Philosophy of Education in a Poor Historical Moment: A Personal Account

Under the post-metaphysical sky “old” humanistic-oriented education is possible solely at the cost of its transformation into its negative, into a power that is determined to diminish human potentials for self-exaltation. Nothing less than total metamorphosis is needed to rescue the core of humanistic genesis: the quest for edifying Life and resistance to the call for “home-returning” into the total harmony that is promised to us within nothingness.     

Virtual Reality One-Session Treatment of Child-Specific Phobia of Dogs: A Controlled,Multiple Baseline Case Series

Specific phobia (SP) typically onsets in childhood and frequently predicts other mental health disorders later in life. Fortunately, childhood SP can be effectively treated with cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), including the exposure-based one-session treatment (OST) approach. Despite empirical support for CBT and OST, clinicians, for various reasons, frequently fail to implement exposure-based therapy in routine clinical practice, including perceived difficulties in implementing exposure. Virtual reality (VR) exposure therapy may overcome some of these challenges and provides an alternative modality of therapy. This preliminary study examined the efficacy of VR OST for 8 children with a SP of dogs (aged 8–12 years) (M = age 10.25; SD = 2.11) using a multiple-baseline controlled case series. Following a stable baseline period of either 2, 3, or 4 weeks, it was expected that specific phobia severity would significantly decline after VR OST and remain improved over the 3-week maintenance phase. Assessments were conducted posttreatment and at 1-month follow up (study end-point). It was found that phobia symptoms remained relatively stable across the baselines, with significant reductions from pretreatment to posttreatment and to follow-up on clinician severity ratings (pre- to post- g = 1.12; pre- to follow-up g = 2.40), target symptom ratings (g = 1.14; 1.29), and behavioral avoidance (g = -1.27; -1.96). The treatment was also associated with clinically significant outcomes, whereby at one-month follow up, 75% of children were considered “recovered” and 88% completed the BAT (interacted with their feared stimuli). This study provides support for the effectiveness of VR OST.     

The psychology of confessions: A comparison of expert and lay opinions

Despite a body of confessions research that is generally accepted in the scientific community, courts often exclude experts on the ground that such testimony would not assist the jury, which can use its common sense. To examine whether laypeople know the contents of expert testimony on confessions, we asked 151 lay participants to indicate their beliefs about 30 confession‐related statements used in a recent survey of 87 confession experts (Kassin et al., American Psychologist, 2018, 73, 63–80). Participants agreed with experts on only 10 of the 30 propositions, suggesting that much of the psychology of confessions is not common knowledge and that expert testimony can assist the trier of fact.     

Why and for whom does the pressure to help hurt others? Affective and cognitive mechanisms linking helping pressure to workplace deviance

Scholars are paying increasing attention to the “dark side” of citizenship behavior. One aspect of this dark side that has received relatively scant attention is “helping pressure”—an employee's perception that s/he is being encouraged to, or otherwise feels that s/he should, enact helping behavior at work. Drawing from theory associated with work stress, we examine affective and cognitive mechanisms that potentially explain why helping pressure, counterintuitively, may lead employees to engage in deviant behavior instead. Beyond examining these possible mechanisms, we also answer calls to identify a potential buffer to these effects. Drawing from self-determination theory, we examine how an employee's intrinsic motivation for citizenship may lessen the deleterious consequences of helping pressure at work. In two studies (a within-individual experience-sampling study and a two-wave between-individual study), we find consistent evidence that helping pressure has a positive indirect relationship with deviant behavior through increased negative affect. Further, we find evidence that intrinsic motivation for citizenship weakens the positive relationship of helping pressure with negative affect, buffering the indirect effect on subsequent deviant behavior. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings for the study of helping pressure at work are discussed.     

‘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