Dispositional bases of self-serving positive evaluations

Positive orientation (POS) is the name given to the latent dimension common to self-esteem, optimism and life satisfaction. Earlier findings attest to the trait-like nature of POS and to its unique contribution to well-adjustment across domains of functioning. The present study investigates the extent to which POS accounts for individuals’ tendency to distort their self-assessment in a positive direction. Taking a class of students (N = 190) at the beginning of their academic year, POS predicted the individuals’ tendency to perform academically better-than-average (BTA) peers. POS accounted for BTA beyond what is merely due to self-esteem, life satisfaction and optimism.     

Power in mixed-sex stranger interactions

The authors tested the approach/inhibition theory of power by examining teasing interactions between women and men in conditions in which either one was given elevated power or they were in an equal-power control condition. Consistent with hypotheses, high-power individuals behaved in a disinhibited fashion and were less accurate judges of their partner's emotion, whereas low-power individuals behaved in a more inhibited, indirect fashion and reported more self-conscious/anxiety-related emotion. Additional contrast analyses revealed only modest support for the claim that men would act in powerful fashion in the absence of explicit power differences, and that power-based differences were greatest when the man had power over the woman. Discussion focuses on different perspectives on the interaction between power and gender.     

Lattice dynamics of ordered and disordered Cu3 Au with a tight-binding potential model

Abstract

The phonon dispersion curves for both ordered and configurationally disordered cubic phases of Cu₃Au are calculated using force constants derived from a many-body tight-binding potential. The derived phonon frequency spectra are used to estimate the vibrational contribution to the entropy difference between the two phases. A brief discussion concerning the relative values of interatomic force constants is included.     

What is so special about embodied simulation?

Simulation theories of social cognition abound in the literature, but it is often unclear what simulation means and how it works. The discovery of mirror neurons, responding both to action execution and observation, suggested an embodied approach to mental simulation. Over the past few years this approach has been hotly debated and alternative accounts have been proposed. We discuss these accounts and argue that they fail to capture the uniqueness of embodied simulation (ES). ES theory provides a unitary account of basic social cognition, demonstrating that people reuse their own mental states or processes represented with a bodily format in functionally attributing them to others.     

Voters and leaders in the mirror of politics: similarity in personality and voting choice in Italy and Spain

Relations between voting choice and similarity in traits between voters and political candidates are examined in two studies. The first study was conducted in Spain, where the personalities of Mariano Rajoy and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero were assessed. The second study was conducted in Italy, where the politicians assessed were Walter Veltroni and Silvio Berlusconi. Results show in both cases a similarity between voters' self-reported personality and their appraisals of the leaders of the party for which they voted. Similarity is generally higher with respect to traits that are the most distinctive for each platform and its leader. The findings show a higher similarity between voters and their leaders on the markers of agreeableness, such as "loyal" and "sincere." Findings hold across countries and political figures, demonstrating the role that personal characteristics of both voters and candidates play in orienting political preference.     

Die Welt und die Evidenz. Zu Husserls Erledigung des Cartesianismus

This paper aims to show that Husserl’s thought represents a dismissal of Cartesianism. I argue that at the basis of Husserl’s thought lies an account of perception and evidence that is completely different from Descartes’. Anticipating an insight which will be developed by analytical philosophy, Husserl claims that a perception or evidence can be called into question only on the basis of other perceptions and evidences. Indeed, all questioning of a single perception or evidence presupposes that perception and evidence are reliable and cannot concern perception and evidence as such, but only their single instances. Therefore, phenomenological reduction is not a methodological doubt, and Husserl’s cogito has a different meaning from Descartes’ cogito. This approach is based on an account of reality, at the core of which lies the identification between what is real and what is experienceable, but it does not lead to a reduction of things to consciousness.     

Neural theory for the perception of causal actions

The efficient prediction of the behavior of others requires the recognition of their actions and an understanding of their action goals. In humans, this process is fast and extremely robust, as demonstrated by classical experiments showing that human observers reliably judge causal relationships and attribute interactive social behavior to strongly simplified stimuli consisting of simple moving geometrical shapes. While psychophysical experiments have identified critical visual features that determine the perception of causality and agency from such stimuli, the underlying detailed neural mechanisms remain largely unclear, and it is an open question why humans developed this advanced visual capability at all. We created pairs of naturalistic and abstract stimuli of hand actions that were exactly matched in terms of their motion parameters. We show that varying critical stimulus parameters for both stimulus types leads to very similar modulations of the perception of causality. However, the additional form information about the hand shape and its relationship with the object supports more fine-grained distinctions for the naturalistic stimuli. Moreover, we show that a physiologically plausible model for the recognition of goal-directed hand actions reproduces the observed dependencies of causality perception on critical stimulus parameters. These results support the hypothesis that selectivity for abstract action stimuli might emerge from the same neural mechanisms that underlie the visual processing of natural goal-directed action stimuli. Furthermore, the model proposes specific detailed neural circuits underlying this visual function, which can be evaluated in future experiments.