Contribution of Peer Deviancy Training to the Early Development of Conduct Problems: Mediators and Moderators

Three variables were tested as moderators of the relationship between peer deviancy training and child antisocial behavior in a longitudinal study of 267 boys and girls from ages 5.3 to 9.3 years. Deviancy training was directly measured by observation of the discourse and play of children with same-gender classmates. Peer deviancy training was significantly related to multi-setting child antisocial behavior from ages 5.3 to 9.3 years. Child impulsivity, poor parental discipline, and peer rejection were all significant moderators of that relationship, even in the context of their direct association with trajectories of antisocial behavior and after controlling for deviant peer affiliation. These moderator effects appeared to be associated with children's increased sensitivity to peer modeling and reinforcement of deviant discourse and play. Not all children are equally affected by peer deviancy training, and an array of intervention strategies are described that may serve to protect children from deviant peer influence.     

Childhood Emotional Abuse and Young Adulthood Dating Violence: The Moderating Role of Stress Reactivity

Dating violence has been linked to past experiences of childhood emotional abuse; however, little research has explored how stress reactivity functions within interpersonal relationships to amplify or attenuate these associations. The present study investigated the moderating effects of cortisol stress reactivity on associations between retrospective self-reported childhood emotional abuse and later self-reported interpersonal violence in young adult dating relationships. The current sample consisted of 57 young adult heterosexual dating partners (46 females, 11 males) between the ages of 18 and 24. Salivary cortisol samples were collected before and after a stress task to measure stress reactivity. Moderation analyses were conducted through the PROCESS macro in SPSS version 22. The relation between childhood emotional abuse and dating violence varied depending on cortisol reactivity, such that the association between childhood emotional abuse and young adult dating violence was stronger for those who demonstrated low levels of cortisol reactivity. The association between childhood emotional abuse and dating violence was not significant for those who demonstrated high cortisol reactivity. Findings underscore the importance of studying physiological mechanisms that may confer risk in the relationship between child emotional abuse and later interpersonal consequences.     

A Priori Causal Models of Natural Selection

Plato articulates a deep perplexity about inquiry in ‘Meno's Paradox’—the claim that one can inquire neither into what one knows, nor into what one does not know. Although some commentators have wrestled with the paradox itself, many suppose that the paradox of inquiry is special to Plato, arising from peculiarities of the Socratic elenchus or of Platonic epistemology. But there is nothing peculiarly Platonic in this puzzle. For it arises, too, in classical Indian philosophical discussions, where it is formulated with great clarity, and analysed in a way that casts it in a new light. We present three treatments of the puzzle in Indian philosophy, as a way of refining and sharpening our understanding of the paradox, before turning to the most radical of the Indian philosophers to tackle it. The Indian philosophers who are optimistic that the paradox can be resolved appeal to the existence of prior beliefs, and to the resources embedded in language to explain how we can investigate, and so move from ignorance to knowledge. Highlighting this structural feature of inquiry, however, allows the pessimist philosopher to demonstrate that the paradox stands. The incoherence of inquiry is rooted in the very idea of aiming our desires at the unknown. Asking questions and giving answers rests on referential intentions targeting objects in a region of epistemic darkness, and so our ‘inquiry sceptic’ also finds structurally similar forms of incoherence in the pragmatics of interrogative discourse.     

Fragment memories mark the end of childhood amnesia

Adults described and dated two kinds of first remembrances: a personal event memory (the recollection of a personal episode that had occurred at some time in some place) and a memory fragment (an isolated memory moment having no event context and remembered, perhaps, as an image, a behavior, or an emotion). First fragment memories were judged to have originated substantially earlier in life than first event memories--approximately 3 1/3 years of age for first fragment memories versus roughly 4 years of age for first event memories. We conclude that the end of childhood amnesia is marked not by our earliest episodic memories, but by the earliest remembered fragments of childhood experiences.     

Evidence for an Error Monitoring Deficit in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

We studied error monitoring in ADHD and control children in a task requiring inhibition of a motor response. The extent of slowing following successful (stopped) and failed (nonstopped) inhibition was compared across groups. We also measured the time required to inhibit a response (stop signal reaction time, SSRT). Compared to controls, ADHD participants slowed less following nonstopped responses. Slowing did not vary with comorbid reading, oppositional, conduct or anxiety disorder, sex or ADHD subtype. Slowing after nonstopped responses was marginally, although significantly correlated with total ADHD symptoms and with age. ADHD participants had significantly longer SSRT than controls, but SSRT was not significantly correlated with slowing. The apparent deficit in error monitoring in ADHD and its independence from the inhibition deficit observed in ADHD has implications for executive control models of ADHD, performance problems associated with the disorder and for component theories of executive control.     

Improving fairness in coverage decisions: performance expectations for quality improvement

Patients and physicians often perceive the current health care system to be unfair, in part because of the ways in which coverage decisions appear to be made. To address this problem the Ethical Force Program, a collaborative effort to create quality improvement tools for ethics in health care, has developed five content areas specifying ethical criteria for fair health care benefits design and administration. Each content area includes concrete recommendations and measurable expectations for performance improvement, which can be used by those organizations involved in the design and administration of health benefits packages, such as purchasers, health plans, benefits consultants, and practitioner groups.     

Motivated to Forgive? Partisan Scandals and Party Supporters

In this study, we investigate how partisan motivations shape voters' reactions to a political scandal by drawing on a unique survey experiment fielded immediately after Justin Trudeau's brownface/blackface scandal broke during the 2019 Canadian election. We thus explore motivated reasoning in real time in a competitive and highly partisan election context. Are voters more willing to forgive politicians for past behavior when their own party leader's impropriety is cued? To what extent do personal interests, such as cross-pressures or electoral concerns, affect the motivation to forgive? Our findings show that partisan-motivated reasoning is overwhelmingly powerful, producing politically biased judgments of politicians implicated in scandals. Furthermore, voters' willingness to forgive scandals is also influenced by “strategic” considerations, in that preferences over which political party wins or loses in the election affect opinions about whether someone should be forgiven or whether the scandal is considered important at all. However, we find no evidence that personal involvement in the issue raised by the scandal conditions partisan motivations. We posit that the environment—in this case, a competitive election—is an important consideration for understanding the extent and limits of partisan-motivated reasoning.     

Comparing predictive validity in a community sample: High-dimensionality and traditional domain-and-facet structures of personality variation

Prediction of outcomes is an important way of distinguishing, among personality models, the best from the rest. Prominent previous models have tended to emphasize multiple internally consistent “facet” scales subordinate to a few broad domains. But such an organization of measurement may not be optimal for prediction. Here, we compare the predictive capacity and efficiency of assessments across two types of personality-structure model: conventional structures of facets as found in multiple platforms, and new high-dimensionality structures emphasizing those based on natural-language adjectives, in particular lexicon-based structures of 20, 23, and 28 dimensions. Predictions targeted 12 criterion variables related to health and psychopathology, in a sizeable American community sample. Results tended to favor personality-assessment platforms with (at least) a dozen or two well-selected variables having minimal intercorrelations, without sculpting of these to make them function as indicators of a few broad domains. Unsurprisingly, shorter scales, especially when derived from factor analyses of the personality lexicon, were shown to take a more efficient route to given levels of predictive capacity. Popular 20^th-century personality-assessment models set out influential but suboptimal templates, including one that first identifies domains and then facets, which compromise the efficiency of measurement models, at least from a comparative-prediction standpoint. © 2020 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Positive affect and the experience of meaning in life

Six studies examined the role of positive affect (PA) in the experience of meaning in life (MIL). Study 1 showed strong relations between measures of mood, goal appraisals, and MIL. In multivariate analyses, PA was a stronger predictor of MIL than goal appraisals. In Study 2, the most consistent predictor of the experience of meaning in a day was the PA experienced that day. Later, global MIL was predicted by average daily PA, rather than average daily MIL. Study 3 demonstrated no prospective relations between measures of MIL and PA over 2 years. In Study 4, priming positive mood concepts enhanced MIL. In Study 5, manipulated positive mood enhanced ratings of MIL for those who were not given an attributional cue for their moods. In Study 6, PA was associated with a high level of distinction between meaningful and meaningless activities. Results indicate that positive moods may predispose individuals to feel that life is meaningful. In addition, positive moods may increase sensitivity to the meaning-relevance of a situation.     

Group size and the framing effect:

Past research provides conflicting evidence for the role of value in the appearance of framing effects. In this study, the effects of frame and group size were examined using scenarios about less valuable and more valuable groups (animal vs. human). In addition, two picture manipulations, intended to increase the value of the group, were presented. Choice patterns differed for the human and animal groups, with participants exhibiting greater risk seeking overall for the human scenario and showing a framing effect for humans but not animals when no pictures were presented. A small group size increased the proportion of risky choices for both the animal and human scenarios. Presenting pictures with names did lead to framing effects for animals, but providing pictures or pictures and names eliminated framing effects for the human scenario. These findings suggest that the relationship between value and framing effects is a matter of degree.