Do Critical Thinkers Drink Too Much Alcohol,Forget to Do Class Assignments,or Cheat on Exams? Using a Critical Thinking Measure to Predict College Students’ Real-World Outcomes

Critical thinking is a higher-order way of reasoning composed of the skill and will to use cognitive abilities and knowledge on a daily basis. It is identified as essential by higher education institutions, corporations, and society in general. To analyze whether college students are critical thinkers in their daily lives, the Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment (HCTA; Halpern in Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment (Measurement instrument), Schuhfried, Mödling, 2012) and the real-world outcomes inventory (RWO; Butler in Appl Cogn Psychol 26(5):721–729, 2012) were administered to 238 students. We performed a cluster analysis (K-means-constrained clustering method), and ANOVAs for each cluster solution tested to identify the most suitable clustering solution, taking the RWO inventory dimensions as dependent variables and cluster membership as an independent variable. Four separate clusters emerged, each representing a different profile related to students’ everyday negative outcomes resulting from a lack of critical thinking. We performed multinomial logistic regression to examine which dimensions of the HCTA test, as well as gender, age, and disciplinary area, predicted the four singular groups of students that emerged: “Mature,” “Risk-taking,” “Lost in translation,” and “Reflective.” Results indicate that: (1) age is a relevant predictor of slackness, rashness, and health neglect, all characteristics of “Mature” students; (2) students who are particularly skilled in hypothesis testing tend to be “Risk-taking,” while it is less likely that students who are specifically competent in argument analysis will be in this group; (3) gender is relevant to predict “Lost in translation” students, while argument analysis is negatively related to the chances of being in this group. Our study supports the relevance of critical thinking in daily decisions and everyday outcomes.     

Workplace bullying and its relation with work characteristics, personality, and post-traumatic stress symptoms: an integrated model

Workplace bullying refers to prolonged exposure to frequent hostile behaviors at work, which can lead to severe stress reactions. Research in this area has not revealed a clear picture on how bullying escalates in organizations. Drawing on recent developments in work stress theory, this study tested a comprehensive model of bullying in which work environmental and personality factors were hypothesized to act as antecedents of bullying and post-traumatic stress symptoms as an outcome. Structural equation modeling on data provided by 609 public sector employees in Italy showed that job demands (workload and role conflict) and job resources (decision authority, co-worker support and salary/promotion prospects) were related to bullying over and above neuroticism, and that bullying mediated the relationship between job demands and PTSD symptoms. Evidence also emerged for a buffering effect of job resources on the job demands-bullying relationship. Overall results are compatible with a view of bullying as a strain phenomenon, initiated by both work environmental and personality factors.     

Ferenczi and Winnicott: Searching for a “Missing Link” (of the Soul)

The aim of this paper is to present the close link between Ferenczi's and Winnicott's theoretical, clinical and therapeutic thought, indicating how this link has become something of a “missing link” in the history of psychoanalytic ideas, an implication which we retain, in part, to this day. In the first part entitled “Who's speaking to whom?”, I aim to explore the contents of the most essential parts of their messages, stressing the similarities and differences between them, and citing the most important authors whom they address (Freud for Ferenczi, Klein for Winnicott). In the second part, I aim to tackle the general direction underlying both their work and their lives, concentrating specifically on “the maternal”, and examining the repercussions of this aspect on psychoanalytic technique and practice. In the third part, as a kind of “Parting”, I will present further brief conclusions on the relevance and significance of their thoughts in modern day psychoanalysis, defining Ferenczi and Winnicott as “founders of future discursiveness”.     

The conjunction fallacy and interference effects

In the present article we consider the conjunction fallacy, a well known cognitive fallacy experimentally tested in cognitive science, which occurs for intuitive judgments. We show that the quantum formalism can be used to describe, in a very simple way, this fallacy, in terms of interference effect. We provide evidence that the quantum formalism leads quite naturally to violations of the joint probability rule of classic probability when considering the estimated probability of the conjunction of two events. By defining the concept of maximal conjunction error, we find a good agreement with experimental results. Thus we suggest that in cognitive science the formalism of quantum mechanics can be used to describe a quantum regime, where the cognitive fallacies and heuristics are valid.     

Determinants of Flu Vaccination among Nurses: The Effects of Group Identification and Professional Responsibility

Five hundred and thirty-one nurses completed a questionnaire assessing knowledge about the flu and flu vaccination, professional group identification, perception of the flu vaccination as a professional duty, previous year's vaccination status, intention to receive vaccination in the following year, and the extent to which motivation to accept vaccination is primarily for self-protection or for patient protection. Results showed that knowledge about the flu and flu vaccination constitutes a major reason for rejecting immunisation. Group identification also constitutes an independent predictor of vaccination. Furthermore, the effect of identification on willingness to receive the vaccination was partially mediated by perceived professional responsibility: the more nurses identified with their group, the more they perceived vaccination as a professional duty and, as a consequence, the more likely that they (a) had been vaccinated the previous year, (b) intended to be vaccinated in the following year, and (c) were motivated to be vaccinated for patient protection (but not for self-protection).     

Mental number line disruption in a right-neglect patient after a left-hemisphere stroke

A right-neglect patient with focal left-hemisphere damage to the posterior superior parietal lobe was assessed for numerical knowledge and tested on the bisection of numerical intervals and visual lines. The semantic and verbal knowledge of numbers was preserved, whereas the performance in numerical tasks that strongly emphasize the visuo-spatial layout of numbers (e.g. number bisection) was impaired. The behavioral pattern of error in the two bisection tasks mirrored the one previously described in left-neglect patients. In other words, our patient misplaced the subjective midpoint (numerical or visual) to the left as function of the interval size. These data, paired with the patient's lesion site are strictly consistent with the tripartite organization of number-related processes in the parietal lobes as proposed by Dehaene and colleagues. According to these authors, the posterior superior parietal lobe on both hemispheres underpins the attentional orientation on the putative mental number line, the horizontal segment of the intraparietal sulcus is bilaterally related to the semantic of the numerical domain, whereas the left angular gyrus subserves the verbal knowledge of numbers. In summary, our results suggest that the processes involved in the navigation along the mental number line, which are related to the parietal mechanisms for spatial attention, and the processes involved in the semantic and verbal knowledge of numbers, are dissociable.