Patterns and evolution of moral behaviour: moral dynamics in everyday life

Recent research on moral dynamics (the processes and phenomena – collective or individual – by which moral behaviour and moral attitudes emerge, evolve, spread, erode or disappear) shows that an individual's ethical mind-set (i.e. outcome-based vs. rule-based) moderates the impact of an initial ethical or unethical act on the likelihood of behaving ethically on a subsequent occasion. More specifically, an outcome-based mind-set facilitates Moral Balancing (behaving ethically or unethically decreases the likelihood of engaging in the same type of behaviour again later), whereas a rule-based mind-set facilitates Moral Consistency (engaging in an ethical or unethical behaviour increases the likelihood of engaging in the same type of behaviour later on). The objective was to look at the evolution of moral choice across a series of scenarios, that is, to explore if these moral patterns (Balancing vs. Consistency) are maintained over time. The results of three studies showed that Moral Balancing is not maintained over time. On the other hand, Moral Consistency could be maintained over time, if the mind-set was reinforced before making a new moral judgment (but not otherwise).     

The cognitive foundations of visual consciousness: Why should we favour a processing approach?

How can we investigate the foundations of consciousness? In addressing this question, we will focus on the two main strategies that authors have adopted so far. On the one hand, there is research aimed at characterizing a specific content, which should account for conscious states. We may call this the content approach. On the other hand, one finds the processing approach, which proposes to look for a particular way of processing to account for consciousness. . Our aim, in this paper, is to develop arguments for the latter approach. We focus on a criticism of Jesse Prinz’s AIR theory of consciousness. We have chosen Prinz’s theory because it incorporates features of both the content and processing approaches, and discussing it will therefore allow us to compare the advantages and downsides of both. Our argument will focus in particular on the notion of intermediate-level. We will discuss how Prinz characterizes the intermediate-level according to a content approach, and argue that such a characterization is inadequate. Finally, we will argue in favor of processing approach to the problem of consciousness, which also accounts for the massive interaction of top-down and bottom-up processes in the brain. Even though consciousness remains an unsolved riddle, we claim that this is the best path towards a solution.     

Effects of the dialectical behavioral therapy-mindfulness module on attention in patients with borderline personality disorder

It is known that patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) show attention deficits and impulsivity. The main aim of this study was to explore the effects of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy-Mindfulness training (DBT-M), used as an adjunct to general psychiatric management (GPM), on attention variables in patients diagnosed with BPD. A second objective was to assess the relation of mindfulness formal practice on clinical variables. A sample of 60 patients with BPD was recruited. Forty of them were allocated to GPM + DBT-M treatment and the other 20 received GPM alone. At the termination of the mindfulness training, DBT-M + GPM group showed a significant improvement on commissions, hit reaction time, detectability scores from the CPT-II neuropsychological test, and also on the composite scores of inattention and impulsivity. Further, the more minutes of mindfulness practice were correlated to greater improvement in general psychiatric symptoms and affective symptomatology, but not in CPT-II measures. This is probably the first study so far assessing the effects of this single DBT module in patients with BPD. The results suggest a positive effect of such intervention on attention and impulsivity variables.     

Arousing "gentle passions" in young adolescents: Sustained experimental effects of value affirmations on prosocial feelings and behaviors

When people reflect on their important values, they may become more attuned to the needs of others. Two longitudinal field experiments examined whether a subtle value-affirmation manipulation can initiate relatively enduring increases in young adolescents' prosocial feelings (Study 1; Mage = 12.9) and prosocial behaviors (Study 2; Mage = 12.9). Participants completed a brief writing exercise that affirmed the values they deemed either most important (value-affirmation group) or unimportant (control group). As predicted, the value affirmation, coupled with a booster affirmation 6 weeks later, caused increases in prosocial feelings and behaviors over the 3-month study period. Antisocial students who were value-affirmed showed especially strong increases in prosocial behavior. These results suggest that "gentle passions" can be aroused in youth by cost- and time-efficient means. The practical utility of value affirmations will need to be evaluated in future work.     

Evaluating order-constrained hypotheses for circular data using permutation tests

Psychological researchers in different fields sometimes encounter circular or directional data. Circular data are data measured in the form of angles or two-dimensional orientations. As an example, experiments investigating the development of spatial memory and the influence of visual experience on haptic orientation perception are presented. Three permutation tests are proposed for the evaluation of ordered hypotheses. The quality of the permutation tests is investigated by means of several simulation studies. The results of these studies show the expected increase in power when the permutation tests for ordered hypotheses are compared to a common non-directional test for circular data. The differences in power between the three tests for ordered alternatives are small.     

A Tractarian Universe

In this paper we develop a reconstruction of the Tractatus ontology. The basic idea is that objects are unsaturated and that Sachlagen are like molecules. Bisimulation is used for the proper individuation of the Sachlagen. We show that the ordering of the Sachlagen is a complete distributive, lattice. It is atomistic, i.e., each Sachlage is the supremum of the Sachverhalte below it. We exhibit three normal forms for Sachlagen: the bisimulation collapse, the canonical unraveling and the canonical bisimulation collapse. The first of these forms is unique modulo isomorphism, the second and third are simply unique. The subset ordering on normal forms of the second and third kind reflects the ordering of the Sachlagen.     

Moment Testing for Interaction Terms in Structural Equation Modeling

Starting with Kenny and Judd (Psychol. Bull. 96:201–210, 1984) several methods have been introduced for analyzing models with interaction terms. In all these methods more information from the data than just means and covariances is required. In this paper we also use more than just first- and second-order moments; however, we are aiming to adding just a selection of the third-order moments. The key issue in this paper is to develop theoretical results that will allow practitioners to evaluate the strength of different third-order moments in assessing interaction terms of the model. To select the third-order moments, we propose to be guided by the power of the goodness-of-fit test of a model with no interactions, which varies with each selection of third-order moments. A theorem is presented that relates the power of the usual goodness-of-fit test of the model with the power of a moment test for the significance of third-order moments; the latter has the advantage that it can be computed without fitting a model. The main conclusion is that the selection of third-order moments can be based on the power of a moment test, thus assessing the relevance in the analysis of different sets of third-order moments can be computationally simple. The paper gives an illustration of the method and argues for the need of refraining from adding into the analysis an excess of higher-order moments.     

Parametric effects of syntactic-semantic conflict in Broca's area during sentence processing

The hypothesized role of Broca’s area in sentence processing ranges from domain-general executive function to domain-specific computation that is specific to certain syntactic structures. We examined this issue by manipulating syntactic structure and conflict between syntactic and semantic cues in a sentence processing task. Functional neuroimaging revealed that activation within several Broca’s area regions of interest reflected the parametric variation in syntactic-semantic conflict. These results suggest that Broca’s area supports sentence processing by mediating between multiple incompatible constraints on sentence interpretation, consistent with this area’s well-known role in conflict resolution in other linguistic and non-linguistic tasks.