How Preschoolers Associate Power with Gender in Male-Female Interactions: A Cross-Cultural Investigation

Sex Roles - Interactions between males and females often display a power imbalance. Men tend to adopt more dominant physical postures, lead conversations more, and are more likely to impose their...     

Applying Community-Based Participatory Approaches to Addressing Health Disparities and Promoting Health Equity

This special issue highlights work that contributes to our understanding of health disparities and community-based participatory research (CBPR) approaches to promoting health equity across diverse populations and issues that matter to communities. We take on a global perspective, and thus, various efforts across international contexts are illustrated. Articles elucidate a variety of CBPR approaches designed to empower and build capacity among individuals and communities in order to seek changes at the level of community practices, programs, and systems. These articles span across diverse populations—children, youth, and families; adults and older adults; immigrants; refugees; Black people; Latinx people; Native Americans/Indigenous people, the Roma community; Muslim women, and women with disabilities—experiencing inequities of interest to community psychologists and other researchers and practitioners.     

Artificial Moral Agents: A Survey of the Current Status

Science and Engineering Ethics - One of the objectives in the field of artificial intelligence for some decades has been the development of artificial agents capable of coexisting in harmony with...     

Subject,enjoyment, hegemony: a discussion of Ernesto Laclau’s interpretation of empty signifiers and the real as impossible in Lacanian psychoanalysis

Continental Philosophy Review - Ernesto Laclau’s theory of hegemony interprets in a peculiar way two central concepts of Lacanian psychoanalysis: the signifier and the real. Laclau maintains...     

Latent inhibition and contextual associations

Attenuated responding to a conditioned stimulus (CS) after preexposure to that CS (latent inhibition) has traditionally been attributed to reductions in CS associability. Alternatively, CS-context associations formed during CS preexposure later interfere with the acquisition or expression of CS-outcome associations. Three lick suppression experiments with rats contrasted these accounts. Presumably, exposure to the context attenuates the CS-context association without altering CS associability. With a fixed amount of CS preexposure, latent inhibition decreased with increasing context exposure during or after (but not before) CS preexposure. When the ratio of context preexposure duration to CS preexposure was fixed, latent inhibition increased with CS preexposure. These results suggest that latent inhibition is a direct function of the strength of CS-context associations formed during preexposure.     

Mechanisms of predictive and diagnostic causal induction

In predictive causal inference, people reason from causes to effects, whereas in diagnostic inference, they reason from effects to causes. Independently of the causal structure of the events, the temporal structure of the information provided to a reasoner may vary (e.g., multiple events followed by a single event vs. a single event followed by multiple events). The authors report 5 experiments in which causal structure and temporal information were varied independently. Inferences were influenced by temporal structure but not by causal structure. The results are relevant to the evaluation of 2 current accounts of causal induction, the Rescorla-Wagner (R. A. Rescorla & A. R. Wagner, 1972) and causal model theories (M. R. Waldmann & K. J. Holyoak, 1992).     

The face in the crowd revisited: a threat advantage with schematic stimuli

Schematic threatening, friendly, and neutral faces were used to test the hypothesis that humans preferentially orient their attention toward threat. Using a visual search paradigm, participants searched for discrepant faces in matrices of otherwise identical faces. Across 5 experiments, results consistently showed faster and more accurate detection of threatening than friendly targets. The threat advantage was obvious regardless of whether the conditions favored parallel or serial search (i.e., involved neutral or emotional distractors), and it was valid for inverted faces. Threatening angry faces were more quickly and accurately detected than were other negative faces (sad or "scheming"), which suggests that the threat advantage can be attributed to threat rather than to the negative valence or the uniqueness of the target display.     

Informal versus formal mathematics

We discuss Kunen’s algorithmic implementation of a proof for the Paris–Harrington theorem, and the author’s and da Costa’s proposed “exotic” formulation for the P = NP hypothesis. Out of those two examples we ponder the relation between mathematics within an axiomatic framework, and intuitive or informal mathematics. The author is Visiting Researcher at IEA/USP, Professor of Communications, Emeritus, at the Federal University in Rio de Janeiro, and a full member of the Brazilian Academy of Philosophy.     

Procrastination: Different time orientations reflect different motives

Because procrastination concerns a person’s ability to meet deadlines, temporal dimension is clearly important to this personality construct. In the present study, the characteristic profile of arousal and avoidant motives of procrastinators were related to past, present, and future time conceptions. Participants (140 women, 135 men; mean age = 49.4, SD = 5.55) completed measures of arousal and avoidance procrastination, and time orientation. Results indicated that avoidant procrastination was associated negatively with present-fatalistic time orientation, and arousal procrastination was associated positively with present-hedonist and negatively with future time orientations. The variance accounted for by time orientations was modest, yet provides further evidence that there are distinct motives for chronic procrastination.     

Morningness in German and Spanish students: a comparative study

Humans show pronounced individual differences in circadian orientation. Transcultural comparisons are interesting since biological (or environmental) factors together with cultural ones may contribute to differences in morningness–eveningness. We compared Spanish and German undergraduates using the Composite Scale of Morningness (CSM) to assess circadian preferences. Confirmatory and multiple groups confirmatory factor analysis were used to assess factor structure and structural invariance across countries. The results showed that a three‐factor model of morningness best characterises the CSM structure of both samples. Partial factorial invariance (factor loadings) across countries was demonstrated for the factors ‘morningness’ and ‘morning alertness’. Scores of both factors were higher in German students. Potential cultural and biological explanations for the differences are discussed. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.