among gig workers indicated that optimism predicted higher task engagement, but trait mindfulness did not, and that a multiplicative interaction existed between high optimism and high mindfulness in stimulating task engagement. Our two experiments confirmed a significant interaction between optimism and induced state mindfulness and showed that the most engaging situation is being high in both mindfulness and optimism. Although optimism predicted task engagement, the experiments indicated that the effect of the state mindfulness manipulation was above and beyond that of optimism. Finally, we discuss the nuances of the interaction between optimism and mindfulness in predicting task engagement.