Victims,Their Stories,and Our Rights

Diana Meyers argues that breaking the silence of victims and attending to their stories are necessary steps towards realizing human rights. Yet using highly personal victims' stories to promote human rights raises significant moral concerns, hence Meyers suggests that before victims' stories can be accessed and used, it is morally imperative that requirements of informed consent and non‐retraumatization are secured. This article argues that while Meyers' proviso is important, and necessary, it may not be sufficient. First, one potential problem with seeking to secure “informed consent” is that one has to ask for the consent, and in the act of asking one is potentially retraumatizing the victim. Secondly, the assumption that victims have ownership right over their stories, which is a key premise in Meyers's argument, is much more problematic than may appear.     

Aggressive content and related defenses in Rorschach responses of children ages 6–14

The aim of this study was to test the psychoanalytic notion that there is a gradual progression with age from primary to secondary process thinking. Three cohorts of children, age 6, 9, and 12, were administered the Rorschach procedure at yearly intervals—twice for the oldest cohort and three times for the two younger ones. No support was found for the developmental hypothesis in terms of aggressive content of the responses and the related defenses. The expectation of more aggressive content at earlier ages, as a reflection of more primitive aggressive drives, was not confirmed.     

Pragmatic schemas and conditional reasoning in children

Solving problems involving conditional relationships has been postulated to play a central role in the development of deductive reasoning, which itself underpins much cognitive developmental theory. The traditional Piagetian and “natural logic” approaches to this topic have more recently been challenged by findings that are more readily explained in terms of the concept of pragmatic schemas. On this basis it was predicted that even young “pre-formal” children would be able to succeed in a Reduced Array Selection Task if the test statement (referring to a previously told story about bees living in a hive) was couched in such a way as to evoke an authorization or permission schema. This proved to be the case in the present study involving 54 nine- and ten-year-old children: The permission condition elicited 70% globally correct solutions, compared to the 11% elicited by the formal control condition. Moreover, this facilitatory effect of the permission condition carried over to a second trial conducted in a standard way across all the conditions.     

The Effect of an Irrelevant Premise on Temporal and Spatial Reasoning

The mental model theory of reasoning postulates that individuals reason by constructing models of the situation described by premises. The more models reasoners have to build, the harder a problem will be. Byrne and Johnson-Laird (1989) confirmed this prediction with spatial problems and Schaeken et al. (1996 a, b) with temporal ones. There is, however, a problem with these studies. All the multiple-model problems and some of the one-model problems contained an irrelevant premise. As Rips (1994) argues, it is possible that an irrelevant premise would complicate the search for a derivation. The present paper reports an experiment which explicitly manipulated the presence of such an irrelevant premise in both one-model and multiple-model problems. The results corroborate the predictions of the mental model theory.     

What's in a function?

In this paper we argue that Revision Rules, introduced by Anil Gupta and Nuel Belnap as a tool for the analysis of the concept of truth, also provide a useful tool for defining computable functions. This also makes good on Gupta's and Belnap's claim that Revision Rules provide a general theory of definition, a claim for which they supply only the example of truth. In particular we show how Revision Rules arise naturally from relaxing and generalizing a classical construction due to Kleene, and indicate how they can be employed to reconstruct the class of the general recursive functions. We also point at how Revision Rules can be employed to access non-minimal fixed points of partially defined computing procedures.I thank Nuel Belnap, Rich Thomason, Ken Manders, and Jamie Tappenden for much helpful advice given while I was trying to get clear on the ideas presented here. I also thank two anonymous referees for helpful comments and criticisms on an earlier version of this paper.     

At-risk children's causal inferences given emotional feedback and their understanding of the excuse-giving process

Italian male school children, ranging in age from 7 to 10 years, were identified as at-risk children on the basis of self-reports, teacher questionnaires, and peer nominations assessing aggression, emotional instability, and pro-social behaviour. Together with a normal control sample, these children participated in two studies guided by attribtional theory. In Study 1, following teacher emotional feedback of anger or sympathy for failure, attributional inferences regarding low ability or lack of effort as the cause of that failure were rated. In Study 2, controllable and uncontrollable causes of a social transgression were given, and participants rated the anticipated anger of the ‘victim’ and their intention to withhold or reveal the cause. Strong effects for both populations that were consistent with attributional predictions were reported. In addition, differences between the inferences, expectations, and behavioural intentions of the populations were found, with at-risk children being less likely to perceive sympathy as a cue for low ability, and anticipating more anger from others following a transgression, particularly when there was a ‘good’ (i.e. uncontrollable) reason for the broken social agreement. It was contended that the results support the social-cognitive approach to the understanding of mechanisms of risk and deviancy.     

Personality described by adjectives: The generalizability of the Big Five to the Italian lexical context

Two studies have been performed in the frame of the Big Five model to describe personality. In the first study, the most useful adjectives for describing personality have been selected, trying to adopt a procedure as objective and empirically driven as possible. The resulting pool of adjectives (n = 492) has been administered to a sample of 274 subjects to verify the emergence of the Big Five in the Italian context. In the second study the pool of original adjectives has been reduced to 260 adjectives selecting the most representative terms (with regard to the factorial structure that has emerged). This pool of 260 adjectives has been administered to a sample of 862 subjects, together with the NEO-PI and the BFQ to facilitate the interpretation of the resulting factorial structure. Results showed the emergence of an Italian Big Five factorial structure that resembles the ‘canonical’ Big Five, although some of the factors, viz. Agreeableness and Emotional Stability, emerged as ‘blended’ dimensions.     

Early emotional instability,prosocial behaviour,and aggression: some methodological aspects

The internal consistency of Emotional Instability, Prosocial Behaviour, and Aggression scales was examined in elementary school children aged between 7 and 10 years. Multiple informants (self-report, teacher rating, mother rating, and peer nomination) were obtained on the above three dimensions. Relationships between the scales were first examined within the single informant frame of reference and then between informants. The concurrent validity was assessed using sociometric measures (popularity, rejection, social impact, and social preference) and the Achenbach and Edelbrock Child Behavior Checklist (teacher and parent form). The results confirm the internal validity of the three scales measuring emotional instability, prosocial behaviour, and aggression in child self-report, teacher rating, and mother rating. The use of self-report measures seems promising within the multiple informant strategy of research on child behaviour. Correlational results show satisfactory concurrent validity for the three scales, especially for teacher rating and peer nomination. The strict relation between emotional instability and aggression poses problems of discriminant validity which need to be further investi gated.     

“Cuts in Action”: A High‐Density EEG Study Investigating the Neural Correlates of Different Editing Techniques in Film

In spite of their striking differences with real‐life perception, films are perceived and understood without effort. Cognitive film theory attributes this to the system of continuity editing, a system of editing guidelines outlining the effect of different cuts and edits on spectators. A major principle in this framework is the 180° rule, a rule recommendation that, to avoid spectators’ attention to the editing, two edited shots of the same event or action should not be filmed from angles differing in a way that expectations of spatial continuity are strongly violated. In the present study, we used high‐density EEG to explore the neural underpinnings of this rule. In particular, our analysis shows that cuts and edits in general elicit early ERP component indicating the registration of syntactic violations as known from language, music, and action processing. However, continuity edits and cuts‐across the line differ from each other regarding later components likely to be indicating the differences in spatial remapping as well as in the degree of conscious awareness of one's own perception. Interestingly, a time–frequency analysis of the occipital alpha rhythm did not support the hypothesis that such differences in processing routes are mainly linked to visual attention. On the contrary, our study found specific modulations of the central mu rhythm ERD as an indicator of sensorimotor activity, suggesting that sensorimotor networks might play an important role. We think that these findings shed new light on current discussions about the role of attention and embodied perception in film perception and should be considered when explaining spectators’ different experience of different kinds of cuts.