Emergence,Reduction and the Identity and Individuation of Powers

Topoi - One recently popular way to characterise strong emergence is to say that emergent entities possess novel causal powers. However, there is little agreement concerning the nature of powers....     

Simulated judicial decision-making for African and European American adolescents with illegal sexual behavior: The impact of medical data and victim race/ethnicity

The perceived importance of victim and defendant race/ethnicity and medical evidence in child sexual abuse cases has been recognized separately in the literature. However, few studies have considered these factors simultaneously. Within a sample of 880 college students, an interaction effect was tested between the presence of medical evidence and the race/ethnicity of a juvenile defendant and victim using child sexual abuse case vignettes. The main effects of medical evidence and the race of the defendant were observed. Medical evidence and race of victim influenced victim believability such that medical evidence was more impactful for cases with African American victims. Further, there were interactions between the race of the defendant and the race of the victim in adult versus juvenile court decisions, sex offender registration and notification requirements, and length of sex offender registration and notification. Interracial sexual offending was associated with substantially higher punishment than intraracial sexual offending. Accordingly, several important implications for court-level decision-making processes are explored.     

Risk assessment in sentencing and plea bargaining: The roles of prosecutors and defense attorneys

Research on risk assessment in sentencing has focused heavily on the role of judges. Ignoring the role of other courtroom actors in the sentencing process, however, leaves unexamined the potentially significant effects on judicial decision making of arguments made by prosecutors and defense attorneys at sentencing hearings. Unduly focusing on judges also overlooks the vast majority of sentences arrived at through negotiated guilty pleas. We explored the extent to which considerations of risk are made among prosecutors and defense attorneys when advocating for given sentences in open court or during plea negotiations. We surveyed all prosecutors and defense attorneys in 14 judicial circuits in Virginia and found that most prosecutors and defense attorneys at least “sometimes” explicitly invoked actuarial risk estimates both at sentencing hearings and during plea negotiations. However, defense attorneys were much more likely than prosecutors to be averse to the use of risk assessment in either form of case disposition.     

‘Personality in Its Natural Habitat’ Revisited: A Pooled,Multi-sample Examination of the Relationships Between the Big Five Personality Traits and Daily Behaviour and Language Use

Past research using the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR), an observational ambulatory assessment method for the real-world measurement of daily behaviour, has identified several behavioural manifestations of the Big Five domains in a small college sample (N = 96). With the use of a larger and more diverse sample of pooled data from N = 462 participants from a total of four community samples who wore the EAR from 2 to 6 days, the primary purpose of the present study was to obtain more precise and generalizable effect estimates of the Big Five–behaviour relationships and to re-examine the degree to which these relationships are gender specific. In an extension of the original article, the secondary purpose of the present study was to examine if the Big Five–behaviour relationships differed across two facets of each Big Five domain. Overall, while several of the behavioural manifestations of the Big Five were generally consistent with the trait definitions (replicating some findings from the original article), we found little evidence of gender differences (not replicating a basic finding from the original article). Unique to the present study, the Big Five–behaviour relationships were not always comparable across the two facets of each Big Five domain. © 2020 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Providing more or less detailed information in job advertisements—Does it matter?

Job advertising is a common and useful recruitment marketing method that is available to a wide range of candidates and offers a practical way to widen the applicant pool. Frequently, retail advertisements only briefly introduce job requirements, but others provide more detailed information. Existing message studies, however, are inconclusive about the effectiveness of message specificity. A scenario‐based experiment that included 164 participants revealed that the type of decision maker (maximizer or satisficer) moderates the specificity effects in recruitment messages. After receiving a detailed job message, more satisficers stop their search process, but only maximizers perceive the company as more attractive and increase intentions toward the advertised job. A follow‐up qualitative study involving 30 participants provided further insights.     

Building cardiovascular disease competence in an urban poor Ghanaian community: A social psychology of participation approach

This paper describes conceptual, methodological, and practical insights from a longitudinal social psychological project that aims to build cardiovascular disease (CVD) competence in a poor community in Accra, Ghana's capital. Informed by a social psychology of participation approach, mixed method data included qualitative interviews and household surveys from over 500 community members, including people living with diabetes, hypertension, and stroke, their caregivers, health care providers, and GIS mapping of pluralistic health systems, food vending sites, bars, and physical activity spaces. Data analysis was informed by the diagnosis‐psychosocial intervention‐reflexivity framework proposed by Guareschi and Jovchelovitch. The community had a high prevalence of CVD and risk factors, and CVD knowledge was cognitive polyphasic. The environment was obesogenic, alcohol promoting, and medically pluralistic. These factors shaped CVD experiences and eclectic treatment seeking behaviours. Psychosocial interventions included establishing a self‐help group and community screening and education. Applying the “AIDS‐competent communities” model proposed by Campbell and colleagues, we outline the psychosocial features of CVD competence that are relatively easy to implement, albeit with funds and labour, and those that are difficult. We offer a reflexive analysis of four challenges that future activities will address: social protection, increasing men's participation, connecting national health policy to community needs, and sustaining the project.     

Disentangling the far transfer of language comprehension gains using latent mediation models

While we know that interventions targeting oral language can be effective, little is known about what drives these effects. In this study, we examine whether gains in transfer measures are mediated through the specific words that are trained in a language intervention. Based on a large‐scale randomized controlled trial of language intervention in 4‐ to 5‐year‐old children, latent mediation models were used to disentangle oral language gains in transfer measures. The results first showed that the effects of the language intervention and the transfer effects are generated through expressive rather than receptive measures of language. Second, we found that the effects of the intervention on intermediate transfer measures of language were mediated through the ability to define the trained words. Third, and critically, for far transfer measures that did not contain any of the trained words, the effects were mediated through the trained words. The findings relate to theories of transfer and support the idea that far transfer is possible, at least within the same domain. In addition, it seems that effects on receptive language skills are difficult to obtain and that what is improved is instead the children's ability to express themselves and use procedures to explain words. Thus, to optimize intervention effects, future studies should focus on expressive language.     

Attachment and resource sharing

In three studies we examined the associations between resource sharing (RS) and attachment, and the enhancement of RS using attachment security primes. In Study 1, we showed that attachment avoidance was negatively associated with RS. We also identified differences and similarities between RS and pro‐sociality. In Studies 2 and 3, we showed that research participants were more likely to share their monetary resources after they were primed with attachment security. Study 3 further revealed that security priming affected mainly people low on state attachment anxiety. Our findings extend previous work on pro‐sociality into the specific realm of RS, provide behavioral evidence, and tie attachment and close relationships in with game theory and research on economic decision making.     

Women are not swayed by sugar‐coated acts of verbal sexual coercion

Sexual coercion is receiving much attention with the #MeToo movement. Not all of the tactics that perpetrators use to coerce sex are perceived to be equally unacceptable. This study examined factors that may mitigate negative perceptions, including features of the perpetrator's tactics (verbal vs. physical tactics, relationship‐focused vs. self‐focused reasons to coerce sex) and raters' own current relationship (commitment, dependence, sexually coercive experiences). College women (N = 498) rated whether the perpetrator's behavior was acceptable, was excusable, and would adversely affect a relationship. Verbal (vs. physical) coercion, dependence on a current partner, and sexually coercive experiences in a current relationship mitigated negative perceptions. However, participant ratings were not influenced by the perpetrator's use of relationship‐focused reasons for coercing sex (vs. self‐focused reasons), suggesting that women may resist male attempts to sugar‐coat sexual coercion.     

Statistical learning of multiple speech streams: A challenge for monolingual infants

Language acquisition depends on the ability to detect and track the distributional properties of speech. Successful acquisition also necessitates detecting changes in those properties, which can occur when the learner encounters different speakers, topics, dialects, or languages. When encountering multiple speech streams with different underlying statistics but overlapping features, how do infants keep track of the properties of each speech stream separately? In four experiments, we tested whether 8‐month‐old monolingual infants (N = 144) can track the underlying statistics of two artificial speech streams that share a portion of their syllables. We first presented each stream individually. We then presented the two speech streams in sequence, without contextual cues signaling the different speech streams, and subsequently added pitch and accent cues to help learners track each stream separately. The results reveal that monolingual infants experience difficulty tracking the statistical regularities in two speech streams presented sequentially, even when provided with contextual cues intended to facilitate separation of the speech streams. We discuss the implications of our findings for understanding how infants learn and separate the input when confronted with multiple statistical structures.