Psychiatric predictions and the death penalty: An unconstitutional sword for the prosecution but a constitutional shield for the defense

The Supreme Court continues to permit psychiatrists and other mental health professionals to testify regarding capital defendants' propensity to future dangerousness. Virtually all scientific evidence indicates that these predictions are unreliable. However, capital juries are particularly likely to rely heavily on such testimony. The admission of this evidence violates the safeguards mandated by the Supreme Court's own case law demanding that a capital jury's discretion be guided. The Court must consider the reliability of evidence of future dangerousness, deny its admissibility on behalf of the prosecution, but structure a rule that does not infringe on capital defendants' right to present evidence in mitigation that may implicate future dangerousness.     

Feeling rules: Testing a model of appraisal—affect relations

The aim of this study was to test a model specifying the relations between appraisals and affects. A theory of the appraisal—affect relation is proposed in terms of general feeling rules differentiating between affects. A taxonomy of ten appraisals is presented, each defined by a specific profile of scores on four appraisal variables: desirability, controllability, responsibility, and the kind of value being at stake in an event. The appraisals are related to nine affect dimensions, resulting from earlier taxonomic research on the structure of affect (Hoekstra, 1986). All predictions following from the theory were tested in two independent samples by structural analysis. The model showed a good fit in both data sets.     

Loneliness accentuates age differences in cardiovascular responses to social evaluative threat

The effects of aging and loneliness on cardiovascular stress responses were examined in 91 young (18-30 years) and 91 older (65-80 years) normotensive adults. Participants completed the revised UCLA Loneliness Scale and a modified version of the Trier Social Stress Test. Piece-wise linear growth-curve analysis was used to model group differences in resting, reactivity, and recovery levels of systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP). Replicating and extending prior research, analyses revealed age-related increases in resting SBP and DBP. Adjusting for demographics and health covariates, interactions were found for SBP in which age differences in stress reactivity and recovery were greater among lonely than nonlonely participants. Findings provide further evidence that loneliness interacts with age to augment cardiovascular risk to social evaluative threat.     

Effectiveness Through Reasonableness Preliminary Steps to Pragma-Dialectical Effectiveness Research

The introduction of the concept of strategic maneuvering into the pragma-dialectical theory makes it possible to formulate testable hypotheses regarding the persuasiveness of argumentative moves that are made in argumentative discourse. After summarizing the standard pragma-dialectical approach to argumentation, van Eemeren, Garssen, and Meuffels explain what the extension of the pragma-dialectical approach with strategic maneuvering involves and discuss the fallacies in terms of the extended pragma-dialectical approach as derailments of strategic maneuvering. Then they give an empirical interpretation of the extended pragma-dialectical model in which they report the testing of three hypotheses which formulate preliminary conditions for effectiveness research within the framework of the extended pragma-dialectical theory and the results of the tests they consecutively carried out.     

Modelling mechanisms with causal cycles

Mechanistic philosophy of science views a large part of scientific activity as engaged in modelling mechanisms. While science textbooks tend to offer qualitative models of mechanisms, there is increasing demand for models from which one can draw quantitative predictions and explanations. Casini et al. (Theoria 26(1):5–33, 2011) put forward the Recursive Bayesian Networks (RBN) formalism as well suited to this end. The RBN formalism is an extension of the standard Bayesian net formalism, an extension that allows for modelling the hierarchical nature of mechanisms. Like the standard Bayesian net formalism, it models causal relationships using directed acyclic graphs. Given this appeal to acyclicity, causal cycles pose a prima facie problem for the RBN approach. This paper argues that the problem is a significant one given the ubiquity of causal cycles in mechanisms, but that the problem can be solved by combining two sorts of solution strategy in a judicious way.     

Development and test of an integrative model of job search behaviour

Research on job search and the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) has identified job search attitude, subjective norm, and job search self-efficacy as the most proximal determinants of job seekers’ search intentions and subsequently job search behaviours. However, we do not yet know how more distal individual differences (e.g., personality) and situational factors (e.g., social context) might help to predict these key TPB determinants of job search behaviour. In an integrative model of job search behaviour, we propose specific relationships between these distal variables and the TPB determinants, which in turn are expected to mediate the effects of individual differences and situational factors on job search behaviour. The hypothesized model is tested in a large representative sample of 1,177 unemployed Flemish job seekers using a two-wave design and provides a satisfactory fit to the data. Extraversion, conscientiousness, core self-evaluations, employment commitment, financial need, and social support are found to differentially relate to instrumental job search attitude, affective job search attitude, subjective norm, and job search self-efficacy. In addition, all distal variables are indirectly related to job search behaviour through their effects on the TPB variables. These results support our expanded and integrative model of job search behaviour.     

First–Person Plural Legislature: Political Reflexivity and Representation*

Abstract

In the Social Contract Rousseau gives what could be called a philosophical rule of recognition for law in Modernity: a law is law if and only if ‘the whole people rules over the whole people’. Thus, he defines self-legislation as, at bottom, collective intentional action. I will first map out the speech act structure [LEX] underlying self-legislation on this account. In particular, I argue for a first person plural counterpart of the reflexive structure inherent to intentions generally: the notion of a collective self. Then I take issue with Bratman's analysis of shared intentional activity in terms of mutuality, submitting that it misses out on the specifically political presupposition involved in ‘doing something together’. I will show why ‘mutuality’ requires representation of the unity of a polity, and how this representation can take form without either external authority or mutual responsiveness.     

Values Define Fields: The Intentional Dynamics of Driving,Carrying, Leading,Negotiating, and Conversing

Coss (1991a) found that squirrels from populations that differed in their historical exposure to snakes reacted in a manner similar to that of squirrels sympatric with snakes when exposed to one; lab-reared pups also showed some typical reactions to a snake. Coss concluded that the squirrels possessed a genetic relic of the pattern of behavior typical of the common progenitor at a time when snakes exerted selection pressure on squirrel evolution. It is argued here that this concept of behavioral relics is suspect and should be employed with caution. The concept is difficult to apply rigorously, and the philosophy of the concept is diametrically opposed to the animal-environment mutualism espoused by ecological psycholo- gists. Three more parsimonious explanations for the phenomena reported in Coss (199 1 a) are suggested.     

Subjective visibility depends on level of processing

Is visual awareness graded or binary? Experimental work has provided support for both possibilities, leading to two coexisting but contradictory theoretical accounts. Here we propose a promising candidate factor through which to integrate both accounts: the depth of stimulus processing required by the task. We compared color identification (a low-level task) with numerical judgements (a high-level task) performed on the very same colored number stimuli. Psychophysical curves were analyzed for both objective discrimination performance and subjective visibility ratings on a trial-by trial basis. We observed a graded relationship between stimulus duration and visibility in the low-level task, but a more non-linear relationship in the high-level task. Both patterns of results have previously been consistently associated with the graded and the dichotomous account, respectively. Follow-up experiments that manipulate the level of processing can further unify previously inconsistent results, thus integrating two major theories of visual awareness.