Cross-Cultural Diagnostic Applicability of the Pictogram Test

The aim of this study was to determine whether the Pictogram Test (PT; Vygostsky, 1960) a test of logical memory that was developed in Russia, is applicable for diagnosing and understanding thought disturbances in schizophrenia within an English-speaking population. Participants included 62 patients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorders and 80 community nonpatients from Russia and the United States. We used correlational analysis to organize PT variables into Concrete (CI), Attribute (AI), and Geometric (GI) indexes. Discriminant function analysis revealed that only AI and GI had significant discriminatory power. These indexes correctly classified 91% of English-speaking and 86% of Russian-speaking participants as either patients or nonpatients. Controlling for age and education, multivariate analysis revealed that patients had significantly lower AI and significantly higher GI scores relative to nonpatients, and those differences were similar across languages. These results indicate that the PT can discriminate between patients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorders and nonpatients, which suggests that characteristics of the PT could be used to understand the mechanism of logical thinking in patients and nonpatients.     

Understanding political responsibility in corporate citizenship: towards a shared responsibility for the common good

In this article, we explore the debate on corporate citizenship and the role of business in global governance. In the debate on political corporate social responsibility it is assumed that under globalization business is taking up a greater political role. Apart from economic responsibilities firms assume political responsibilities taking up traditional governmental tasks such as regulation of business and provision of public goods. We contrast this with a subsidiarity-based approach to governance, in which firms are seen as intermediate actors who have political co-responsibilities in society endowed upon them by (inter)national governmental institutions. We argue that both approaches face conceptual and empirical problems, and do not make clear the content and scope of political corporate responsibility. Based on Iris Marion Young’s account of political responsibility we argue that corporate actors and governmental actors have a shared responsibility to tackle societal problems. Taking political corporate responsibility not only entails engaging in private action or engaging in public–private partnerships, but it also includes aiding governmental actors to remedy injustice or even create public institutions where they do not yet exist. By adding this perspective we contribute to the debate on responsibility in corporate citizenship and clarify the political role business can play in global governance.     

Equivalence of Consequence Operations

This paper is based on Lectures 1, 2 and 4 in the series of ten lectures titled “Algebraic Structures for Logic” that Professor Blok and I presented at the Twenty Third Holiday Mathematics Symposium held at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico, January 8-12, 1999. These three lectures presented a new approach to the algebraization of deductive systems, and after the symposium we made plans to publish a joint paper, to be written by Blok, further developing these ideas. That project was still incomplete when Blok died. In fact, there is no indication that he had prepared a draft of the paper, and we do not know what new material he intended to include. I am therefore not in a position to complete the project as he had envisioned it. So, I have settled for the more limited objective of presenting the material from the three lectures, leaving to others the task of adapting the techniques used there to more general situations. Preface by Bjarni Jónsson Dedicated to the memory of Willem Johannes Blok     

Development of approximate number sense across the elementary school years: A cross‐cultural longitudinal study

In recent years, there has been growing interest among researchers in exploring approximate number sense (ANS)—the ability to estimate and discriminate quantities without the use of symbols. Despite the growing number of studies on ANS, there have been no cross‐cultural longitudinal studies to estimate both the development of ANS and the cross‐cultural differences in ANS growth trajectories. In this study, we aimed to estimate the developmental trajectories of ANS from the beginning of formal education to the end of elementary school in two countries, Russia and Kyrgyzstan, which have similar organization of their educational systems but differences in socioeconomic status (SES) and in the results of large‐scale educational assessments. To assess the developmental trajectories of ANS, we used a four‐wave longitudinal study with 416 participants from two countries and applied the mixed effect growth approach and the latent class growth approach. Our analysis revealed that the rate of growth in ANS accuracy was higher for the Russian sample than for the Kyrgyz sample and that this difference remained significant even after controlling for fluid intelligence. We identified two latent classes of growth trajectories: the first class had a significant growth in ANS, whereas the second class had no growth. Comparing the distribution of latent classes within the two countries revealed that there was a significantly larger proportion of schoolchildren from the second class in Kyrgyzstan than in Russia.     

Religiosity and Aging: Age and Cohort Effects and Their Implications for the Future of Religious Values in High‐Income OECD Countries

It has long been noticed that older people tend to be more religious than younger people. However, it is still disputable whether this fact should be attributed to people generally becoming more religious with age per se (age effect), or to the process of secularization, wherein earlier cohorts (to which the now older people belong) used to be more religious than those that appeared later, younger cohorts (cohort effect). We try to distinguish between these two effects using a multifactor model applied to World Values Survey data (1981–2014) and find that at least in the developed countries the age effect strongly prevails over the cohort effect. This finding has important implications, e.g., that population aging in OECD countries can possibly slow down the transition from religious to secular values. This effect is already visible in some countries, such as Japan.     

Disentangling Structural Connectives or Life Without Display Property

Journal of Philosophical Logic - The work is concerned with the so called display property of display logic. The motivation behind it is discussed and challenged. It is shown using one display...     

Age-related differences in reaction time task performance in young children

Performance of reaction time (RT) tasks was investigated in young children and adults to test the hypothesis that age-related differences in processing speed supersede a “global” mechanism and are a function of specific differences in task demands and processing requirements. The sample consisted of 54 4-year-olds, 53 5-year-olds, 59 6-year-olds, and 35 adults from Russia. Using the regression approach pioneered by Brinley and the transformation method proposed by Madden and colleagues and Ridderinkhoff and van der Molen, age-related differences in processing speed differed among RT tasks with varying demands. In particular, RTs differed between children and adults on tasks that required response suppression, discrimination of color or spatial orientation, reversal of contingencies of previously learned stimulus-response rules, and greater stimulus-response complexity. Relative costs of these RT task differences were larger than predicted by the global difference hypothesis except for response suppression. Among young children, age-related differences larger than predicted by the global difference hypothesis were evident when tasks required color or spatial orientation discrimination and stimulus-response rule complexity, but not for response suppression or reversal of stimulus-response contingencies. Process-specific, age-related differences in processing speed that support heterochronicity of brain development during childhood were revealed.     

Protoalgebraic logics

There exist important deductive systems, such as the non-normal modal logics, that are not proper subjects of classical algebraic logic in the sense that their metatheory cannot be reduced to the equational metatheory of any particular class of algebras. Nevertheless, most of these systems are amenable to the methods of universal algebra when applied to the matrix models of the system. In the present paper we consider a wide class of deductive systems of this kind called protoalgebraic logics. These include almost all (non-pathological) systems of prepositional logic that have occurred in the literature. The relationship between the metatheory of a protoalgebraic logic and its matrix models is studied. The following results are obtained for any finite matrix model U of a filter-distributive protoalgebraic logic : (I) The extension _U of is finitely axiomatized (provided has only finitely many inference rules); (II) _U has only finitely many extensions.