The Meaning of Being: Husserl on Existential Propositions as Predicative Propositions

Axiomathes - This essay examines how Husserl stretches the bounds of his philosophy of meaning, according to which all propositions are categorical, to account for existential propositions, which...     

Emotion Dysregulation and Eating Disorder Symptoms: Examining Distinct Associations and Interactions in Adolescents

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - Emotion dysregulation has been posited as a key transdiagnostic factor of mental health difficulties, including eating disorders. However, how...     

A Basic Bivariate Structure of Personality Attributes Evident Across Nine Languages

Here, two studies seek to characterize a parsimonious common‐denominator personality structure with optimal cross‐cultural replicability. Personality differences are observed in all human populations and cultures, but lexicons for personality attributes contain so many distinctions that parsimony is lacking. Models stipulating the most important attributes have been formulated by experts or by empirical studies drawing on experience in a very limited range of cultures. Factor analyses of personality lexicons of nine languages of diverse provenance (Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Turkish, Greek, Polish, Hungarian, Maasai, and Senoufo) were examined, and their common structure was compared to that of several prominent models in psychology. A parsimonious bivariate model showed evidence of substantial convergence and ubiquity across cultures. Analyses involving key markers of these dimensions in English indicate that they are broad dimensions involving the overlapping content of the interpersonal circumplex, models of communion and agency, and morality/warmth and competence. These “Big Two” dimensions—Social Self‐Regulation and Dynamism—provide a common‐denominator model involving the two most crucial axes of personality variation, ubiquitous across cultures. The Big Two might serve as an umbrella model serving to link diverse theoretical models and associated research literatures.     

State-based versus reward-based motivation in younger and older adults

Recent decision-making work has focused on a distinction between a habitual, model-free neural system that is motivated toward actions that lead directly to reward and a more computationally demanding goal-directed, model-based system that is motivated toward actions that improve one’s future state. In this article, we examine how aging affects motivation toward reward-based versus state-based decision making. Participants performed tasks in which one type of option provided larger immediate rewards but the alternative type of option led to larger rewards on future trials, or improvements in state. We predicted that older adults would show a reduced preference for choices that led to improvements in state and a greater preference for choices that maximized immediate reward. We also predicted that fits from a hybrid reinforcement-learning model would indicate greater model-based strategy use in younger than in older adults. In line with these predictions, older adults selected the options that maximized reward more often than did younger adults in three of the four tasks, and modeling results suggested reduced model-based strategy use. In the task where older adults showed similar behavior to younger adults, our model-fitting results suggested that this was due to the utilization of a win-stay–lose-shift heuristic rather than a more complex model-based strategy. Additionally, within older adults, we found that model-based strategy use was positively correlated with memory measures from our neuropsychological test battery. We suggest that this shift from state-based to reward-based motivation may be due to age related declines in the neural structures needed for more computationally demanding model-based decision making.     

Inferences from disclosures about the truth and falsity of expert testimony

Participants acting as mock jurors made inferences about whether a person was a suspect in a murder based on an expert's testimony about the presence of objects at the crime scene and the disclosure that the testimony was true or false. Experiment 1 showed that participants made more correct inferences, and made inferences more quickly, when the truth or falsity of the expert's testimony was disclosed immediately after the testimony rather than when the disclosure was delayed. Experiment 2 showed no advantage for prior disclosure over immediate disclosure. Experiment 3 showed that the pattern of inferences when there was no disclosure mirrored the pattern when it was disclosed that the expert's testimony was true rather than false. Participants made more correct inferences from true conjunctions than disjunctions, and from false disjunctions than conjunctions. We discuss the implications for theories of the mental representations and cognitive processes that underlie human reasoning.     

Religion and Life Satisfaction: A Correlational Study of Undergraduate Students in Trinidad

Journal of Religion and Health - Religious behaviour tends to correlate positively with life satisfaction. The predictive power of this relationship is associated with various socio-demographic...