“Local determination”, even if we could find it,does not challenge free will: Commentary on Marcelo Fischborn

Marcelo Fischborn discusses the significance of neuroscience for debates about free will. Although he concedes that, to date, Libet-style experiments have failed to threaten “libertarian free will” (free will that requires indeterminism), he argues that, in principle, neuroscience and psychology could do so by supporting local determinism. We argue that, in principle, Libet-style experiments cannot succeed in disproving or even establishing serious doubt about libertarian free will. First, we contend that “local determination”, as Fischborn outlines it, is not a coherent concept. Moreover, determinism is unlikely to be established by neuroscience in any form that should trouble compatibilists or libertarians—that is, anyone who thinks we might have free will. We conclude that, in principle, neuroscience will not be able undermine libertarian free will and explain why these conclusions support a coherent compatibilist notion of causal sourcehood.     

Postural change effects on infants' AB task performance: visual, postural, or spatial?

Smith and colleagues (Smith, L. B., Thelen, E., Titzer, R., & McLin, D. (1999). Knowing in the context of acting: The task dynamics of the A-not-B error. Psychological Review, 106, 235-260) demonstrated that 10-month-olds succeed on a Piagetian AB search task if they are moved from a sitting position to a standing position between A and B trials. These authors explained this result by suggesting that because the reach must be executed by different muscle forces from the standing position, an appropriate reach to B is programmed without the memory of the previous reach interfering with the current reach. In the main study reported here, the influences of postural and spatial factors are separated by adding a condition in which the table containing the hiding wells is moved up at the same time as the infant is shifted to standing, thereby allowing a postural change without a change in the spatial relations between the hand and hiding locations. Results showed that in both a standard control condition and the sitting-to-standing condition in which the table also moved up, performance was poor. Only in the sitting-to-standing condition in which the spatial relation between the hand and apparatus was altered were infants successful. These outcomes demonstrate that perseveration effects are likely to occur at the level of reach planning rather than at the level of execution, thereby narrowing the gap between explanations of improvements in AB performance with age that emphasize prefrontal maturation as opposed to improvements in reaching ability.     

Looking beyond the boundaries: time to put landmarks back on the cognitive map?

Since the proposal of Tolman (1948) that mammals form maplike representations of familiar environments, cognitive map theory has been at the core of debates on the fundamental mechanisms of animal learning and memory. Traditional formulations of cognitive map theory emphasize relations between landmarks and between landmarks and goal locations as the basis of the map. More recently, several models of spatial coding have taken the boundaries of an environment as the basis of the cognitive map, with landmark relations being processed through alternative, operant learning mechanisms. In this review, the evidence for this proposed dichotomy is analyzed. It is suggested that 2 factors repeatedly confound efforts to compare spatial coding based on landmark arrays, formed by 2 or more landmarks, and that based on the boundaries of an environment. The factors are the perceived stability of the landmark arrays and their placement relative to the larger environment. Although the effects of landmark stability and of placement on spatial navigation have been studied extensively, the implications of this work for debates concerning the role of boundaries in cognitive map formation have not been fully realized. It is argued that when these 2 factors are equated between landmark arrays and bounded environments, current evidence supports a commonality of spatial coding mechanism rather than a dichotomy. The analysis places further doubt on the existence of a dedicated geometric module for reorientation and is consistent with models of navigation containing mapping and operant learning components, both taking as input local views (Sheynikhovich et al., 2009).     

Gender Role Traits Among Individuals with Social Anxiety Disorder

The present study investigated differences between individuals with and without social anxiety disorder (SAD) in instrumentality and expressiveness, personality traits traditionally linked to the male and female gender roles, respectively. Based on evolutionary and self-discrepancy theories, it was hypothesized that individuals with SAD would score lower on instrumentality and report a discrepancy between their perceived and ideal level of instrumentality compared to control participants. Sixty-four patients with SAD and 31 non-anxious control participants completed a battery of questionnaires, including ratings of their perceived and ideal gender role attributes and current psychosocial distress. Results supported the hypotheses, and provided initial evidence that a discrepancy between perceived and ideal instrumentality may be linked to social anxiety severity, depression and lower quality of life. No differences were detected between groups in expressiveness. The present findings suggest that individuals with SAD perceive themselves to be deficient in instrumentality. They also suggest that increasing instrumentality among individuals with SAD may be beneficial for treatment.     

Effect of Parenting Interventions on Perinatal Depression and Implications for Infant Developmental Outcomes: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review - Considering the significant impact of perinatal depression on both maternal wellbeing and infant development, it is important to examine the...     

Neuroscientific challenges to free will and responsibility

Recent developments in neuroscience raise the worry that understanding how brains cause behavior will undermine our views about free will and, consequently, about moral responsibility. The potential ethical consequences of such a result are sweeping. I provide three reasons to think that these worries seemingly inspired by neuroscience are misplaced. First, problems for common-sense notions of freedom exist independently of neuroscientific advances. Second, neuroscience is not in a position to undermine our intuitive notions. Third, recent empirical studies suggest that even if people do misconstrue neuroscientific results as relevant to our notion of freedom, our judgments of moral responsibility will remain largely unaffected. These considerations suggest that neuroethical concerns about challenges to our conception of freedom are misguided.     

Damaged goods: women managing the stigma of STDs

This article uses interview data to explore how 28 women diagnosed with chronic sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) managed the impact of stigma on how they saw themselves as sexual beings.Constant comparative analysis reveals the ways in which they manage the stigmatized sexual health status of genital herpes and human papillomavirus infections. Findings from this study indicate that the women engaged in a three-stage process of reconciling their spoiled sexual selves. First, the majority of them passed for healthy; some covered by lying about what was happening to their bodies.Second, almost all used stigma transference to deflect the blame onto real and imaginary others. In the end, all of the women preventively or therapeutically disclosed to intimate others. The data suggest, through a narrative model of the self, that the women viewed their sexual selves as ''damaged goods'' yet prevented the stigma from infecting their core self-narratives.     

Appraisals of Interparental Conflict and Change in Attention to Emotion after Exposure to Marital Conflict

The goal of this study was to investigate whether exposure to marital conflict changes patterns of attention to anger and happiness, as well as whether those patterns vary based on appraisals of the history of interparental conflict in the home. Emerging adults viewed photo pairs with one emotionally-neutral photo and another photo depicting a happy/angry emotional interaction (while a high-speed camera tracked gaze), were randomly assigned to view a neutral or marital conflict recording, viewed neutral-emotional photo pairs again, and then reported their appraisals of their parents’ conflict. Results indicated that feeling threatened by and to blame for parental conflict predicted avoidance of happy emotions at baseline. Although there were no significant changes in attention to emotion overall based on condition, self-blame for interparental conflict predicted greater increases in time spent looking at anger after watching marital conflict (but not after watching the neutral recording). These results indicate that differences in attention to emotion may be one mechanism linking parental conflict to anxiety that could be the focus of prevention/intervention efforts to reduce anxiety symptoms in those from high-conflict homes.