That Many of Us Should Not Parent

In liberal societies (where birth control is generally accepted and available), many people decide whether or not they wish to become parents. One key question in making this decision is, What kind of parent will I be? Parenting competence can be ranked from excellent to competent to poor. Cassidy argues that those who can foresee being poor parents, or even merely competent ones, should opt not to parent.     

Understanding the directedness of gaze: three ways of doing it

It is argued that alongside the mentalistic and the behaviouristic forms, there is a third kind of gaze understanding. Gaze may be understood to be subjective in the sense that there can be diversity across self and other in terms of what is seen, without it being understood to be representational. This form of gaze understanding is more consistent with the evidence on toddlers' understanding of gaze and may well represent a developmentally intermediate form between the behaviouristic and mentalistic forms discussed in the target article. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Too far beyond the call of duty: moral rationalism and weighing reasons

Philosophical Studies - The standard account of supererogation holds that Liv is not morally required to jump on a grenade, thereby sacrificing her life, to save the lives of five soldiers. Many...     

Blushing during social interactions in people with a fear of blushing

Changes in facial blood flow were investigated during an introductory conversation, delivering a speech, and listening to the speech afterwards in 16 people with a fear of blushing and 16 controls. It was hypothesized that fear of blushing would be associated with high ratings of self-reported blushing intensity and embarrassment during the tasks, and with persistence of the blushing reaction between tasks. Embarrassment and self-reported blushing intensity were greater in the fear-of-blushing group than in controls throughout the experiment. Increases in facial blood flow were similar in the two groups during each of the tasks. However, blushing dissipated more slowly after each task in the fear-of-blushing group than in controls, resulting in an incremental increase in facial blood flow over the course of the experiment. The slow recovery after an episode of blushing might result in physiological or social cues that help to maintain a fear of blushing.     

Listening to Reporters or Engineers? How Instance‐Based Messages About Building Design Affect Earthquake Fatalism1

Attributions are shaped by information about the causal mechanisms that produce outcomes. Two studies examined the effect of mechanism information on attributions for earthquake damage and judgments that the damage could be prevented. Scenarios based on actual reports of earthquakes compared 2 messages about the building design of damaged buildings. Accurate rate‐based messages stated that well‐designed buildings were resilient, whereas fatalistic, instance‐based messages stated that well‐designed buildings were damaged. In Study 2, to vary source credibility, the message source was either an engineer or a reporter. Participants made less fatalistic inferences and attributions with rate‐based messages than with instance‐based messages, regardless of the source. These findings show that rate‐based messages are likely to reduce fatalism about earthquakes and other risks.     

A taxometric study of the Adult Attachment Interview

This study is the first to examine the latent structure of individual differences reflected in the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI; C. George, N. Kaplan, & M. Main, 1985), a commonly used and well-validated measure designed to assess an adult's current state of mind regarding childhood experiences with caregivers. P. E. Meehl's (1995) taxometric methods (i.e., MAXCOV-HITMAX) were applied to data from 504 AAIs. Analyses revealed that the variation underlying secure versus dismissing states of mind was more consistent with a dimensional than a taxonic model. (Taxometric analyses of preoccupation were indeterminate.) In addition, variation in secure adults' (n=278) reports about their early experiences revealed little evidence for qualitative groups of earned- and continuous-secures. Rather, the inferred life experiences of secure adults appeared to be distributed continuously. Findings are discussed in terms of their theoretical implications regarding the phenomenon of earned-security specifically and variation underlying secure and insecure states of mind more generally. The consequences of these analyses for AAI reliability training and coding are also explored.     

A negative compatibility effect in priming of emotional faces

The negative compatibility effect (NCE) is the surprising result that low-visibility prime arrows facilitate responses to opposite-direction target arrows. Here we compare the priming obtained with simple arrows to the priming of emotions when categorizing human faces, which represents a more naturalistic set of stimuli and for which there are no preexisting response biases. When inverted faces with neutral expressions were presented alongside emotional prime and target faces, only strong positive priming occurred. However, when the neutral faces were made to resemble the target faces in geometry (upright orientation), time (flashing briefly), and space (appearing in the same location), positive priming gradually weakened and became negative priming. Implications for theories of the NCE are discussed.     

Adult attachment and preemptive defenses: converging evidence on the role of defensive exclusion at the level of encoding

The objective of this research was to determine whether the tendency of highly avoidant adults not to recall attachment-related information is best explained through defensive strategies that operate on encoding or retrieval processes. In Study 1 participants listened to an emotionally evocative recording and were given both explicit and implicit tests of their memory for the material. Compared to less avoidant people, highly avoidant people recalled fewer details from the recording and performed worse on an implicit test of their memory for the information. In Study 2 we manipulated people's motivation to retrieve information from memory by offering participants a monetary award for recall. Highly avoidant people recalled less information than less-avoidant people despite the monetary incentive. Taken together, these results suggest that the relative inability of avoidant adults to recall attachment-related information is due to the defensive exclusion of information at the time of encoding rather than the time of retrieval.