To challenge and to be challenged – teachers collective learning in higher education

Critical analyzing and reflective competence are essential objectives in all higher education. In academic professional education, it is a challenge for the teacher to support and develop the student´s critical reflection of both academic and placement studies. The aim of this study is to identify the characteristics of the teacher role and the challenges of the reflective seminar within higher education. Data were gathered through group interviews and analyzed with a phenomenological hermeneutic approach. The result shows four themes; the experience of control and uncertainty, building trust and challenging ideas, the alternation between closeness and distance, and the parallel processes of supervising learning and being in a learning state. One conclusion is that the seminar teaching practice stimulates a collegial learning environment. This practice promotes the teachers pedagogical and didactical competence and an open attitude to each other´s teaching practice.     

“I think you did it!”: Examining the effect of presuming guilt on the verbal output of innocent suspects during brief interviews

Innocent suspects interviewed by a guilt‐presumptive versus innocence‐presumptive or neutral interviewer may tend more to display non‐verbal behaviours which neutral judges consider indicative of guilt. We examined the effects of interviewer's presumption of guilt on innocent mock suspects' alibis. Participants (N = 90) provided an alibi to convince an interviewer of their innocence of a theft after she implied that she believed that they were guilty or innocent or that she had no belief about their veracity. On the basis of existing conflicting findings for suspects' verbal behaviour during accusatory interviews, we predicted that alibis in the guilt‐belief condition would contain the highest or lowest number of correct details with overall higher or poorer accuracy rates, respectively. Although participants perceived the interviewer's presumptive approach, the number of correct details provided and accuracy rates of alibis did not differ significantly between conditions. We propose explanations to these findings and future research paths.     

Motivational Bias in Criminal Investigators' Judgments of Witness Reliability1

An experiment was conducted where experienced criminal investigators (N = 49) evaluated the testimony of a witness who either confirmed or disconfirmed the focal hypothesis in a homicide case. Participants' motivation to perpetuate the hypothesis was manipulated by varying the need for cognitive closure via time pressure. The hypothesis‐inconsistent witness was perceived as less reliable and credible, although its background and witnessing conditions were identical to those of the hypothesis‐consistent witness. While this asymmetrical skepticism was not moderated by time pressure, participants under high (vs. low) time pressure were less inclined to adjust their confidence in the hypothesis in line with the witness testimony. Discussion focuses on implications for criminal investigations and theoretical contributions to investigative psychology.     

Judges', lay judges', and police officers' beliefs about factors affecting children's testimony about sexual abuse

The authors examined Swedish judges', lay judges', and police officers' beliefs about factors that may complicate or facilitate children's reports of sexual abuse. Participants (N = 562) rated potential complicating and facilitating factors and freely reported which criteria they considered important when assessing the reliability of child witnesses. The groups had similar opinions regarding which factors are complicating and facilitating. Furthermore, the groups tended to regard emotional factors as more complicating than cognitive factors. When freely reporting criteria that are important when assessing reliability, judges and police officers reported criteria pertaining mainly to the child, whereas lay judges reported mainly criteria pertaining mainly to the police interview. Results indicate that participants believe that children have the capacity to remember and report about abuse but are hindered in doing so by emotional factors. Results also suggest that police officers may underestimate their own influence on the reliability of children's reports.     

Expert performance in SCRABBLE: implications for the study of the structure and acquisition of complex skills

Applied psychologists have long been interested in examining expert performance in complex cognitive domains. In the present article, we report the results from a study of expert cognitive skill in which elements from two historically distinct research paradigms are incorporated -- the individual differences tradition and the expert-performance approach. Forty tournament-rated SCRABBLE players (20 elite, 20 average) and 40 unrated novice players completed a battery of domain-representative laboratory tasks and standardized verbal ability tests. The analyses revealed that elite- and average-level rated players only significantly differed from each other on tasks representative of SCRABBLE performance. Furthermore, domain-relevant practice mediated the effects of SCRABBLE tournament ratings on representative task performance, suggesting that SCRABBLE players can acquire some of the knowledge necessary for success at the highest levels of competition by engaging in activities deliberately designed to maximize adaptation to SCRABBLE-specific task constraints. We discuss the potential importance of our results in the context of continuing efforts to capture and explain superior performance across intellectual domains.     

The naïve intuitive statistician: a naïve sampling model of intuitive confidence intervals

The perspective of the na?ve intuitive statistician is outlined and applied to explain overconfidence when people produce intuitive confidence intervals and why this format leads to more overconfidence than other formally equivalent formats. The na?ve sampling model implies that people accurately describe the sample information they have but are na?ve in the sense that they uncritically take sample properties as estimates of population properties. A review demonstrates that the na?ve sampling model accounts for the robust and important findings in previous research as well as provides novel predictions that are confirmed, including a way to minimize the overconfidence with interval production. The authors discuss the na?ve sampling model as a representative of models inspired by the na?ve intuitive statistician.     

Is something rotten in the state of Denmark? The Muhammad cartoons and Danish political culture

During and after what became known as ‘the cartoon crisis’ in the early months of 2006, many observers noted how the crisis should be understood as an expression of a growing Islamophobic tendency in Danish society. While such an interpretation undoubtedly is correct it fails to explain how both this Islamophobic tendency and the crisis must be seen as contemporary expressions of a long-lasting estrangement in Danish society between forces respectively sympathetic and adverse to modernity. In this article it is argued that Muslims in the Danish context today have become signifiers of current modernity, in the shape of globalization. This perspective provides a clearer understanding of the dynamics of the crisis in the Danish context as it explains why publishing the cartoons made sense to many groups in Denmark who came out both for and against this act.

Oedipus the king: Quest for self‐knowledge – denial of reality. Sophocles’ vision of man and psychoanalytic concept formation

In the Oedipus myth we find a dramatic representation of the child’s passionate ties to its parents. In the play Oedipus the King, Sophocles relates the theme of the myth to the question of self‐knowledge. This was the predominant reading in German 19th century thinking, and even as a student Freud was fascinated by Oedipus’ character – not primarily as the protagonist of an oedipal drama, but as the solver of divine riddles and as an individual striving for self‐knowledge. Inspired by Vellacott, Steiner has proposed an alternative reading of Oedipus the King as a play about a cover‐up of the truth. The text supports both these arguments. The pivotal theme of the tragedy is Oedipus’ conflict between his desire to know himself and his opposing wish to cover up the truth that will bring disaster. It is this complex character of Oedipus and the intensity of his conflict‐ridden struggle for self‐knowledge that has made the tragedy to a rich source of inspiration for psychoanalytic concept formation and understanding both of emotional and cognitive development up to our own time.     

Capturing the Naturally Occurring Superior Performance of Experts in the Laboratory: Toward a Science of Expert and Exceptional Performance

ABSTRACT— Expertise researchers have traditionally shied away from studying the highest levels of achievement in favor of studying basic cognitive processes, such as memory and categorization. In this article, we present a different approach that is focused on capturing superior (expert) performance on representative tasks that reveal the essential characteristics of expertise in a given domain. In domains where expert performance is measurable, acquisition is gradual and the highest levels are only attained after 10 years of intense preparation—even for the most "talented." Analyses of reproducibly superior performance show that it is mediated by physiological adaptations and cognitive skills acquired as a result of the cumulative effects of special practice activities (deliberate practice). It appears that the genes necessary to attain such adaptations and expert skills can be activated in healthy children—the only clear exceptions to date being genes that control body size and height. Our knowledge of how experts acquire their superior skills provides insights into the potential for human adaptation and skill acquisition and has important implications for theories of the structure of general and expert cognition, as well as for training interventions in applied psychology and education.