Coordinating perspectives: De se and taste attitudes in communication

The received picture of linguistic communication understands communication as the transmission of information from speaker's head to hearer's head. This picture is in conflict with the attractive Lewisian view of belief as self-location, which is motivated by de se attitudes – first-personal attitudes about oneself – as well as attitudes about subjective matters such as personal taste. In this paper, I provide a solution to the conflict that reconciles these views. I argue for an account of mental attitudes and communication on which mental content and speech act content is understood as sets of multicentered worlds – roughly, possible worlds ‘centered’ on a sequence of individuals at a time. I develop a Stalnakerian model of communication based on multicentered worlds content, and I provide a suitable semantics for personal pronouns and predicates of personal taste. The resulting picture is one on which the point of conversation is the coordination of individual perspectives.     

Examination of emotional Stroop interference in obsessive-compulsive disorder

Previous research has produced conflicting findings on whether or not patients with subclinical or manifest obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) share an attentional bias for anxiety-related material. In the present study, 35 OCD patients were compared with 20 healthy controls on their performance in an emotional Stroop paradigm. Nine different stimulus conditions were compiled, including sets for depression-related and anxiety-related words as well as stimuli from two constructs with a potential relevance for the pathogenesis and maintenance of OCD symptomatology: responsibility and conscientiousness. Patients did not show enhanced interference for any of the conditions. Syndrome subtype and severity, avoidance and speed of information processing did not moderate results. The present study concurs with most prior research that OCD patients display no interference effect for general threat words. It deserves further consideration, that emotional interference effects in OCD as seen in other anxiety disorders occur when using idiosyncratic word material with a direct relation to the individual's primary concerns.     

Trauma and autobiographical memory specificity in depressed inpatients

Research on autobiographical memory has shown that clinical depression is associated with a difficulty in retrieving specific autobiographical memories in response to cue words. This study examined the relation between lack of autobiographical memory specificity and self-reported trauma in a group of depressed adults (N = 23). In addition to the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT; Williams & Broadbent, 1986) participants completed a number of questionnaires assessing the presence of traumatic experiences in the past, level of depression and neuroticism. The number of specific responses was not related to depression severity, but was significantly associated with the presence and severity of reported physical abuse. Participants who had been victim of physical abuse were less specific than participants who had not been confronted with such physical adversities. The results are discussed in the context of a functional hypothesis about the developmental relations between memory specificity, trauma and depression.     

Valence of distractor words increases the effects of irrelevant speech on serial recall

Participants memorized target words in silence or while ignoring neutral or valent (positive or negative) distractor words that could be either possessor-relevant or other-relevant. Distractor words impaired recall performance, but valent distractor words caused more disruption than neutral distractors, and negative distractors caused more disruption than positive distractors. The results are problematic for explanations of the irrelevant speech effect within working memory models that do not specify an explicit role of attention in the maintenance of information for immediate serial recall.     

Stoic pantheism

This essay argues the Stoics are rightly regarded as pantheists. Their view differs from many forms of pantheism by accepting the notion of a personal god who exercises divine providence. Moreover, Stoic pantheism is utterly inimical to a deep ecology ethic. I argue that these features are nonetheless consistent with the claim that they are pantheists. The essay also considers the arguments offered by the Stoics. They thought that their pantheistic conclusion was an extension of the best science of their day. Some of their most interesting arguments are thusa posteriori     

Immunizing the self: self-concept stabilization through reality-adaptive self-definitions

Processes of self-concept immunization are introduced as a way of reconciling self-concept protection against threatening information with the necessity of acknowledging own failure or losses. Self-immunization works by adaptively changing the subjective operationalization of personal traits, such that skills that individuals believe themselves to be good at are conceived as highly diagnostic, whereas skills that persons do not believe they possess are considered less diagnostic. Three studies are presented to investigate this stabilizing process. Correlational as well as experimental and longitudinal data support the assumption that self-immunization stabilizes central and abstract aspects of the self-concept without ignoring negative information on concrete skills.     

Reality monitoring and metacognitive beliefs related to cognitive confidence in obsessive-compulsive disorder

The present study investigated general reality monitoring ability, and selective reality monitoring ability for anxiety relevant actions in a group of individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and a group of non-anxious controls. In addition, reality monitoring confidence was assessed, as well as specific meta-cognitive beliefs related to cognitive confidence (by means of the Meta-Cognitions Questionnaire (MCQ)). No differences were found between both groups in actual reality monitoring ability. Unlike previous studies, the reality monitoring task included actions that were related to the individual concerns of the OCD patients and were ideographically selected. Nevertheless, no differential reality monitoring effect was observed for the anxiety relevant stimuli. Data from the MCQ, however, revealed that OCD patients had less overall confidence in their memory for actions and their reality monitoring ability. Analysis of the confidence ratings of the reality monitoring task showed that this reduced confidence was restricted to the neutral actions. No differences were observed for patients that reported low or high frequencies of checking behaviour. The whole of these data do not support memory deficit models of OCD, but are in line with recent emphasis on the importance of memory confidence and other meta-cognitive beliefs in OCD.     

Estimating the valence of single stimuli: a new variant of the Affective Simon Task

In this article, a modified variant of the Affective Simon Task (AST; De Houwer & Eelen, 1998) is presented as a measure of implicit evaluations of single stimuli. In the AST, the words "good" or "bad" have to be given as responses depending on the color of the stimuli. The AST was combined with an evaluation task to increase the salience of the valence of the presented stimuli. Experiment 1 investigated evaluations of schematic faces showing emotional expressions. In Experiment 2 we measured the valence of artificial stimuli that acquired valence in a game context during the experiment. Both experiments confirm the validity of the modified AST. The results also revealed a dissociation between explicit and implicit evaluations.     

Age stereotypes in younger and older women: analyses of accommodative shifts with a sentence-priming task

A sentence-priming technique was used to examine whether older women (N = 39) share a more positive view of aging than younger women (N = 35). Situationally specified statements about older and younger persons were presented, followed either by a semantically related word, an unrelated word of the same valence, or a nonword. The accessibility of target words was measured by reaction times in a lexical decision task. Whereas a semantic priming effect for negatively connoted materials emerged for both groups, a priming effect for positively connoted materials was found for older women only. Furthermore, an affective priming effect was found for the older group, i.e., older women tended to respond relatively faster (slower) to semantically unrelated positive (negative) words following a sentence about an older person. The results are discussed within a coping-theoretical framework.     

Estimation of the MIRID: A program and a SAS-based approach

The MIRID CML program is a program for the estimation of the parameter values of two different componential IRT models: the Rasch—MIRID and the OPLM—MIRID (Butter, 1994; Butter, De Boeck, & Verhelst, 1998). To estimate the parameters of both models, the program uses a CML approach. The model parameters can also be estimated with a MML approach that can be implemented in PROC NLMIXED of SAS Version 8. Both the MIRID CML program and the MML SAS approach are explained and compared in a simulation study. The results showed that they did about equally well in estimating the values of the item parameters but that there were some differences in the estimation of the person parameters, as could be expected from the differential assumptions regarding the distribution of the persons. The SAS MML approach is much slower than the MIRID CML program, but it is more flexible.