Ex‐offender Restrictions

Individuals convicted of crimes are often subject to numerous restrictions — on housing, employment, the vote, public assistance, and other goods — well after they have completed their sentences, and in some cases permanently. The question of whether — and if so, when — ex‐offender restrictions are morally permissible has received surprisingly little philosophical scrutiny. This article first examines the significance of completing punishment, of paying one's debt to society, and contends that when offenders' debts are paid, they should be restored to full standing as citizens. Thus all ex‐offender restrictions are presumptively unjustified. Nonconsequentialist defences of these restrictions are ultimately unsuccessful in defeating the presumption against them. In a limited range of cases, consequentialist considerations — namely, of risk reduction — may be sufficient to override the presumptive case against these restrictions. The article concludes by suggesting a number of criteria for assessing whether particular restrictive measures are permissible on grounds of risk reduction.     

Gesturing makes learning last

The gestures children spontaneously produce when explaining a task predict whether they will subsequently learn that task. Why? Gesture might simply reflect a child's readiness to learn a particular task. Alternatively, gesture might itself play a role in learning the task. To investigate these alternatives, we experimentally manipulated children's gesture during instruction in a new mathematical concept. We found that requiring children to gesture while learning the new concept helped them retain the knowledge they had gained during instruction. In contrast, requiring children to speak, but not gesture, while learning the concept had no effect on solidifying learning. Gesturing can thus play a causal role in learning, perhaps by giving learners an alternative, embodied way of representing new ideas. We may be able to improve children's learning just by encouraging them to move their hands.     

Individual differences in the perception of similarity and difference

Thematically related concepts like coffee and milk are judged to be more similar than thematically unrelated concepts like coffee and lemonade. We investigated whether thematic relations exert a small effect that occurs consistently across participants (i.e., a generalized model), or a large effect that occurs inconsistently across participants (i.e., an individualized model). We also examined whether difference judgments mirrored similarity or whether these judgments were, in fact, non-inverse. Five studies demonstrated the necessity of an individualized model for both perceived similarity and difference, and additionally provided evidence that thematic relations affect similarity more than difference. Results suggest that models of similarity and difference must be attuned to large and consistent individual variability in the weighting of thematic relations.     

Automatic vigilance for negative words in lexical decision and naming: comment on Larsen, Mercer, and Balota (2006)

An automatic vigilance hypothesis states that humans preferentially attend to negative stimuli, and this attention to negative valence disrupts the processing of other stimulus properties. Thus, negative words typically elicit slower color naming, word naming, and lexical decisions than neutral or positive words. Larsen, Mercer, and Balota analyzed the stimuli from 32 published studies, and they found that word valence was confounded with several lexical factors known to affect word recognition. Indeed, with these lexical factors covaried out, Larsen et al. found no evidence of automatic vigilance. The authors report a more sensitive analysis of 1011 words. Results revealed a small but reliable valence effect, such that negative words (e.g., "shark") elicit slower lexical decisions and naming than positive words (e.g., "beach"). Moreover, the relation between valence and recognition was categorical rather than linear; the extremity of a word's valence did not affect its recognition. This valence effect was not attributable to word length, frequency, orthographic neighborhood size, contextual diversity, first phoneme, or arousal. Thus, the present analysis provides the most powerful demonstration of automatic vigilance to date.     

Outcome summaries of latency‐based functional analyses conducted in hospital inpatient units

Latency‐based functional analysis (FA) may be a viable alternative to the standard, rate‐based, FA when frequently evoking problem behavior is not advisable. We conducted 18 latency‐based FAs of the problem behavior of children diagnosed with autism in inpatient hospital settings and identified functional relations during 44.4% (8 of 18) of latency‐based FAs. Implications for conducting FAs of severe problem behavior are discussed.     

A Framework for Valuing Investments in a Nurturing Society: Opportunities for Prevention Research

Investing in strategies that aim to build a more nurturing society offers tremendous opportunities for the field of prevention science. Yet, scientists struggle to consistently take their research beyond effectiveness evaluations and actually value the impact of preventive strategies. Ultimately, it is clear that convincing policymakers to make meaningful investments in children and youth will require estimates of the fiscal impact of such strategies across public service systems. The framework offered here values such investments. First, we review current public spending on children and families. Then, we describe how to quantify and monetize the impact of preventive interventions. This includes a new measurement strategy for assessing multisystem service utilization and a price list for key service provision from public education, social services, criminal justice, health care and tax systems.     

Exploring metaphor's epistemic function: Uncertainty moderates metaphor-consistent priming effects on social perceptions

Consistent with conceptual metaphor theory's claim that metaphors operate at a conceptual, and not just linguistic, level, prior research shows that priming perceptions related to concrete concepts influences perceptions related to dissimilar, more abstract concepts in metaphor-consistent ways. However, the theory's claim that metaphors function to reduce uncertainty about abstract concepts has yet to be experimentally assessed. Two studies tested whether situational variation in uncertainty moderates metaphor-consistent priming effects. Study 1 focused on the metaphor life is a path and showed that priming path perceptions (vs. literal representations) increased perceived autobiographical continuity only if uncertainty about personal identity was salient. Study 2 focused on verticality metaphors and showed that vertical orientation primes influenced satisfaction with the decision to attend one's current university in both directions (up is good, bad is down) only if uncertainty about the value of the college experience was salient.     

Fear and uncertainty in the face of death: The role of life after death in group identification

Terror management theory argues that mortality‐induced terror motivates group identification. Uncertainty–identity theory argues that uncertainty about what happens after death motivates group identification. Two experiments were conducted to test the latter reasoning. In Experiment 1 (n = 187), mortality salience was manipulated, and uncertainty about the afterlife was measured to predict national identification. As hypothesized, mortality salience strengthened identification only among those who were uncertain about the afterlife. In Experiment 2 (n = 177), mortality salience was manipulated as before, but belief in an afterlife was also manipulated—participants were primed to believe that there was an afterlife, there was not an afterlife, or the existence of an afterlife was uncertain. As in Experiment 1, mortality salience strengthened identification only among those who were existentially uncertain. These experiments show that uncertainty plays a significant role in reactions to mortality salience, and support uncertainty–identity theory's analysis of the role of self‐uncertainty in ideological conviction and group behavior. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Epistemic Side Constraints and the Structure of Epistemic Normativity

In this paper, I develop the notion of an epistemic side constraint in order to overcome one of the main challenges to a goal‐based approach to the structure of epistemic normativity. I argue that the rationale for such side constraints can be found in the work of John Locke and that his argument is best understood as the epistemic analog to David Gauthier's argument as to the rationality of being moral.