Philosophy of Education in a Poor Historical Moment: A Personal Account

Under the post-metaphysical sky “old” humanistic-oriented education is possible solely at the cost of its transformation into its negative, into a power that is determined to diminish human potentials for self-exaltation. Nothing less than total metamorphosis is needed to rescue the core of humanistic genesis: the quest for edifying Life and resistance to the call for “home-returning” into the total harmony that is promised to us within nothingness.     

Ensemble coding of facial identity is not refined by experience: Evidence from other-race and inverted faces

The ability to recognize identity despite within-person variability in appearance is likely a face-specific skill and shaped by experience. Ensemble coding – the automatic extraction of the average of a stimulus array – has been proposed as a mechanism underlying face learning (allowing one to recognize novel instances of a newly learned face). We investigated whether ensemble encoding, like face learning and recognition, is refined by experience by testing participants with upright own-race faces and two categories of faces with which they lacked experience: other-race faces (Experiment 1) and inverted faces (Experiment 2). Participants viewed four images of an unfamiliar identity and then were asked whether a test image of that same identity had been in the study array. Each test image was a matching exemplar (from the array), matching average (the average of the images in the array), non-matching exemplar (a novel image of the same identity), or non-matching average (an average of four different images of the same identity). Adults showed comparable ensemble coding for all three categories (i.e., reported that matching averages had been present more than non-matching averages), providing evidence that this early stage of face learning is not shaped by face-specific experience.     

Examining the Potential Mental Health Costs of Defending Victims of Bullying: a Longitudinal Analysis

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - It has been speculated that defending victims of bullying is stressful for youth, and may contribute to poor mental health among those who...     

Investigating Religion and Inequality through Women's Work-Family Pathways

This project investigates the relationship between religious involvement and women's work and family pathways in the United States. I identify five work-family configurations using National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) data and latent class analysis. These configurations incorporate cohabitation histories, timing of family formation, and maternal employment. Then, I analyze how adolescent religiosity and personal and family characteristics are associated with subsequent work-family pathways. Affiliation with an evangelical Protestant tradition is associated with women who form families early, while Catholic affiliation is tied to later family formation. Importantly, family background characteristics such as living with both biological parents and higher parental education, as well as race/ethnicity and the respondent's educational attainment, are the most consistent variables associated with work-family configurations. These results suggest that religious involvement, when considered alongside family background, contributes to women's unequal work-family pathways in adulthood. The close links between religion, family, and stratification are evident in the study of women's work-family experiences.     

Between certainty and uncertainty--observations on psychoanalysis in Russia

'Diversity', the theme of our conference, carries a subversive sub-text in totalitarian societies. This is one of the themes presented as the current revival of psychoanalysis in the more democratic post-Communist Russia is explored. The history of psychoanalysis in Russia is summarized with a focus on its politicization, which led to initial interest in its theory (by way of a misapprehension of its tenets), and then to ultimate suppression of psychoanalytic thinking as an ideology deemed antagonistic to the totalitarian regime. In contrast, features of psychoanalysis and democracy are explored for their mutual affinities. The background of the resourceful new generation of analytic therapists is discussed, especially in regard to their experience of the parallel meanings of the word 'repression' (political, psychological). There is a persistence of some traits in patients and practitioners alike that are referable to past repression, such as the newness of verbal treatments, the inhibition of psychological curiosity, the ambivalent lure of certainty, and the pressure of authoritarian introjects. It is noted that psychoanalysis has its own history of a posture opposed to pluralism and diversity, which deepens the dialogue on the mutual engagement between psychoanalysis and the vicissitudes of its history in Russian culture.     

The psychological bases of ideology and prejudice: testing a dual process model

The issue of personality and prejudice has been largely investigated in terms of authoritarianism and social dominance orientation. However, these seem more appropriately conceptualized as ideological attitudes than as personality dimensions. The authors describe a causal model linking dual dimensions of personality, social world view, ideological attitudes, and intergroup attitudes. Structural equation modeling with data from American and White Afrikaner students supported the model, suggesting that social conformity and belief in a dangerous world influence authoritarian attitudes, whereas toughmindedness and belief in a competitive jungle world influence social dominance attitudes, and these two ideological attitude dimensions influence intergroup attitudes. The model implies that dual motivational and cognitive processes, which may be activated by different kinds of situational and intergroup dynamics, may underlie 2 distinct dimensions of prejudice.     

Action-based and vision-based selection of input: Two sources of control

In the first part of this paper we review evidence suggesting that there exists a mechanism that selects input on the basis of its similarity to the required action. This response-based input selection differs from the more established space- and object-based input selection in that it is not constrained by the structure of the input. Our evidence suggests that the two-choice Stroop effect is caused by this response-based selection mechanism. By contrast, it is known that the flanker effect is determined by the space- and object- based selection mechanisms. We explore whether the conflict resolution of the Stroop and flanker tasks is different as well by embedding these two tasks in a PRP (Psychological Refractory Period) paradigm. We show that the Stroop and the PRP effects are additive whereas the flanker and the PRP effects are underadditive, suggesting that the processes in charge of the conflict resolution in the Stroop and the flanker tasks are indeed different. We discuss possible reasons for this difference, and discuss possible ways in which the response-based mechanism can be implemented in information processing models.