Meaning without fulfilment

Some philosophers argue that a necessary component of a meaningful life is positive affect. The implication of this type of view is that a meaningful life necessarily feels good. I respond primarily to Susan Wolf's version of this type of view; for Wolf, meaningful lives are necessarily fulfilling lives. In contrast to Wolf, I argue that people do sometimes find parts of their lives to be meaningful when the feeling of fulfilment is absent. I propose an alternative subjective condition that does not involve positive affect. I argue that meaningful parts of our lives obtain their value through their relationship to our practical identities.     

Mother-Daughter Mutual Arousal Escalation and Emotion Regulation in Adolescence

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - Adolescence is a period of heightened emotionality, and difficulties with emotion regulation during adolescence are associated with the...     

Maternal Parenting and Toddler Temperament: Predictors of Early School Age Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder-Related Behaviors

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - Detection of early risk for developing childhood attention-deficit/hyperactive disorder (ADHD) symptoms, inattention and hyperactivity, may be...     

Impaired face detection may explain some but not all cases of developmental prosopagnosia

Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is defined by severe face recognition difficulties due to the failure to develop the visual mechanisms for processing faces. The two‐process theory of face recognition (Morton & Johnson, 1991) implies that DP could result from a failure of an innate face detection system; this failure could prevent an individual from then tuning higher‐level processes for face recognition (Johnson, 2005). Work with adults indicates that some individuals with DP have normal face detection whereas others are impaired. However, face detection has not been addressed in children with DP, even though their results may be especially informative because they have had less opportunity to develop strategies that could mask detection deficits. We tested the face detection abilities of seven children with DP. Four were impaired at face detection to some degree (i.e. abnormally slow, or failed to find faces) while the remaining three children had normal face detection. Hence, the cases with impaired detection are consistent with the two‐process account suggesting that DP could result from a failure of face detection. However, the cases with normal detection implicate a higher‐level origin. The dissociation between normal face detection and impaired identity perception also indicates that these abilities depend on different neurocognitive processes.     

Parent-early adolescent relationship quality and problem behavior in Hungary,the Netherlands,India, and Iceland

Higher parent-child relationship quality has been associated with less internalizing and externalizing problem behavior. However, it remained less clear whether these associations are universal or depend on the country under investigation. Furthermore, fathers are still understudied, even though there is increasing evidence of their important role in early adolescent development. Our study compared the association of mother-child as well as father-child relationship quality with early adolescents’ problem behavior in four culturally different countries, namely Hungary (N = 293; M_age = 11.22; 53% boys), the Netherlands (N = 242; M_age = 11.20; 48% boys), India (N = 230; M_age = 10.68; 61% boys), and Iceland (N = 261; M_age = 10.90; 53% boys). Early adolescents filled out questionnaires in their classroom, assessing warmth and conflict with fathers and mothers and internalizing and externalizing problem behavior. Stepwise multi-group path analysis demonstrated no cross-cultural differences in associations between quality of the parent-child relationship and problem behavior. We did not find any effects of maternal or paternal warmth. However, across samples conflict with mothers was associated with more internalizing and externalizing problem behavior, and conflict with fathers was associated with more externalizing problem behavior. Our findings highlight the need to target conflict with both fathers and mothers in interventions across different countries, especially when addressing externalizing problem behavior.     

Evidence for the persistence of visual guidance information

An earlier study from our laboratory provided initial support for the hypothesis that information facilitating visual guidance persists in the absence of retinal stimulation. The present study supports and extends this hypothesis with three experiments in which visually occluded subjects positioned a point of light at the location of a previously viewed target and also walked in the direction of a previously viewed path. In both tasks, performance was possible following occlusion, and in all cases, performance slowly and significantly decreased with longer durations of occlusion. This decay in performance was gradual and had a “half-life” of greater than 15 sec. Absolute performance was correlated across tasks. The effect of occlusion on absolute error in the localization performance was relatively stable within individuals over a 3-week period. The biological utility of guidance information persistence is discussed along with implications for space constancy, illusions of motion, and problems of disorientation.     

“Avant‐Garde of What?”: Surrealism Reconceived as Political Culture

However we may judge avant-garde art when we meet it, for us the phenomenon and idea are so present and evident that we do not stop, even momentarily, to wonder if we might be dealing with an illusion or an appearance rather than a reality, with a myth or a superstition rather than a concept.     

“I was and still am”: Narratives of Bisexual Marking in the #StillBisexual Campaign

This research investigated narratives of bi-erasure and bisexual marking by considering 53 video confessionals associated with the #StillBisexual campaign. #StillBisexual is a web-based campaign that targets myths about bisexuality and promotes bisexual identity visibility. Thematic analysis was conducted to identify emergent themes regarding the ways that individuals mark and make known their bisexuality. Three major themes of bisexual demarcation emerged including the enduring nature of bisexuality, defining bisexuality, and defining the self as a bisexual being. Discussion focuses on describing bisexual marking approaches by #StillBisexual participants and by analyzing the way bisexual demarcation challenges assumptions of monosexism and cisgenderism inherent to cultural conceptualizations of sexuality.