From empathy to action: Can enhancing host‐society children's empathy promote positive attitudes and prosocial behaviour toward refugees?

Over half of refugees are school‐aged children. In host communities, children's attitudes and behaviours are important for the integration of refugee children. This study examines the empathy–attitudes–action model in middle childhood (N = 94, 8 to 11 years old). In both the experimental and control conditions, children were introduced to a (fictional) refugee and told that he or she would be moving to their school. The experimental condition also listened to a storybook about the child's refugee experience. Empathy, outgroup attitudes, and prosocial behaviour toward the incoming child, and refugees as a group, were measured. Although mediation was not supported, the storybook condition reported more empathy and helping intentions, and attitudes predicted helping intentions but not giving to refugees. Results highlight how host‐society children can welcome refugees.     

Is Democratic Toleration a Rubber Duck?

Democratic politicians face pressures unknown to the prerogative rulers of the early modern period when toleration was first formulated as a political ideal. These pressures are less often expressed as demands by groups or individuals for the permission of practices they dislike than for their restraint or outright prohibition; tolerant dispositions are less politically clamorous. The executive structure of toleration as a virtue, together with the ‘fact of reasonable pluralism’, make conflicts over toleration peculiarly intractable. Political conflicts are apt to take the form of mutual allegations ofintolerance; indeed, the problem of ‘tolerating the intolerant’, far from being a marginal case, is central to the theory and practice of toleration. Toleration thus exemplifies a category mistake committed in much contemporary political theory, particularly in its contractualist versions: the threshold of the political lies precisely where rational agreement proves impossible. The main prospects for democratic toleration are thus pre-emptive. The main way in which this can happen is by cultivating executive dispositions: in other words, encouraging people to detach themselves from strong evaluative commitments, so that toleration does not become politically contentious to start with. But this involves losses as well as gains. The gains in civil harmony and peace are obvious. The cost for tolerant political actors is alienation from what they have good reason to value. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The Semantic Theory of Truth: Field’s Incompleteness Objection

According to Field’s influential incompleteness objection, Tarski’s semantic theory of truth is unsatisfactory since the definition that forms its basis is incomplete in two distinct senses: (1) it is physicalistically inadequate, and for this reason, (2) it is conceptually deficient. In this paper, I defend the semantic theory of truth against the incompleteness objection by conceding (1) but rejecting (2). After arguing that Davidson and McDowell’s reply to the incompleteness objection fails to pass muster, I argue that, within the constraints of a non-reductive physicalism and a holism concerning the concepts of truth, reference and meaning, conceding Field’s physicalistic inadequacy conclusion while rejecting his conceptual deficiency conclusion is a promising reply to the incompleteness objection.

Generation and mnemonic encoding induce a mirror effect in the DRM paradigm

Encoding tasks that increase memory accuracy are appealing from both practical and theoretical perspectives. Within the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm, we found that generating list words from anagrams (relative to reading) produced a mirror effect: enhanced recognition of studied words coupled with a reduction in false recognition. Signal detection analyses suggest that the increase in correct recognition was due to enhanced item-specific encoding of the list words, whereas the reduction in false recognition was due to enhanced strategic monitoring at test (i.e., a distinctiveness heuristic), rather than to reduced relational encoding at study. Further support for a distinctiveness heuristic account was obtained using both "theme judgment" instructions and within-group conditions. In our final experiment, we replicated this mirror effect using a purely mnemonic (self-referential) encoding task, showing that extra perceptual cues are not necessary to induce participants to adopt a successful memory-improvement strategy at test.     

The Epidemiology of Homicide followed by Suicide: A Systematic and Quantitative Review

This systematic review of population based studies of homicide followed by suicide was conducted to examine the associations between rates of homicide‐suicide, rates of other homicides and rates of suicide. The review analysed 64 samples, including the case of an outlier (Greenland) that were reported in 49 studies. There was a significant association between the rates of homicide‐suicide and those of other homicides in studies from the U.S.A. Outside the U.S.A. there was no clear association between homicide‐suicide and other homicide but there was modest but significant association between rates of suicide and homicide‐suicide. Homicide‐suicide appears to be closer in epidemiological terms to homicide than suicide in regions with high rates of homicide and measures to reduce homicide in these regions may also reduce homicide‐suicide.     

Assessing the costs and benefits of production in recognition

The production effect is a memory advantage for items studied aloud over items studied silently. Although it typically is found within subjects, here we also obtained it between subjects in a recognition task—providing new evidence that production can be an effective study strategy. Our experiment, and a set of meta-analyses, also evaluated whether the within effect reflects costs to silent items and/or benefits to aloud items. Contrary to a strong distinctiveness account, we found little evidence that aloud items show an additional within-subjects benefit. Instead, silent items suffered an additional within-subjects cost. Blocking silent and aloud items eliminated this cost, suggesting that the cost was due to mixing silent and aloud items. Our discussion focuses on implications for distinctiveness and strength accounts of the production effect and on how to implement production as an encoding strategy depending on the learner’s goals.