Evaluation of the Bifactor Structure of the Dispositional Hope Scale

The Dispositional Hope Scale (DHS; Snyder et al., 1991) is composed of items assessing an individual's perception of his or her agency and pathways. This study examined support for the bifactor structure and relation of the factors in this model with depressive symptoms. It also examined cross-gender measurement invariance for the bifactor model. A community sample of 413 women and 257 men completed the DHS. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated more support for the bifactor model than the 1- and 2-factor models. Results also indicated full measurement invariance across gender for the bifactor and the 2-factor models. The general and the specific agency factors, but not the specific pathways factor, correlated with depressive symptoms. The better support for the bifactor model suggests that ideally hope has to be measured and examined by factors reflecting high covariance for agency and pathways, and also factors reflecting unique variances for agency and pathways. The support for full cross-gender measurement invariance indicated that there are no differences in measurement and scaling properties for the DHS across ratings provided by women and men, and therefore the DHS ratings can be scored in the same way for women and men.     

Ulrike Kistner and Philippe Van Haute: Violence,Slavery and Freedom between Hegel and Fanon,Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2020, 168 pp., ISBN 978-1-77,614-623-9, ISBN 978-1-77,614-627-7

Continental Philosophy Review - Violence, Slavery and Freedom between Hegel and Fanon is a volume of secondary literature that dispels common misconceptions about the relationship between Hegelian...     

Plans or Outcomes: How Do We Attribute Intelligence to Others?

Humans routinely make inferences about both the contents and the workings of other minds based on observed actions. People consider what others want or know, but also how intelligent, rational, or attentive they might be. Here, we introduce a new methodology for quantitatively studying the mechanisms people use to attribute intelligence to others based on their behavior. We focus on two key judgments previously proposed in the literature: judgments based on observed outcomes (you're smart if you won the game) and judgments based on evaluating the quality of an agent's planning that led to their outcomes (you're smart if you made the right choice, even if you didn't succeed). We present a novel task, the maze search task (MST), in which participants rate the intelligence of agents searching a maze for a hidden goal. We model outcome-based attributions based on the observed utility of the agent upon achieving a goal, with higher utilities indicating higher intelligence, and model planning-based attributions by measuring the proximity of the observed actions to an ideal planner, such that agents who produce closer approximations of optimal plans are seen as more intelligent. We examine human attributions of intelligence in three experiments that use MST and find that participants used both outcome and planning as indicators of intelligence. However, observing the outcome was not necessary, and participants still made planning-based attributions of intelligence when the outcome was not observed. We also found that the weights individuals placed on plans and on outcome correlated with an individual's ability to engage in cognitive reflection. Our results suggest that people attribute intelligence based on plans given sufficient context and cognitive resources and rely on the outcome when computational resources or context are limited.     

Low-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation of the anterior temporal lobes does not dissociate social versus nonsocial semantic knowledge

Social conceptual knowledge is imperative to communicate with, interact with, and interpret human society; however, little is known about the neural basis of social concepts. Previous research has predominantly suggested that the right anterior temporal lobe (ATL) may specifically represent social conceptual knowledge, whereas the left ATL is necessary for general semantic processing. However, this view has not always been supported by empirical studies. Employing a lateralized design and two different semantic tasks and a nonsemantic control task, we aimed to clarify some of these ambiguities by potentially dissociating left from right functionality and social from nonsocial concepts, using inhibitory repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) coupled with a sham and control site stimulation (N = 56). The results showed that stimulation of the left ATL led to overall faster processing times without affecting accuracy, whilst the right ATL and control groups did not significantly change in reaction times or accuracy. No difference occurred between social and nonsocial concepts after stimulation. This study is the first to show that inhibition of the left temporal lobe may improve performance on a semantic task and provides evidence that the ATLs may be lateralized in conceptual processing. The results do not confirm that the right temporal lobe is crucial for social conceptual processing, as inhibition did not significantly affect performance for social concepts.