From gains to losses: Age-related differences in decisions under risk in a non-monetary gambling task

Lifespan theory suggests a shift from a primary orientation towards attaining gains in young adulthood to preventing losses in older adulthood. The current research tested if this motivational shift is reflected in behavioural and emotional responses to risks in non-monetary gains and losses. Study 1 established in a sample of N = 168 younger (18–30 years) and older adults (65–79 years) that a non-monetary gambling task was experienced similarly by the age groups with respect to arousal and valence of the task, and the willingness to continue playing. In Study 2 (N = 83), differences between young (18–30 years) and older (64–85 years) adults’ risk-taking in this non-monetary gambling task with mixed gambles were tested while assessing physiological responses (event-related heart rate change) to gain and loss feedback. Behavioural – but not physiological – results confirm hypotheses derived from a lifespan motivational framework regarding age-differential effects of gains and losses.     

Impure temporalities in the history of political philosophy: the historiography of dēmokratia in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain

ABSTRACT

Building on Bernard Williams’ thesis about the intertwining of history and political philosophy, the essay explores how the problem of the history of dēmokratia after the late-eighteenth and over the nineteenth-century in Britain constituted a primary and critical field in which the philosophical meaning of democracy was debated. Configuring a new temporal perspective grounded in the relationship between ancient and modern democracy, historiographical works by John Gillies, William Mitford, and George Grote put forth an understanding of the concept as a battlefield, involving several conflicting meanings, narratives and historical forces. This historiographical tradition highlighted the tensions underpinning the definition of democracy in the long-term temporal frame linking antiquity and modernity. So even more than contemporary philosophical and political writings, historical understanding constituted a unique concept of democracy that both concentrated and dispersed meaning; it was not just one vision of democracy, among others, but one that acquired the paradoxical power to forge some semantic stability and coherence over time, and to accentuate the threat of the concept’s break up into distinct political premises and historical moments that constituted it.     

Helicopter Parenting and Drinking Outcomes Among College Students: The Moderating Role of Family Income

Journal of Adult Development - Helicopter parenting, a form of overcontrol defined by intense levels of monitoring and supervision, has been linked to an increase in risky behaviors in emerging...     

Kant and the transparency of the mind

ABSTRACT

It has become standard to treat Kant’s characterization of pure apperception as involving the claim that questions about what I think are transparent to questions about the world. By contrast, empirical apperception is thought to be non-transparent, since it involves a kind of inner observation of my mental states. I propose a reading that reverses this: pure apperception is non-transparent, because conscious only of itself, whereas empirical apperception is transparent to the world. The reading I offer, unlike the standard one, can accommodate Kant’s claim that the I of pure apperception is the same as the I of empirical apperception.     

Moulding environmental contexts to optimise neurodiverse executive function performance and development: A goodness-of-fit account

Executive functions (EFs) provide a top-down response to stimuli and events in pursuit of a goal. We argue that the extent to which an individual's environment is enriching and a good fit for them influences whether their performance at that moment is towards their upper- or lower-limit of EF ability. We outline the implications of this for interpreting measures of EF. We next argue that a child's sensitivity to the environment, and their caregivers' ability to modulate the environment to improve goodness-of-fit, influences the cumulative effects of the environment in shaping that child's actualised EF ability (the performance level shown in day-to-day situations), and thus their skill development. We therefore recommend that EF interventions be designed to improve children's actualised EF ability by improving their day-to-day environment, while simultaneously helping children modulate their physiological response to environmental challenges, and providing opportunities to practise EF skills in ecologically-valid contexts.