“Two Jews walk into a Coffeehouse”: the “Jewish question,” utility, and political participation in late eighteenth-century Livorno

This article examines the distinct ways in which the Jewish condition was perceived during the Enlightenment in the port city of Livorno, arguing that the privileged status of certain mercantile Jewish communities could be a force for conservatism and not necessarily a trigger of emancipation. On the basis of literary and governmental sources, including the little-known ironic philosophical dialogue Les Juifs (Livorno, 1786), and an analysis of Tuscan municipal reforms, it appears that Livorno offers an alternative model of integration to the better-known Prussian and French cases. The Tuscan government and intellectual elite did not consider the useful Livornese minority in need either “to be improved” or better “integrated into society,” and thus the Enlightenment critiques of Jewish society typical of French and Prussian reformers and the calls for Jewish self-improvement that characterized the Haskalah are not applicable to Livorno. However, the notion of utility that defined the Livornese community during the Old Regime was not a station on the road to emancipation. Jewish utility in Livorno did not bring about greater civil rights for individual Livornese Jews. Rather in both function and perception, it contributed to the arrested political integration of Livornese Jewry in the 1780s compared to events in all other Tuscan Jewish communities     

Persons with acquired brain injury and multiple disabilities access stimulation independently through microswitch-based technology

The possibility of enabling two adults with acquired brain injury and profound multiple disabilities to use microswitch-based technology to attain preferred environmental stimuli on their own was assessed. Each of the participants was provided with two microswitches that could be activated by right and left head-turning or head-bending responses. The microswitches were introduced sequentially according to a multiple probe design across microswitches (responses) and allowed access to different sets of auditory or visual stimuli. Eventually, the two microswitches were made available simultaneously. Sessions lasted 5 min. Each participant learned to use the two microswitches successfully and maintained consistent levels of responding when they were simultaneously available. During this phase, both participants showed large within-session variations in their right and left response frequencies, with one of them showing an overall prevalence of the left-side response. The importance of assistive technology within programs for persons with acquired brain injury and multiple disabilities is discussed.     

Recognition and mental manipulation of body parts dissociate in locked-in syndrome

Several lines of evidence demonstrate that the motor system is involved in motor simulation of actions, but some uncertainty exists about the consequences of lesions of descending motor pathways on mental imagery tasks. Moreover, recent findings suggest that the motor system could also have a role in recognition of body parts. To address these issues in the present study we assessed patients with a complete damage of descending motor pathways (locked-in syndrome, LIS) on the hand laterality task, requiring subjects to decide whether a hand stimulus in a given spatial orientation represents a left or a right hand. LIS patients were less accurate than healthy controls in judging hand laterality; more importantly, LIS patients’ performance was modulated by spatial orientation of hand stimuli whereas it was not affected by biomechanical constraints. These findings demonstrate a dissociation between spared hand recognition and impaired access to action simulation processes in LIS patients.     

Attentional distractor interference may be diminished by concurrent working memory load in normal participants and traumatic brain injury patients

A reduction in congruency effects under working memory (WM) load has been previously described using different attentional paradigms (e.g.,  and ). One hypothesis is that different types of WM load have different effects on attentional selection, depending on whether a specific memory load demands resources in common with target or distractor processing. In particular, if information in WM is related to the distractors in the selective attention task, there is a reduction in distraction (Kim et al., 2005). However, although previous results seem to point to a decrease in interference under high WM load conditions (Kim et al., 2005), the lack of a neutral baseline for the congruency effects makes it difficult to differentiate between a decrease in interference or in facilitation. In the present work we included neutral trials in the task introduced by Kim et al. (2005) and tested normal participants and traumatic brain injury patients. Results support a reduction in the processing of distractors under WM load, at least for incongruent trials in both groups. Theoretical as well as applied implications are discussed.     

Non‐instrumental voice and extra‐role behaviour

The instrumental power associated with voicing opinions to an authority was manipulated to observe the effects upon subsequent discretionary, extra‐role behaviours. In two experiments, the provision of non‐instrumental voice increased extra‐role behaviours above a no voice condition. Experiment 2 also showed that this relationship was mediated by procedural‐justice perceptions, but not respect from, or social identification with, the group. The implications of these data for current theory, as well as the possible moderating role of social identification, are discussed. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The dark side of creativity: original thinkers can be more dishonest

Creativity is a common aspiration for individuals, organizations, and societies. Here, however, we test whether creativity increases dishonesty. We propose that a creative personality and a creative mindset promote individuals' ability to justify their behavior, which, in turn, leads to unethical behavior. In 5 studies, we show that participants with creative personalities tended to cheat more than less creative individuals and that dispositional creativity is a better predictor of unethical behavior than intelligence (Experiment 1). In addition, we find that participants who were primed to think creatively were more likely to behave dishonestly than those in a control condition (Experiment 2) and that greater ability to justify their dishonest behavior explained the link between creativity and increased dishonesty (Experiments 3 and 4). Finally, we demonstrate that dispositional creativity moderates the influence of temporarily priming creativity on dishonest behavior (Experiment 5). The results provide evidence for an association between creativity and dishonesty, thus highlighting a dark side of creativity.     

First,get your feet wet: The effects of learning from direct and indirect experience on team creativity

How does prior experience influence team creativity? We address this question by examining the effects of task experience acquired directly and task experience acquired vicariously from others on team creativity in a product-development task. Across three laboratory studies, we find that direct task experience leads to higher levels of team creativity and more divergent products than indirect task experience. Moreover, our results show that the difference in team creativity between direct and indirect task experience persists over time. Finally, our findings demonstrate that transactive memory systems fully mediate the effect of direct task experience on team creativity. Teams who acquired task experience directly are more creative because they develop better transactive memory systems than teams who acquired experience vicariously. We discuss how our findings contribute to understanding the effects of prior experience on team creativity, and the role of transactive memory systems in creative tasks.     

Increases in Intrusion Errors and Working Memory Deficit of Poor Comprehenders

This study tests the hypothesis that the ability to inhibit already processed and actually irrelevant information could influence performance in the listening span test (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980) and have a crucial role in reading comprehension. In two experiments, the listening span test and a new working memory test were given to two groups of young adults, poor and good comprehenders, matched for logical reasoning ability. In Experiment 1, the poor comprehenders had a significantly lower performance in the listening span test associated to a higher number of intrusions-that is, recalled words that, in spite of being in sentence form, were not placed in the last position. In Experiment 2, a new working memory test was devised in order to analyse more effectively the occurrence of intrusions. Subjects were required to listen to a growing series of strings of animal and non-animal words. Whilst listening, they had to detect when an animal word occurred, and at the end of each series they had to recall the last word of each string. The poor comprehenders obtained a significantly lower performance in the memory task and made a higher number of intrusions, particularly of animal words.