Feedback specificity, exploration, and learning

Greater feedback specificity is generally considered to be beneficial for performance and learning, but the evidence for this generalization is limited. The authors argue that increasing the specificity of feedback is beneficial for initial performance but discourages exploration and undermines the learning needed for later, more independent performance. The results of their transfer experiment demonstrate that increasing the specificity of feedback positively affected practice performance, but its benefits did not endure over time or modification of the task. In addition, feedback specificity negatively affected levels of exploration during practice and interacted with exploration strategies to affect learning. The results suggest that those who received feedback of varying specificity may have learned through different but equally beneficial mechanisms.     

Feedback specificity, learning opportunities, and learning

Although increasing feedback specificity is generally beneficial for immediate performance, it can undermine certain aspects of the learning needed for later, more independent performance. The results of the present transfer experiment demonstrate that the effects of increasing feedback specificity on learning depended on what was to be learned, and these effects were partially mediated through the opportunities to learn how to respond to different task conditions during practice. More specific feedback was beneficial for learning how to respond to good performance and detrimental for learning how to respond to poor performance. The former relationship was partially mediated by feedback specificity's effect on learning opportunities during practice. The results have implications for designing feedback interventions and training to maximize the learning of various aspects of a task.     

Coercion in Intimate Partner Violence: Toward a New Conceptualization

For decades, battered women’s advocates have placed coercive control squarely at the center of their analysis of intimate partner violence. Yet, little work has been done to conceptualize and measure the key construct of coercive control. In this article, we apply French and Raven’s social power model to a conceptualization of coercive control in intimate partner violence relationships. Central elements of the model include: social ecology; setting the stage; coercion involving a demand and a credible threat for noncompliance; surveillance; delivery of threatened consequences; and the victim’s behavioral and emotional response to coercion. These elements occur in spiraling and overlapping sequences to establish an overall situation of coercive control. The implications of this model for theory and practice are discussed.     

Distressed Mothers and Their Infants Use a Less Efficient Timing Mechanism in Creating Expectancies of Each Other’s Looking Patterns

The prediction of events and the creation of expectancies about their time course is a crucial aspect of an infant's mental life, but temporal mechanisms underlying these predictions are obscure. Scalar timing, in which the ratio of mean durations to their standard deviations is held constant, enables a person to use an estimate of the mean for its standard deviation. It is one efficient mechanism that may facilitate predictability and the creation of expectancies in mother-infant interaction. We illustrate this mechanism with the dyadic gaze rhythm of mother and infant looking at and looking away from each other's faces. Two groups of Hi- and Lo-Distress mothers were created using self-reported depression, anxiety, self-criticism and childhood experiences. Lo-Distress infants (controls) used scalar timing 100% of the time, about double that of Hi-Distress infants. Lo-Distress mothers used scalar timing about nine times as much as Hi-Distress mothers. The diminished use of scalar timing patterns in Hi-Distress mothers and infants may make the anticipation of each other's gaze patterns more difficult for both partners.     

The Impact of a Derogatory Remark on Prejudice Toward a Gay Male Leader1

A laboratory experiment examined the impact of a derogatory remark on expressions of prejudice toward a gay male leader. Students participated in same‐sex groups with a male confederate who was obviously gay or presumably straight. Half of the participants in the gay condition heard a derogatory remark about the confederate. This resulted in 3 experimental conditions: gay/remark, gay/no remark, and straight/no remark. Participants evaluated the leader's abilities less favorably and evidenced more negative nonverbal behaviors toward him in the gay/remark condition than in the gay/no remark or straight/no remark conditions. These findings extend research on derogatory remarks to a nonracial minority and highlight the powerful effect of immediate social context on expressions of prejudice.     

On Defining ‘Argument’

There is no concept more central to logic and critical thinking than the concept of an argument. I here address the definition of ‘argument’ in the logical sense of the term and defend the claim that many current proposals, once they are interpreted in a way that makes them sufficiently precise, are extensionally inadequate. Definitions found in some contemporary, prominent critical thinking textbooks will serve as a springboard. I claim that each may be interpreted in an absolutist way (i.e., as providing a definition of ‘argument’ simpliciter) or a relativistic way (as providing a definition of ‘argument-for-S’, where S is some agent or group of agents), yet all turn out to be objectionable no matter which route is taken. I finish with a proposal on which the definition of ‘argument’ is an absolutist one, yet one that avoids the problems discussed for the earlier proposals.     

Crime and socioeconomic conditions: Evidence for non-cultural domain specificity in evolutionary forensic psychology

In disagreement with the explanatory utility of niche-construction in crime–culture interaction, this article reviews a variety of evidence for non-cultural domain specificity in criminal behavior. However, this review does subscribe to Durrant and Ward's integrative framework for evolutionary theory in criminology. Moralistic self-deception is implied in Black's self-help theory of social control, and is argued to facilitate victimization while maintaining social norms. Strong empirical evidence of social control in reliable criminal responses to cues of economic conditions, policing and community relatedness is clearly related to domain-specific theories of criminal behavior in evolutionary forensic psychology. Domain-specific interaction between individual differences and socioeconomic complexity can possibly be mistaken for cultural processes, where game-theoretic and information-theoretic interpretations of social interaction provide insight into evolutionary-recurrent features of complex socioeconomic processes in human society. The review concludes that there is indeed support for a productive integration of theory between evolutionary forensic psychology and the interdisciplinary field of criminology.     

Naked in the Public Square

Responding to Rawls?? pleas in Political Liberalism against appeals to comprehensive doctrines, be they religious or metaphysical, I argue that such constraints are inherently illiberal??and unworkable. Rawls deems political proposals inherently coercive and judges everyone in a democracy a participant in governance??thus, in effect, complicit in state coercion. He seeks to limit the sweep of his exclusionary rule to core questions of rights. But in an individualistic and litigious society like ours it proves hard to draw a firm boundary around issues that raise core (constitutional) questions. The standards Rawls proposes seem oppressive in effect, their likeliest yield, a kind of doublethink, encouraging many citizens to cloak their deepest normative concerns in neutered language. I worry about the means by which Rawls?? ??overlapping consensus?? might be attained, and about the exclusion (as metaphysical) of policy proposals in behalf of broadly conceived human goods. I find it suppositious in Rawls to presume the innocence of seemingly secular arguments while placing in the stocks the religious appeals critical to many, along with old and new metaphysical arguments that may seek to bridge the gap between religious and secular appeals.     

Comparing pluralities

What does it mean to compare sets of objects along a scale, for example by saying “the men are taller than the women”? We explore comparison of pluralities in two experiments, eliciting comparison judgments while varying the properties of the members of each set. We find that a plurality is judged as “bigger” when the mean size of its members is larger than the mean size of the competing plurality. These results are incompatible with previous accounts, in which plural comparison is inferred from many instances of singular comparison between the members of the sets (Matushansky &; Ruys, 2006). Our results suggest the need for a type of predication that ascribes properties to plural entities, not just individuals, based on aggregate statistics of their members. More generally, these results support the idea that sets and their properties are actively represented as single units.     

Dimensions and Latent Classes of Episodic Mania-Like Symptoms in Youth: An Empirical Enquiry

The dramatic increase in diagnostic rates of bipolar disorder in children and adolescents in the USA has led to an intense interest in the phenomenology of the disorder. Here we present data from a newly-developed instrument to assess episodic mania-like symptoms in youth in a large population-based sample (N = 5326) using parent- and self-report. We found that a substantial proportion of children screened positive for having episodes of “going high” and were at an increased risk for morbidity and impairment. Using factor analysis, we identified that episodic mania-like symptoms comprised two dimensions: An under-controlled dimension that was associated with significant impairment, and a low-risk exuberant dimension. Using latent class analysis, we identified a small group of children scoring high on a range of manic symptoms and suffering from severe psychosocial impairment and morbidity. Our results carry implications for the nosology and psychosocial impairment associated with episodic mood changes in young people.