Alexandre Kojève and philosophical Stalinism

Alexandre Kojève not infrequently claimed that he was a Stalinist. While many have ignored his claim, this paper takes it seriously and outlines several aspects of Kojève’s thought that allow one to read Kojève as a philosopher of Stalinism, as one who articulates the self-consciousness of Stalinism. These aspects are three: (1) Kojève’s association of finality and freedom with the overcoming of individuality; (2) the attempt to achieve finality and freedom so defined in the universal homogeneous state, and (3) the structure of that state as an essentially juridical administrative system. The question remains, however, whether one can truly overcome individuality while one is still living, the conflict between individual material existence and the overarching state being irresolvable.     

Illicit Sexual Behavior: A Test of Self-Control Theory

Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990 Gottfredson , Michael and Travis Hirschi . 1990 . A General Theory of Crime . Standford , CA : Standford University Press . [Google Scholar]) contend that all deviance is subsumed under self-control theory and that individuals who commit any one deviant act will tend to commit other deviant acts as well. This research tests the correlation of illicit sexual behaviors with crime as they relate to measures of self-control. Secondly, this research examines the Gottfredson and Hirschi argument that their theory is a “general theory” and predicts all forms of deviance whereby low self-control is a predictor of both sexual deviance and crime. These analyses report illicit sexual behaviors are positively correlated with criminal behaviors providing support for Self-Control Theory. Furthermore, the analyses of this data support that low self-control is a predictor of illicit sexual behaviors and crime.     

The Chronotype-Academic Performance Model (CAM): Daytime sleepiness and learning motivation link chronotype and school performance in adolescents

Many adolescents experience a discrepancy between their biological time, which is shifted toward eveningness, and early school starting times. Due to this social jetlag, eveningness is negatively correlated with school performance. On the basis of the here presented data, we derived a model for the association of chronotype and school performance, the Chronotype-Academic Performance Model (CAM), including daytime sleepiness and achievement motivation as mediating factors. The sample comprised N = 273 adolescents aged 14–16 years. Circadian preference, daytime sleepiness, learning and achievement motivation, and information about participants’ last school certificate were assessed online. Chronotype was not directly related to academic performance, but was mediated by daytime sleepiness and learning motivation. Morning-orientation was negatively associated with daytime sleepiness and positively with learning motivation, which, in turn, affected performance. In evening-types, we found the strongest association between sleepiness and refusal to work. The CAM suggests that chronotype may not directly influence academic performance, but be mediated by daytime sleepiness and learning motivation. Evening types seem to be at high risk to suffer from daytime sleepiness and to display dysfunctional attitudes toward work. Measures of reducing sleepiness and modifying attitudes toward academic achievement might attenuate the disadvantages of evening-types due to social jetlag.     

Using a Self-Management Intervention to Increase Compliance in Children With ASD

This two-study series examined the effectiveness of self-management in increase compliance with parental requests. Three boys diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder and their parents participated. The intervention involved self-monitoring combined with parent-delivered reinforcement. A multiple baseline design was used. The intervention was successful in increasing rates of compliance and reducing problem behavior in training and generalization settings with each participant. Social validity was high and treatment integrity data indicated that the intervention could be readily implemented by parents. Study 2 also provided evidence of a strong treatment effect for the self-management beyond a small effect for effective instructional delivery.     

Bayesian Fundamentalism or Enlightenment? On the explanatory status and theoretical contributions of Bayesian models of cognition

The prominence of Bayesian modeling of cognition has increased recently largely because of mathematical advances in specifying and deriving predictions from complex probabilistic models. Much of this research aims to demonstrate that cognitive behavior can be explained from rational principles alone, without recourse to psychological or neurological processes and representations. We note commonalities between this rational approach and other movements in psychology - namely, Behaviorism and evolutionary psychology - that set aside mechanistic explanations or make use of optimality assumptions. Through these comparisons, we identify a number of challenges that limit the rational program's potential contribution to psychological theory. Specifically, rational Bayesian models are significantly unconstrained, both because they are uninformed by a wide range of process-level data and because their assumptions about the environment are generally not grounded in empirical measurement. The psychological implications of most Bayesian models are also unclear. Bayesian inference itself is conceptually trivial, but strong assumptions are often embedded in the hypothesis sets and the approximation algorithms used to derive model predictions, without a clear delineation between psychological commitments and implementational details. Comparing multiple Bayesian models of the same task is rare, as is the realization that many Bayesian models recapitulate existing (mechanistic level) theories. Despite the expressive power of current Bayesian models, we argue they must be developed in conjunction with mechanistic considerations to offer substantive explanations of cognition. We lay out several means for such an integration, which take into account the representations on which Bayesian inference operates, as well as the algorithms and heuristics that carry it out. We argue this unification will better facilitate lasting contributions to psychological theory, avoiding the pitfalls that have plagued previous theoretical movements.     

Mands for information generalize across establishing operations

The current study extends the literature on teaching mands for information by assessing whether mands generalize across different establishing operations (EOs). Three children with autism were taught to perform multiple behavior chains, 3 of which included a common response (e.g., “Where is the spoon?”) used for different purposes. An interrupted-behavior-chain procedure was used to contrive the EO for each mand. After teaching a mand for information under 1 EO, the remaining chains were interrupted to determine whether the mand had generalized to different EOs. For all participants, mands for information generalized across EOs. For 2 participants, a new mand-for-information topography emerged after training.     

Direct Associations or Internal Transformations? Exploring the Mechanisms Underlying Sequential Learning Behavior

We evaluate two broad classes of cognitive mechanisms that might support the learning of sequential patterns. According to the first, learning is based on the gradual accumulation of direct associations between events based on simple conditioning principles. The other view describes learning as the process of inducing the transformational structure that defines the material. Each of these learning mechanisms predicts differences in the rate of acquisition for differently organized sequences. Across a set of empirical studies, we compare the predictions of each class of model with the behavior of human subjects. We find that learning mechanisms based on transformations of an internal state, such as recurrent network architectures (e.g., Elman, 1990), have difficulty accounting for the pattern of human results relative to a simpler (but more limited) learning mechanism based on learning direct associations. Our results suggest new constraints on the cognitive mechanisms supporting sequential learning behavior.     

SUSTAIN: a network model of category learning

SUSTAIN (Supervised and Unsupervised STratified Adaptive Incremental Network) is a model of how humans learn categories from examples. SUSTAIN initially assumes a simple category structure. If simple solutions prove inadequate and SUSTAIN is confronted with a surprising event (e.g., it is told that a bat is a mammal instead of a bird), SUSTAIN recruits an additional cluster to represent the surprising event. Newly recruited clusters are available to explain future events and can themselves evolve into prototypes-attractors-rules. SUSTAIN's discovery of category substructure is affected not only by the structure of the world but by the nature of the learning task and the learner's goals. SUSTAIN successfully extends category learning models to studies of inference learning, unsupervised learning, category construction, and contexts in which identification learning is faster than classification learning.     

Chronic corticosterone-induced deterioration in rat behaviour is not paralleled by changes in hippocampal NF-kappaB-activation

We investigated whether long-lasting stress induced by chronic glucocorticoid (GC) exposure affects activation of brain NF-kappaB and whether these changes are related to functional deterioration and structural changes in the rat hippocampus. Psychometric investigations were conducted using a holeboard test system in 28 one-year-old male Wistar rats. Thereafter, rats were divided into three groups for daily administration of 10 mg corticosterone (treatment) or sesame oil (placebo = sham control for effects of the vehicle) for 60 days. Additional control rats did not receive any treatment or handling until the end of the experiment. Behavioural and cognitive changes were tested again in the holeboard system. Rat body weights and corticosterone concentrations in plasma, hippocampus and urine were determined and adrenal glands were investigated histopathologically. Hippocampal concentrations of corticosterone, NF-kappaB and I-kappaBalpha were determined using RIA, EMSA and Western blotting techniques, respectively. Structural changes in rat hippocampus were measured using magnetic resonance imaging techniques. High peripheral corticosterone concentrations after chronic treatment led to significant reductions in rat body weight. Significant atrophy of both adrenal glands with marked histological deterioration was detected. Furthermore, an increase in hippocampal corticosterone concentrations was observed after chronic administration. Chronic corticosterone treatment also significantly altered behaviour and working and reference memory capacity without changing hippocampal structure. Daily injections of sesame oil in the placebo group, however, were also sufficient to reduce the pellet-finding time. However, neither in the corticosterone group nor in the placebo group were behavioural changes paralleled by significant changes in brain NF-kappaB activation and I-kappaBalpha expression. Thus, cognitive alterations in rats seen after chronic corticosterone exposure are not paralleled by hippocampal NF-kappaB modulation.