A comparison of race‐related pain stereotypes held by White and Black individuals

Pain judgments are the basis for pain management. The purpose of this study was to assess Black and White participants' race‐related pain stereotypes. Undergraduates (n = 551) rated the pain sensitivity and willingness to report pain for the typical Black person, White person, and themselves. Participants, regardless of race, rated the typical White person as being more pain sensitive and more willing to report pain than the typical Black person. White participants rated themselves as less sensitive and less willing to report pain than same‐race peers; however, Black participants rated themselves as more pain sensitive and more willing to report pain than same‐race peers. These findings highlight similarities and differences in racial stereotypic pain beliefs held by Black and White individuals.     

Effects of signaling on temporal control of behavior in response‐initiated fixed intervals

Behavior and events distributed in time can serve as markers that signal delays to future events. The majority of timing research has focused on how behavior changes as the time to some event, usually food availability, decreases. The primary objective of the two experiments presented here was to assess how behavior changes as time passes between two time markers when the first time marker was manipulated but the second, food delivery, was held constant. Pigeons were exposed to fixed‐interval, response‐initiated fixed‐interval, and signaled response‐initiated fixed‐interval 15‐ and 30‐s schedules of reinforcement. In Experiment 1, first‐response latencies were systematically shorter in the signaled response‐initiated schedules than response‐initiated schedules, suggesting that the first response was a more effective time marker when it was signaled. In Experiment 2, responding in no‐food (i.e. “peak”) trials indicated that timing accuracy was equivalent in the three schedule types. Compared to fixed interval schedules, timing precision was reduced in the signaled response‐initiated schedules and was lowest in response‐initiated schedules. Results from Experiments 1 and 2 coupled with previous research suggest that the overall “informativeness” of a time marker relative to other events and behaviors in the environment may determine its efficacy.     

Extended Cognition and Propositional Memory

The philosophical case for extended cognition is often made with reference to ‘extended‐memory cases’ (e.g. Clark & Chalmers 1998); though, unfortunately, proponents of the hypothesis of extended cognition (HEC) as well as their adversaries have failed to appreciate the kinds of epistemological problems extended‐memory cases pose for mainstream thinking in the epistemology of memory. It is time to give these problems a closer look. Our plan is as follows: in §1, we argue that an epistemological theory remains compatible with HEC only if its epistemic assessments do not violate what we call ‘the epistemic parity principle’. In §2, we show how the constraint of respecting the epistemic parity principle stands in what appears to be a prima facie intractable tension with mainstream thinking about cases of propositional memory. We then outline and evaluate in §3 several lines of response.     

Corrupting Conversations with the Marquis de Sade: On Education,Gender, and Sexuality

In this essay, the author joins a conversation started by Martin (Reclaiming the conversation: the ideal of the educated woman. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1985) regarding gender and education seeking to extend the conversation to address sexuality. To do so, the author brings a reading of the Marquis de Sade to challenge the emphasis on reproduction in education as it relates to gendered and sexual norms. The author, following Martin’s approach in Reclaiming the Conversation, reads one particular text of Sade’s—Philosophy in the Bedroom—to argue for queer possibilities that Sade brings to the conversation around gender and sexuality within twenty-first century education. The Marquis de Sade may viscerally seem an inappropriate choice to return to and use to join the conversation, but his novelic imagination incites complications in the conversation. Following in the footsteps of Martin’s re-reading of historic philosophical texts the author offers not only another layer of thinking about “female education,” but also opens up space for engaging gender and sexuality in the history and philosophy of education. As issues around gender and sexed bodies become ever more present and contested in educational discourses, does Sade continue the conversation in ways that corrupt the reproductive aims of education?     

Forum: Crafting the Introductory Course in Religious Studies

This series of short essays considers the complex choices and decision‐making processes of instructors preparing to teach, and continuing to teach, introductory courses in religious studies. In a paper originally presented in the University of Chicago's “The Craft of Teaching in the Academic Study of Religion” series, Russell McCutcheon explores a “baker's dozen” of such choices and the larger pedagogical problems with which they are entwined, ranging from classic questions of skill development and content coverage to philosophical concerns around students' identification with their topics of study and institutional concerns around governance and assessment. Aaron Hollander provides a brief introduction and four doctoral students at the University of Chicago Divinity School respond to McCutcheon's essay, widening its scope, testing its applicability, and interrogating its undergirding suppositions from the perspective of early‐career educators in the field.     

Anxiety,anticipation and contextual information: A test of attentional control theory

We tested the assumptions of Attentional Control Theory (ACT) by examining the impact of anxiety on anticipation using a dynamic, time-constrained task. Moreover, we examined the involvement of high- and low-level cognitive processes in anticipation and how their importance may interact with anxiety. Skilled and less-skilled tennis players anticipated the shots of opponents under low- and high-anxiety conditions. Participants viewed three types of video stimuli, each depicting different levels of contextual information. Performance effectiveness (response accuracy) and processing efficiency (response accuracy divided by corresponding mental effort) were measured. Skilled players recorded higher levels of response accuracy and processing efficiency compared to less-skilled counterparts. Processing efficiency significantly decreased under high- compared to low-anxiety conditions. No difference in response accuracy was observed. When reviewing directional errors, anxiety was most detrimental to performance in the condition conveying only contextual information, suggesting that anxiety may have a greater impact on high-level (top-down) cognitive processes, potentially due to a shift in attentional control. Our findings provide partial support for ACT; anxiety elicited greater decrements in processing efficiency than performance effectiveness, possibly due to predominance of the stimulus-driven attentional system.