You can't always get what you want: effortful control and children's responses to undesirable gifts

This study examined individual differences in children's regulation of emotional expression after receiving desirable and undesirable gifts. Effortful control, the ability to suppress a dominant response in favor of a subdominant one, was measured using a battery of behavioral tasks. Reactions to the gifts were videotaped, and emotional expression was coded. Age predicted effortful control, but not emotional displays. Effortful control predicted similarity of children's displays of positive affect after receiving the two gifts. Specifically, children high in effortful control showed similar amounts of positive affect after receiving the desirable and undesirable gifts, whereas children low in effortful control showed less positive affect after receiving the undesirable gift than after receiving the desirable gift. Results are discussed in terms of temperament and the development of socially appropriate expressive behavior.     

You can't always get what you want: educational attainment, agency, and choice

Using educational attainment to indicate socioeconomic status, the authors examined models of agency and effects of choice among European American adults of different educational backgrounds in 3 studies. Whereas college-educated (BA) participants and their preferred cultural products (i.e., rock music lyrics) emphasized expressing uniqueness, controlling environments, and influencing others, less educated (HS) participants and their preferred cultural products (i.e., country music lyrics) emphasized maintaining integrity, adjusting selves, and resisting influence. Reflecting these models of agency, HS and BA participants differently responded to choice in dissonance and reactance paradigms: BA participants liked chosen objects more than unchosen objects, but choice did not affect HS participants' preferences. Results suggest that HS and BA models of agency qualitatively differ, despite overlap between HS and BA worlds.     

You can't always get what you want: The influence of unexpected task constraint on voluntary task switching

The current study assessed the effect that unexpected task constraint, following self-generated task choice, has on task switching performance. Participants performed a modified double-registration voluntary task switching procedure in which participants specified the task they wanted to perform, were presented with a cue that, on the majority of trials, confirmed the choice, and then performed the cued task. On a small portion of trials, participants were cued to perform a task that did not match their choice. Trials on which cues unexpectedly failed to match the chosen task were associated with costs. These costs were particularly large when participants chose to switch tasks but had to unexpectedly repeat the previous task. The results suggest that when participants choose to switch tasks, they prepare for that switch in anticipation of the stimulus, and the preparation is durable such that it cannot be readily undone.     

Highway bridges and feasts: Heidegger and Borgmann on how to affirm technology

Borgmann's views seem to clarify and elaborate Heidegger's. Both thinkers understand technology as a way of coping with people and things that reveals them, viz. makes them intelligible. Both thinkers also claim that technological coping could devastate not only our environment and communal ties but more importantly the historical, world-opening being that has defined Westerners since the Greeks. Both think that this devastation can be prevented by attending to the practices for coping with simple things like family meals and footbridges. But, contrary to Borgmann, Heidegger claims further that, alongside simple things, we can affirm technological things such as autobahn bridges. For Borgmann, technological coping produces things like central heating that are so dispersed they inhibit skillful interaction with them and therefore prevent our being sensitive to ourselves as world-disclosers. For Heidegger, so long as we can still relate to non-technological things, we can affirm relations with technological things because we can maintain both our technological and the non-technological ways of world-disclosing. So Borgmann sees revealing as primarily directed to things while Heidegger sees it as directed to worlds. If Heidegger is right about us, we have more leeway to save ourselves from technological devastation than Borgmann sees.     

Studies on time: a proposal on how to get out of circularity

The analysis of time is vitiated very often by circularity: several disciplines, such as psychology, linguistics, and neurosciences, analyze time by using concepts or terms which already contain in themselves, or are based, on the experience and notion of time (as when, for example, time is defined as “duration”, or when our ability to estimate durations is explained by resorting to the notion of an internal clock). Some detailed examples of circularity in the analysis of time are given here and examined. A way out of circularity is then given: it is represented by the proposal of attentional semantics (AS) of considering words and their meanings in terms of the aim they serve, and the means and processes developed and implemented in order to achieve that aim. According to AS, the main aim of words is that of indicating to, and eliciting in, the listener or reader a specific conscious experience: namely, the conscious experience referred to by their meanings. Words achieve their main aim by conveying the condensed instructions on the attentional operations one has to perform if one wants to consciously experience what is expressed through and by them. By describing the conscious experiences elicited by words in terms of the attentional operations that are responsible for the production of such conscious experiences, AS offers an a-linguistic counterpart to language, and therefore an effective way out of circularity. Following in footsteps of Mach (Contributions to the analysis of the sensations, 1890), but slightly revising his hypothesis, AS defines time-sensation as the perception of the effort made, or alternatively the nervous energy expended, by the organ of attention when performing a “temporal activity” (for instance, estimating duration), that is, when one’s own attention is focused in a continuous and incremental way on the conscious product of the (“non-temporal”) activity performed by means of another portion of one’s attention.

Retraction statement: When nothing compares to me: how defensive motivations and similarity shape social comparison effects

The following article from European Journal of Social Psychology, “When nothing compares to me: How defensive motivations and similarity shape social comparison effects” by Diederik A. Stapel and Camille S. Johnson, published online on 26 September 2006 in Wiley Online Library ( wileyonlinelibrary.com ), has been retracted by agreement between the co‐author, the journal Editor in Chief, Tom Postmes, and John Wiley and Sons Ltd. The retraction has been agreed following the results of an investigation into the work of Diederik A. Stapel ( https://www.commissielevelt.nl/ ). The Levelt Committee has determined that this article contained data that was fabricated by Diederik A. Stapel. His co‐author was unaware of his actions, and not in any way involved. REFERENCE Stapel, D. A. &; Johnson, C. S. (2007). When nothing compares to me: how defensive motivations and similarity shape social comparison effects. European Journal of Social Psychology, 37, 824–838. DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.390     

The touchscreen cognitive testing method for rodents: how to get the best out of your rat

The touchscreen testing method for rodents is a computer-automated behavioral testing method that allows computer graphic stimuli to be presented to rodents and the rodents to respond to the computer screen via a nose-poke directly to the stimulus. The advantages of this method are numerous; however, a systematic study of the parameters that affect learning has not yet been conducted. We therefore sought to optimize stimuli and task parameters in this method. We found that when parameters were optimized, Lister Hooded rats could learn rapidly using this method, solving a discrimination of two-dimensional stimuli to a level of 80% within five to six sessions lasting ~30 min each. In a final experiment we tested both male and female rats of the albino Sprague-Dawley strain, which are often assumed to have visual abilities far too poor to be useful for studies of visual cognition. The performance of female Sprague-Dawley rats was indistinguishable from that of their male counterparts. Furthermore, performance of male Sprague-Dawley rats was indistinguishable from that of their Lister Hooded counterparts. Finally, Experiment 5 examined the ability of Lister Hooded rats to learn a discrimination between photographic stimuli. Under conditions in which parameters were optimized, rats were remarkably adept at this discrimination. Taken together, these experiments served to optimize the touchscreen method and have demonstrated its usefulness as a high-throughput method for the cognitive testing of rodents.     

Computer viruses: What they are,how they work,how they might get you,and how to control them in academic institutions

A computer virus is a program that replicates itself and spreads to computers with the goal of disrupting or destroying normal computer use. In academic computing, viruses represent a serious problem that costs millions of dollars in losses annually and hinders the free exchange of information so critical to education. Viruses operate in incubation, infection, and destroy phases. The nature, mechanisms, and preventive measures for personal-computer viruses are reviewed. Different procedures are recommended to protect research laboratories, instructional laboratories, and software lending libraries. Tradeoffs between providing adequate protection and not having the security become too burdensome are considered.     

How to investigate subjectivity: Natorp and Heidegger on reflection

Continental Philosophy Review - Is it possible to investigate subjectivity reflectively? Can reflection give us access to the original experiential dimension, or is there on the contrary reason to...     

Heidegger and Korsgaard on Death and Freedom: The Implications for Posthumanism

Prominent advocates of posthumanism such as Nick Bostrom and Ray Kurzweil make the case that a drastic increase in the human lifespan (or healthspan) would be intrinsically good. This question of the value of an extended lifespan has perhaps become more pressing as medical and scientific advances are seemingly bringing us closer and closer to being able to extend our lives in the way posthumanists envision. In this paper I intend to use Martin Heidegger’s work on death and freedom to develop a potential objection to the claim that an indefinite healthspan is intrinsically desirable. The basic plan will be to make the case that the structure of human agency is such that truly free action is possible only on the basis of the essential finitude of our existence. Assuming that we take this sort freedom to be an important good, we would lose something of crucial importance if we were to radically extend the human healthspan. I am not claiming to present an entirely conclusive argument against posthumanism, or even enhancing the human healthspan to posthuman proportions, but rather, I see my argument here as adding another currently valued dimension of human existence that could very well be lost if we move decisively in the posthumanist direction.     

A Broken Engagement: Reassessing Barth's Relationship to Kierkegaard on the Grounds of Subjectivity and Preaching

Despite Barth's initial appropriations of Kierkegaard, he famously discarded the Dane from the theological ‘canon’ due to the latter's alleged anthropocentric subjectivism. Yet Kierkegaard was himself a preacher and polemical homiletician, seeking merely to appropriate the objective truth of the proclaimed word. Barth's Basel prison sermons reveal this same endeavour to render the eternally significant message temporally significant for his hearers. In Kierkegaard's Christendom, a corrective focus on subjectivity was the only way to remain faithful to the ‘objective’ truth of the gospel. Barth and Kierkegaard are juxtaposed here not in contrast (as Barth might have preferred) but in affinity, in that both sought to evoke the dialectical subjectivity of objectivity through preaching.     

You don't always get what you pay for: Measuring depression with short and simple versus long and sophisticated scales

In three studies subjects' depressiveness was assessed by a variety of instruments. Questionnaire scales were either comparatively short or long and either fairly simple, content oriented, and undisguised or sophisticated in the sense of reflecting psychodynamic theorizing or elaborate multivariate approaches to scale construction. Simple self-ratings were also obtained. Results showed that (a) short scales were as valid on the average as long scales in all three studies, even though some of the short scales were merely subsets of the long scales; (b) simple scales were as valid as sophisticated scales in all three studies; and (c) self-rating scales were as valid as questionnaire scales in two studies, but not in the third. The discussion focuses on certain unrealistic assumptions of the Spearman-Brown formula and on the notion of personality assessment as a noise-afflicted communication process.     

Ask and You Shall be Given: Request Size and Donations to a Good Cause1

In an attempt to replicate the findings reported in this Journal by Weyant and Smith (1987), members or recent donors to a Canadian civil liberties organization were asked to donate money under one of three conditions: (a) In the control condition, they were simply asked for a donation; (b) in the “smaller request” condition, they were asked to make a donation, but amounts of Canadian $30 to $100 were suggested; and (c) in the “larger request” condition, amounts of $50 to $250 were suggested. Unlike the Weyant and Smith studies, we found no difference in the proportion of respondents making a donation, but significant differences in the size of the donations made by those making donations. In our study, the most effective way of getting large donations was to ask for a large amount. It was suggested that the most likely explanations for the differences in the results of the two studies were the following: First, our target population were previous donors to the organization, whereas those in the Weyant and Smith studies were not likely to have been. Previous research suggests that those who had been donors previously are influenced, positively, by requests for a specific large donation, whereas those not previously approached are, if anything, negatively influenced. Second, our “larger request” appears to be within a plausible range for donations, whereas the larger request in the Weyant and Smith study may have been seen as being outside of the plausible range. In any case, however, we would recommend caution in drawing a conclusion about the most effective request size to encourage people to donate money to charity.     

CAT: A tool for eliciting knowledge on how to perform procedures

Procedural tasks involve context-sensitive sequences of actions that are performed in pursuit of goals. Procedural knowledge specifies how to do something (e.g., repairing a car) but not how the physical system works (e.g., how the engine works). We have developed a computer program that elicits procedural knowledge from individuals with varying amounts of domain knowledge (ranging from novices to experts) and varying amounts of computer literacy. The tool is called CAT (cognitive analysis tool). CAT is an extension of a class of cognitive models known as GOMS, which stands for goals, operators, methods, and selection rules. The tool guides the user in articulating the goals (and subgoals) the user wants to accomplish, the operators (actions, steps) to accomplish each goal, the alternative methods of accomplishing goals, the conditions in which each method is applied, and exceptional circumstances when goals are suspended and restarted. CAT can be used on most IBMcompatible microcomputers.     

Søren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth: Reflections on a Relation and a Proposal for Future Investigation

Karl Barth's relationship to Kierkegaard is one that is complex but often solely understood by means of Barth's own explicit reflections on Kierkegaard near the end of his life. This article revisits this history not only to cast light on the reasons for Barth's explicit distancing of himself from Kierkegaard's work, but also to provide evidence that Kierkegaard's influence upon Barth's thinking may have ranged further and in more subtle ways than is often acknowledged. This is particularly seen when Kierkegaard's understanding of Christology and the objectivity, rather than subjectivity, of faith is taken into account. Such an examination may provide warrant for a reappraisal of the relation between these two figures.     

Inhibitory control and response selection in problem solving: how cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus) overcome a bias for selecting the larger quantity of food

When presented with a choice between 1 and 3 pieces of food in a type of reversed contingency task, 4 cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus) consistently chose the 3 pieces of food and received nothing, even though the choice of 1 piece would have yielded 3. However, in a task in which the tamarins received the 1 piece of food when they chose it, all subjects learned to select 1 over 3. Thus, the tamarins' prior failure on the reversed contingency task did not result entirely from an inherent inability to suppress the prepotent response of reaching to the larger of 2 quantities of food. After the experience of selecting the smaller quantity and receiving it, all of the tamarins solved the version of the reversed contingency task that they failed initially. These results suggest that the tamarins' initial failure may have reflected a difficulty with selecting an alternative response option.     

Inspired to get there: The effects of trait and goal inspiration on goal progress

The present investigation examined the effects of trait and goal inspiration on goal progress. Undergraduate students reported three goals they intended to pursue throughout the semester and completed measures of trait and goal inspiration as well as measures of personality traits. Participants then reported on goal progress three times at monthly intervals throughout the semester. Result showed that trait inspiration predicted goal progress, and that this effect was fully mediated by goal inspiration and held after controlling for the Big Five personality traits. Additional within-person analyses of goal inspiration showed that most of the variance in goal inspiration was due to between-person individual differences. Furthermore, analyses of the direction of causality between goal inspiration and goal progress revealed a bi-directional relationship. Discussion focused on the implications and future directions for research on inspiration.     

What You Do for Your Team Comes Back to You: A Cross-Level Investigation of Individual Goal Specification,Team-Goal Clarity,and Individual Performance

This article reports findings from a longitudinal field study on multilevel processes in teams and examines the role of individual team-goal specification and team-goal clarity with regard to individual performance. It is hypothesized that individual team-goal specification predicts change in individual performance over time, particularly when team-goal clarity is low. Multisource data gathered in 31 project teams supported the hypotheses. Overall, the findings suggest that team members can improve their individual performance when engaging in teamwork processes that are relevant for the team as a whole.     

You've Got to Suffer If You Want to Sing the Blues: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Guilt and Self-Pity

The experience of self is partially a narrative of one's history; without memory, there is no self. Central to personal histories are accounts of significant relationships and their successes and failures. Accounts of failed relationships tend to gravitate toward two narrative themes: selfpity and guilt. This essay explores some aspects of the nature of guilt and self-pity, the different forms in which they surface, and their relationship to each other.     

Likability,Sex-role Congruence of Interest,and Competence: It All Depends on How You Ask1

Subjects were shown one of four videotaped versions of a male or female stimulus person (SP) being interviewed, the SP' s being Competent or Incompetent and Masculine or Feminine in their interests. All S s were asked to rate the SPs' likability on an objective questionnaire, those in one condition (Standard) immediately after viewing the tape, and in another (Projective) after first having responded to a series of open-ended, TAT-like questions about the SP. In the Standard condition, the major results were two highly significant effects-Competent SP s were liked better than Incompetent ones, and the Masculine Competent SP s more than their feminine counterparts. Several changes occurred in the Projective condition. Only profeminist women continued to prefer the Masculine Competent female SP to the Feminine Competent, the other group reversing their ratings. In response to the male SP s, profeminist males in the Projective condition preferred both Masculine SP s to the Feminine ones and, in comparison with other groups, exhibited a reduced competency effect.