The mark of adaptive memory in healthy and cognitively impaired older adults and elderly

The survival processing paradigm has recently drawn attention to the functional aspects of memory functioning. The survival effect, characterized by better memory performance when information is processed in a survival context, as compared with a variety of controls, is now well established in healthy populations. The main goal of this study was to test this paradigm in a group of cognitively impaired older adults and elderly; their data were compared to the data obtained in a group of healthy older adults and elderly. Seventeen cognitively impaired and 17 healthy participants performed a typical survival task using a blocked within‐subject design procedure and free recall as the memory test. The healthy older adults and elderly performed better on this memory task as well as on other tests included in a neuropsychological evaluation protocol. Importantly, both groups benefited from survival processing. These results provide further support for the power of survival processing, extending this phenomenon to cognitively impaired aging participants. The data also suggest that the survival effect is not simply a form of deep processing. Potential applied considerations are presented.     

Out of the depths

A fundamental approach of theology as practiced within the palliative setting is care for the whole human being, with particular focus on spirituality and the spiritual dimension. Theology and medicine come together in palliative care in which the spiritual aspect is an important component together with the physical, psychological, and social. This article is based on a mixed methods study of spirituality among persons receiving palliative care. Findings revealed the importance of spirituality and its multidimensional elements by which spirituality was perceived as a complex phenomenon relating to religious and non-religious aspects of human life. Theological reflection based on the present findings indicates that a sharp distinction between the concepts of religion and spirituality is not beneficial. It also reveals the significance of the spiritual dimension and that theology has an important role in creating a deeper understanding of this complex part of human existence. Spiritual needs, expressed in various ways, were evident among the participants receiving palliative care. The findings confirm that the theological approach in palliative care, with its focus on the whole human being and emphasis on spirituality and the spiritual dimension, continues to be the hallmark of practicing theology within palliative care.     

Maker Cultures and the Prospects for Technological Action

Supported by easier and cheaper access to tools and expanding communities, maker cultures are pointing towards the ideas of (almost) everyone designing, creating, producing and distributing renewed, new and improved products, machines, things or artefacts. A careful analysis of the assumptions and challenges of maker cultures emphasizes the relevance of what may be called technological action, that is, active and critical interventions regarding the purposes and applications of technologies within ordinary lives, thus countering the deterministic trends of current directions of technology. In such transformative potential, we will explore a set of elements what is and could be technological action through snapshots of maker cultures based on the empirical research conducted in three particular contexts: the Fab Lab Network, Maker Media core outputs and initiatives such as Maker Faires, and the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA). Elements such as control and empowerment through material engagement, openness and sharing, and social, cultural, political and ethical values of the common good in topics such as diversity, sustainability and transparency, are critically analysed.     

Common Ideological Roots of Speciesism and Generalized Ethnic Prejudice: The Social Dominance Human–Animal Relations Model (SD‐HARM)

Recent research and theorizing suggest that desires for group‐based dominance underpin biases towards both human outgroups and (non‐human) animals. A systematic study of the common ideological roots of human–human and human–animal biases is, however, lacking. Three studies (in Belgium, UK, and USA) tested the Social Dominance Human–Animal Relations Model (SD‐HARM) proposing that Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) is a key factor responsible for the significant positive association between ethnic outgroup attitudes and speciesist attitudes towards animals, even after accounting for other ideological variables (that possibly confound previous findings). Confirming our hypotheses, the results consistently demonstrated that SDO, more than right‐wing authoritarianism (RWA), is a key factor connecting ethnic prejudice and speciesist attitudes. Furthermore, Studies 2 and 3 showed that both SDO and RWA are significantly related to perceived threat posed by vegetarianism (i.e. ideologies and diets minimizing harm to animals), but with SDO playing a focal role in explaining the positive association between threat perceptions and ethnic prejudice. Study 3 replicated this pattern, additionally including political conservatism in the model, itself a significant correlate of speciesism. Finally, a meta‐analytic integration across studies provided robust support for SD‐HARM and offers important insights into the psychological parallels between human intergroup and human–animal relations. Copyright © 2016 European Association of Personality Psychology     

The Interactive Origin of Iconicity

We investigate the emergence of iconicity, specifically a bouba‐kiki effect in miniature artificial languages under different functional constraints: when the languages are reproduced and when they are used communicatively. We ran transmission chains of (a) participant dyads who played an interactive communicative game and (b) individual participants who played a matched learning game. An analysis of the languages over six generations in an iterated learning experiment revealed that in the Communication condition, but not in the Reproduction condition, words for spiky shapes tend to be rated by naive judges as more spiky than the words for round shapes. This suggests that iconicity may not only be the outcome of innovations introduced by individuals, but, crucially, the result of interlocutor negotiation of new communicative conventions. We interpret our results as an illustration of cultural evolution by random mutation and selection (as opposed to by guided variation).     

Social comparison processes in the experience of personal relative deprivation

Drawing on social comparison and equity theories, we investigated the role that perceived similarity of a comparison target plays in how resentful people feel about their relative financial status. In Study 1, participants tended to choose a comparison target who was better off, and they selected a target they perceived to be more similar than dissimilar along dimensions that surrounded their financial outcomes. In Study 1, perceived relative disadvantage was positively associated with resentment regardless of the perceived similarity of the comparison target. The results of Studies 2 to 5b clarified these findings by showing that being both similar and dissimilar to a target can cause resentment depending on the context. Using hypothetical and real social comparisons, we found that people are more dissatisfied with their financial outcomes when their comparative targets have the same background qualifications (i.e., are similar) but are financially better off (Studies 2, 3b, 4, and 5b). However, we also found that when the comparative financial contexts were similar (i.e., equal affluence), participants were more dissatisfied when their target for comparison had lower qualifications (i.e., was dissimilar; Studies 2, 3a, 4, and 5a). In all cases, perceptions of unfairness mediated the effects of social comparison on financial dissatisfaction. Taken together, these studies address some of the ambiguities around what it means to be similar to a target in the context of social comparisons of affluence, and they underscore the importance of perceived unfairness in the link between social comparison and resentment with one's financial status.     

Animal Morality: What It Means and Why It Matters

It has been argued that some animals are moral subjects, that is, beings who are capable of behaving on the basis of moral motivations (Rowlands 2011, 2012, 2017). In this paper, we do not challenge this claim. Instead, we presuppose its plausibility in order to explore what ethical consequences follow from it. Using the capabilities approach (Nussbaum 2004, 2007), we argue that beings who are moral subjects are entitled to enjoy positive opportunities for the flourishing of their moral capabilities, and that the thwarting of these capabilities entails a harm that cannot be fully explained in terms of hedonistic welfare. We explore the implications of this idea for the assessment of current practices involving animals.     

Moral (dis)engagement with anthropogenic climate change in online comments on newspaper articles

Anthropogenic climate change (ACC) is widely acknowledged to be morally significant, but little is known about everyday moralising around ACC. We addressed this gap via quantified thematic analysis of 300 online comments to British newspaper articles on ACC, drawing on Bandura's moral disengagement theory. Moral disengagement through denial of ACC was widespread. Other disengagement strategies, such as palliative comparison and diminishing agency, occurred less often. There was also some moral engagement, most often through assertions of the existence of ACC and/or its harmful effects. Moral disengagement was significantly more common in comments on right wing than left wing newspapers, whereas the opposite was true of moral engagement. Although Bandura's framework provided a useful starting point to make sense of ACC moralising, it did not capture moral concerns that extended beyond its “harm/care” remit. In particular, many “denial” comments included a “dishonesty” discourse, whereby ACC proponents were accused of deception for ulterior motives. To classify this discourse as moral disengagement obscures its engagement with a different set of moral issues around trust and honesty. We suggest that Bandura's theory represents one possible “moral landscape” around ACC and could be extended to encompass a broader range of moral concerns.     

Priming the mental time-line: effects of modality and processing mode

The notion of a mental time-line (i.e., past corresponds to left and future corresponds to right) supports the conceptual metaphor view assuming that abstract concepts like “time” are grounded in cognitively more accessible concepts like “space.” In five experiments, we further investigated the relationship between temporal and spatial representations and examined whether or not the spatial correspondents of time are unintentionally activated. We employed a priming paradigm, in which visual or auditory prime words (i.e., temporal adverbs such as yesterday, tomorrow) preceded a colored square. In all experiments, participants discriminated the color of this square by responding with the left or the right hand. Although the temporal reference of the priming adverb was task irrelevant in Experiment 1, visually presented primes facilitated responses to the square in correspondence with the direction of the mental time-line. This priming effect was absent in Experiments 2, 3, and 5, in which the primes were presented auditorily and the temporal reference of the words could be ignored. The effect, however, emerged when attention was oriented to the temporal content of the auditory prime words in Experiment 4. The results suggest that task demands differentially modulate the activation of the mental time-line within the visual and auditory modality and support a flexible association between conceptual codes.