Reasons as the Unity Among the Varieties of Goodness

Our concepts of good simpliciter, good for, and good as a particular kind of thing must share some common element. I argue that all three types of goodness can be analysed in terms of the reasons that there are for a certain sets of agents to have pro‐attitudes. To this end I provide new and compelling accounts of good for and goodness of a kind in terms of reasons for pro‐attitudes that are more explanatorily illuminating than competing accounts and that evade the objections that undermine previous accounts of good for and goodness of a kind in terms of reasons.     

A range of kindness activities boost happiness

This experiment investigates the effects of a seven-day kindness activities intervention on changes in subjective happiness. The study was designed to test whether performing different types of kindness activities had differential effects on happiness. Our recent systematic review and meta-analysis of the psychological effects of kindness (Curry, et al. 2018) revealed that performing acts of kindness boosts happiness and well-being. However, we noted in that review that rarely had researchers specifically compared the effects of kindness to different recipients, such as to friends or to strangers. Thus in a single factorial design (n=683) we compare acts of kindness to strong social ties, weak social ties, novel acts of self kindness, and observing acts of kindness, against a no acts control group. The results indicate that performing kindness activities for seven days increases happiness. In addition, we report a positive correlation between the number of kind acts and increases in happiness. Neither effect differed across the experimental the groups, suggesting that kindness to strong ties, to weak ties, and to self, as well as observing acts of kindness, have equally positive effects on happiness.     

A semantics-based approach to the "no negative evidence" problem

Previous studies have shown that children retreat from argument-structure overgeneralization errors (e.g., * Don't giggle me ) by inferring that frequently encountered verbs are unlikely to be grammatical in unattested constructions, and by making use of syntax-semantics correspondences (e.g., verbs denoting internally caused actions such as giggling cannot normally be used causatively). The present study tested a new account based on a unitary learning mechanism that combines both of these processes. Seventy-two participants (ages 5–6, 9–10, and adults) rated overgeneralization errors with higher (* The funny man's joke giggled Bart ) and lower (* The funny man giggled Bart ) degrees of direct external causation. The errors with more-direct causation were rated as less unacceptable than those with less-direct causation. This finding is consistent with the new account, under which children acquire—in an incremental and probabilistic fashion—the meaning of particular constructions (e.g., transitive causative = direct external causation) and particular verbs, rejecting generalizations where the incompatibility between the two is too great.     

The long‐term effects of counselling: The process and mechanisms that contribute to ongoing change from a user perspective

Aims: This qualitative study aimed to expand the limited evidence base about the long‐term effects of psychological therapies.Method: We conducted in‐depth interviews with 15 people, 1–3 years after primary care counselling, to investigate whether they could identify enduring benefits and the mechanisms that brought about and maintained them. From their narratives, we developed a model of the change process of counselling and mechanisms that were perceived as essential to produce lasting benefit. The model conceptualised movement through distinct phases: engagement; exploration of internal and external worlds; consolidation and negotiated ending. Results: Mechanisms integral to sustained impact were: the active engagement of people during and between sessions to work toward their own solutions; and acquisition through the change process of skills which could be further built on after the counselling ended. These enabled ongoing, dynamic change in the way people conducted their lives and relationships. Conclusion: A key concept in securing long‐term benefit was co‐production, both during counselling and in taking ownership of and using the ‘box of skills’ acquired. Support of the model was reinforced through comparison with the experience of three interviewees who reported no long‐term benefit.     

Development of the emotional self-disclosure scale

The Emotional Self-Disclosure Scale (ESDS) was developed to assess how willing people are to discuss specific emotions with different disclosure recipients. Internal reliabilities (Cronbach's alpha) and test-retest were consistently high for each of the subscales on the ESDS for three specific disclosure recipients: female friends, male friends, and spouses/lovers. A final set of results indicated that women's and men's emotional disclosures varied as a function of their gender and the personal characteristics of the disclosure recipient. Although men and women reported a similar pattern of willingness to discuss their emotions with their male friends, additional results revealed that women were more willing than men to disclose information about their feelings of depression, anxiety, anger, and fear to their female friends and spouses/lovers. The implications of these findings for men's and women's emotional expressivity are discussed.Portions of this paper were presented at the 33rd annual meeting of the Southwestern Psychological Association, New Orleans, Louisiana, April 1987.     

Multisystemic therapy: monitoring treatment fidelity

The challenges of specifying a complex and individualized treatment model and measuring fidelity thereto are described, using multisystemic therapy (MST) as an example. Relations between therapist adherence to MST principles and instrumental and ultimate outcome variables are examined, as are relations between clinical supervision and therapist adherence. The findings provide modest support for the associations between MST adherence measures and instrumental and ultimate outcomes. Results also show that adherence can be altered when clinical supervision and adherence monitoring procedures are fortified. The modest associations between adherence measures and youth outcomes argue for further refinement and validation of the MST adherence measure, especially in light of the well-established effectiveness of MST with challenging clinical populations and the increasing dissemination of MST programs.     

Attentional load and implicit sequence learning

A widely employed conceptualization of implicit learning hypothesizes that it makes minimal demands on attentional resources. This conjecture was investigated by comparing learning under single-task and dual-task conditions in the sequential reaction time (SRT) task. Participants learned probabilistic sequences, with dual-task participants additionally having to perform a counting task using stimuli that were targets in the SRT display. Both groups were then tested for sequence knowledge under single-task (Experiments 1 and 2) or dual-task (Experiment 3) conditions. Participants also completed a free generation task (Experiments 2 and 3) under inclusion or exclusion conditions to determine if sequence knowledge was conscious or unconscious in terms of its access to intentional control. The experiments revealed that the secondary task impaired sequence learning and that sequence knowledge was consciously accessible. These findings disconfirm both the notion that implicit learning is able to proceed normally under conditions of divided attention, and that the acquired knowledge is inaccessible to consciousness. A unitary framework for conceptualizing implicit and explicit learning is proposed.     

Children's comprehension of sentences with focus particles

We report three studies investigating children's and adults' comprehension of sentences containing the focus particle only. In Experiments 1 and 2, four groups of participants (6-7 years, 8-10 years, 11-12 years and adult) compared sentences with only in different syntactic positions against pictures that matched or mismatched events described by the sentence. Contrary to previous findings (Crain, S., Ni, W., & Conway, L. (1994). Learning, parsing and modularity. In C. Clifton, L. Frazier, & K. Rayner (Eds.), Perspectives on sentence processing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum; Philip, W., & Lynch, E. (1999). Felicity, relevance, and acquisition of the grammar of every and only. In S. C. Howell, S. A. Fish, & T. Keith-Lucas (Eds.), Proceedings of the 24th annual Boston University conference on language development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press) we found that young children predominantly made errors by failing to process contrast information rather than errors in which they failed to use syntactic information to restrict the scope of the particle. Experiment 3 replicated these findings with pre-schoolers.     

Explaining errors in children's questions

The ability to explain the occurrence of errors in children's speech is an essential component of successful theories of language acquisition. The present study tested some generativist and constructivist predictions about error on the questions produced by ten English-learning children between 2 and 5 years of age. The analyses demonstrated that, as predicted by some generativist theories [e.g. Santelmann, L., Berk, S., Austin, J., Somashekar, S. & Lust. B. (2002). Continuity and development in the acquisition of inversion in yes/no questions: dissociating movement and inflection, Journal of Child Language, 29, 813-842], questions with auxiliary DO attracted higher error rates than those with modal auxiliaries. However, in wh-questions, questions with modals and DO attracted equally high error rates, and these findings could not be explained in terms of problems forming questions with why or negated auxiliaries. It was concluded that the data might be better explained in terms of a constructivist account that suggests that entrenched item-based constructions may be protected from error in children's speech, and that errors occur when children resort to other operations to produce questions [e.g. Dabrowska, E. (2000). From formula to schema: the acquisition of English questions. Cognitive Liguistics, 11, 83-102; Rowland, C. F. & Pine, J. M. (2000). Subject-auxiliary inversion errors and wh-question acquisition: What children do know? Journal of Child Language, 27, 157-181; Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press]. However, further work on constructivist theory development is required to allow researchers to make predictions about the nature of these operations.