Alternative approaches to equity: Dissonance reduction pro-social motivation and strategic accommodation

Reviews, compares and evaluates a self-justijication and a decision theoretical conceptualization of equity. It is argued that the latter approach reveals an important and often neglected distinction between equity as a goal of social interaction and equity as an interpersonal strategy employed in rhe pursuit of other valued goals. Associated problems of definition and measurement are discussed. After a review of relevant research it is concluded that equity serves predominantly as an accommodative interpersonal strategy, and that future research should focus on analyzing the various functional bases of equity, their relationships, and their eflects on behaviour.     

Improving Delivery Behaviors During Exposure for Pediatric OCD: A Multiple Baseline Training Trial With Community Therapists

This study tested whether a new training tool, the Exposure Guide (EG), improved in-session therapist behaviors (i.e., indicators of quality) that have been associated with youth outcomes in prior clinical trials of exposure therapy. Six therapists at a community mental health agency (CMHA) provided exposure therapy for 8 youth with obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). Using a nonconcurrent multiple baseline design with random assignment to baseline lengths of 6 to 16 weeks, therapists received gold-standard exposure therapy training with weekly consultation (baseline phase) followed by addition of EG training and feedback (intervention phase). The primary outcome was therapist behavior during in-session exposures, observed weekly using a validated coding system. Therapist behavior was evaluated in relation to a priori benchmarks derived from clinical trials. Additional outcomes included training feasibility/acceptability, therapist response to case vignettes and beliefs about exposure, and independent evaluator-rated clinical outcomes. Three therapists reached behavior benchmarks only during the EG (intervention) phase. Two therapists met benchmarks during the baseline phase; one of these subsequently moved away from benchmarks but met them again after starting the EG phase. Across all therapists, the percentage of weeks meeting benchmarks was significantly higher during the EG phase (86.4%) vs. the baseline phase (53.2%). Youth participants experienced significant improvement in OCD symptoms and global illness severity from pre- to posttreatment. Results provide initial evidence that adding the EG to gold-standard training can change in-session therapist behaviors in a CMHA setting.     

Toward a More Credible Understanding of Post-Traumatic Growth

Traditional research on post-traumatic growth has utilized methodologically flawed cross-sectional designs that involve retrospective assessments of post-traumatic growth. This has resulted in a majority of research in this field suffering from a lack of credibility and reliability. In this special issue, we present nine articles that seek to make innovative conceptual and methodological contributions with the goal of promoting better research practices on post-traumatic growth. In the introduction to this special issue, we provide an overview of these contributions, and discuss the implications of these articles both to improving future scholarship and to encouraging personality scientists to examine this important phenomenon in the years and decades to come.     

Bidirectional Links Between Teachers’ Disciplinary Practices,Students’ Peer Status,and Students’ Aggression in Kindergarten

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - This study examined bidirectional links between teachers’ disciplinary practices (punitive and educational), students’ peer status in...     

Boredom proneness,political orientation and adherence to social-distancing in the pandemic

Motivation and Emotion - Research recently showed that boredom proneness was associated with increased social distancing rule-breaking in a sample collected early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Here we...     

Expressivity results for deontic logics of collective agency

We use a deontic logic of collective agency to study reducibility questions about collective agency and collective obligations. The logic that is at the basis of our study is a multi-modal logic in the tradition of stit (‘sees to it that’) logics of agency. Our full formal language has constants for collective and individual deontic admissibility, modalities for collective and individual agency, and modalities for collective and individual obligations. We classify its twenty-seven sublanguages in terms of their expressive power. This classification enables us to investigate reducibility relations between collective deontic admissibility, collective agency, and collective obligations, on the one hand, and individual deontic admissibility, individual agency, and individual obligations, on the other.

     

Is Evidence Normative?

Philosophia - This paper defends the view that in a certain sense evidence is normative. Neither a bit of evidence nor the fact that it is evidence for a certain proposition is a normative fact,...