Alternative approaches to equity: Dissonance reduction pro-social motivation and strategic accommodation

Reviews, compares and evaluates a self-justijication and a decision theoretical conceptualization of equity. It is argued that the latter approach reveals an important and often neglected distinction between equity as a goal of social interaction and equity as an interpersonal strategy employed in rhe pursuit of other valued goals. Associated problems of definition and measurement are discussed. After a review of relevant research it is concluded that equity serves predominantly as an accommodative interpersonal strategy, and that future research should focus on analyzing the various functional bases of equity, their relationships, and their eflects on behaviour.     

I can see myself helping: The effect of self-awareness on prosocial behaviour

Many studies indicate that increasing self-awareness leads to individuals reflecting on their values and ideals (Silvia & Duval, 2001). This self-reflection appears to increase prosocial behaviour (Berkowitz, 1987). However, previously studies typically manipulated self-awareness in situations in which the individual may have felt pressure from the researcher to help. Thus, experimenter pressure to behave prosocially confounds the self-awareness explanation provided in past research. We used a novel experimental paradigm to manipulate self-awareness and remove the researcher's presence to decrease the likelihood that the participant would conform to experimenter demand. Participants were 36 college students (M_age = 19.52; 25 women). The results indicated a strong probability that the experimental condition participants were more prosocial than control condition participants. These findings provide additional support for the hypothesis that self-reflection increases prosocial behaviour, even without experimenter demands. These findings and the importance of studying objective self-awareness in light of the coronavirus are discussed.     

Adverse caregiving in early life: The trauma and deprivation distinction in young children

Knowledge and understanding about the impact of cumulative adverse experiences on the health and wellbeing of children, adolescents, and adults has rapidly expanded over the past 30 years. Despite the invaluable attention and support this proliferation has drawn to the importance of early childhood experiences, we believe that it is time to move beyond broad indices of risk and toward more specific and individualized understanding of how risk exposures are linked to clinical outcomes in young children. Within infant and early childhood mental health, there is a need for greater specificity in linking adverse caregiving experiences in early life to psychopathology in children. We highlight a framework distinguishing experiences of trauma from experiences of deprivation and use the examples of posttraumatic stress disorder and reactive attachment disorder to demonstrate how greater specificity in our understanding of early adverse caregiving can lead to more accurate and targeted diagnosis and treatment for young children. Both researchers and clinicians benefit from an approach to gain a greater appreciation of the links between specific types of experiences and outcomes in the children that we serve.     

Seeing What’s Possible: Videos are more Effective than Written Portrayals for Enhancing the Relatability of Scientists and Promoting Black Female Students’ Interest in STEM

Sex Roles - Although interactions with Black female scientists can alter beliefs about STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) and encourage Black female students’ interest in...     

The Role of Emotional Content and Perceptual Saliency During the Programming of Saccades Toward Faces

Previous studies have shown that the human visual system can detect a face and elicit a saccadic eye movement toward it very efficiently compared to other categories of visual stimuli. In the first experiment, we tested the influence of facial expressions on fast face detection using a saccadic choice task. Face-vehicle pairs were simultaneously presented and participants were asked to saccade toward the target (the face or the vehicle). We observed that saccades toward faces were initiated faster, and more often in the correct direction, than saccades toward vehicles, regardless of the facial expressions (happy, fearful, or neutral). We also observed that saccade endpoints on face images were lower when the face was happy and higher when it was neutral. In the second experiment, we explicitly tested the detection of facial expressions. We used a saccadic choice task with emotional-neutral pairs of faces and participants were asked to saccade toward the emotional (happy or fearful) or the neutral face. Participants were faster when they were asked to saccade toward the emotional face. They also made fewer errors, especially when the emotional face was happy. Using computational modeling, we showed that this happy face advantage can, at least partly, be explained by perceptual factors. Also, saccade endpoints were lower when the target was happy than when it was fearful. Overall, we suggest that there is no automatic prioritization of emotional faces, at least for saccades with short latencies, but that salient local face features can automatically attract attention.     

Justice in epistemic gaps: The ‘proof paradox’ revisited

This paper defends the heretical view that sometimes we ought to assign legal liability based on statistical evidence alone. Recent literature focuses on potential unfairness to the defending party if we rely on bare statistics. Here, I show that capitulating in response to ‘epistemic gaps’—cases where there is a group of potential harmers but an absence of individuating evidence—can amount to a serious injustice against the party who has been harmed. Drawing on prominent civil law litigation involving pharmaceutical and industrial negligence, the overall aim is to illustrate moral pitfalls stemming from the popular idea that it is never appropriate to rely on bare statistics when settling a legal dispute.     

On regulatory authority: Insights from durkheim

Émile Durkheim is recognized for his analysis of horizontal division of labor (that is, task specialization differentiating de jure equals). Vertical differences can also develop with structural differentiation, often taking the form of authority vested in regulatory agencies. But according to Durkheim, the conditions sufficient to produce specialized division of labor are not sufficient in themselves to produce regulatory structures. New regulatory agencies tend to emerge in environments characterized by directly attributable cost interdependence among a plethora of otherwise independent units.     

Fear and aggression in the rat

The effect of fear on two types of aggression in rats was investigated by adding a cat stimulus to a colony in which the dominant male was attacking an intruder (offensive aggression), or, to a tube test situation in which defensive biting was measured before and during tail shock. The cat completely abolished offense in the colony; when the cat was presented and removed before a strange rat was placed in the colony, attack on the intruder was also reduced. In contrast, defensive biting was unchanged or even slightly potentiated by the presence of the cat, demonstrating a separation of the effects of fear on offensive and defensive aggression.