Not Just “Study Drugs” for the Rich: Stimulants as Moral Tools for Creating Opportunities for Socially Disadvantaged Students

An argument in the cognitive enhancement literature is that using stimulants in populations of healthy but socially disadvantaged individuals mistakenly attributes pathology to nonpathological individuals who experience social inequalities. As the argument goes, using stimulants as cognitive-enhancing drugs to solve the social problem of poorly educated students in inadequate schools misattributes the problem as an individual medical problem, when it is really a collective sociopolitical problem. I challenge this argument on the grounds that not all types of enhancement have to be explained in medical terms, but rather at least one conception of enhancement can be explained in social terms—opportunity maintenance. Therefore, I propose that as a moral requirement we ought to explore whether stimulants could be a means of remedying underprivileged children's experiences of social inequalities that are borne from inadequate schools for the sake of increasing their chances for opportunities and well-being.     

Stimulus–response correspondence effect as a function of temporal overlap between relevant and irrelevant information processing

The stimulus–response correspondence (SRC) effect refers to advantages in performance when stimulus and response correspond in dimensions or features, even if the common features are irrelevant to the task. Previous research indicated that the SRC effect depends on the temporal course of stimulus information processing. The current study investigated how the temporal overlap between relevant and irrelevant stimulus processing influences the SRC effect. In this experiment, the irrelevant stimulus (a previously associated tone) preceded the relevant stimulus (a coloured rectangle). The irrelevant and relevant stimuli onset asynchrony was varied to manipulate the temporal overlap between the irrelevant and relevant stimuli processing. Results indicated that the SRC effect size varied as a quadratic function of the temporal overlap between the relevant stimulus and irrelevant stimulus. This finding extends previous experimental observations that the SRC effect size varies in an increasing or decreasing function with reaction time. The current study demonstrated a quadratic function between effect size and the temporal overlap.     

The Relationship Between Parenting Style and Children's Adjustment: The Parents' Perspective

We examined the relationship between authoritative and authoritarian parenting styles and socio-emotional adjustment in elementary school children as reported from the parents' perspective. Mothers of first through fifth graders provided information about parenting style as well as children's competencies and problem behaviors. Teachers provided ratings of children's adjustment for a subset of the participants. Results indicated that authoritative parenting was associated negatively with parent- and teacher-rated maladaptive behavior, and positively with indicators of healthy adjustment. Correlations between authoritarian parenting and adjustment were either small or non-significant. Regression analyses indicated that authoritative parenting was more predictive of children's competence than maladaptation (22% versus 10% of variance). The effects of parenting style on adjustment were not moderated by demographic variables, such as the child's gender, grade level, ethnicity, and family income.     

Adjusting the Religious Autobiography Course for the Postmodern Classroom

Religious autobiography as an introductory course is popular yet problematic. Often, it lacks methodological breadth and functions to ensconce Western notions of subjectivity which elide difference, locatedness, and the reality of multiple or shifting identifications. These problems can be addressed by incorporating into the course a community‐based learning exercise in which each student is paired with a local senior citizen, conducts a series of interviews with the elder, and then writes an (auto‐)biography based on the interviews. Students are thus given a real‐life situation in which to test the applicability of theories and definitions of religion, as well as a relationship to a subject whose locatedness and relatively unprivileged “I” allow for the problematization of autobiography as a genre as well as an appreciation for the contextual nature of religiosity. This exercise transforms the religious autobiography course into a pedagogically fruitful, intellectually defensible, and institutionally savvy introductory course.     

Does the Awareness of Mortality Shape People's Openness to Violence and Conflict? An Examination of Terror Management Theory

Terror management theory (TMT) proposes that evoking death‐related thoughts (mortality salience; MS) in individuals or groups can lead to stronger worldview defence and greater support for extremist violence. In three experiments, we tested whether an MS manipulation, and associated moderators, increased support for extremist violence. In Australian university students, Study 1 found no statistically significant main or moderated effects for MS on measures of extremist violence. However, participants exposed to the MS manipulation reported increases in conservative religiosity (belief in divine power). In Study 2, the MS manipulation had no significant effect on support for extremist violence for Australian university students primed with an antiviolent extremism norm. And in young Australian Jewish people (Study 3), the MS manipulation did not increase support for violence against migrants. However, there was an increase in support for policies that act to fight against violent extremism in Iraq and Syria in those exposed to the MS manipulation. Across three studies, we find little support for the hypothesis that MS results in increased support for violent extremism. Larger more methodological sound studies are needed to address inconsistencies in the evidence surrounding TMT and the MS hypothesis, at least in regards to violence and extremism.     

Applying a longitudinal tracer methodology to evaluate complex interventions in complex settings

Long-running multi-faceted intervention studies are particularly problematic in large complex organizations where traditional methods prove too resource intensive and can yield inaccurate and incomplete findings. This paper describes the first use of, longitudinal tracer methodology (LTM), a realist approach to evaluation, to examine the links between multiple complex intervention activities (processes) and their outcomes on a construction megaproject. LTM is especially useful when the researcher has little control over intervention delivery but has evidence drawn from multiple sources to evaluate the intervention activities effects over time. This methodology has rarely been deployed in complex organizational settings and not on a construction megaproject. This paper presents a case study of its use over a period of three years, on 24 construction sites forming London’s Thames Tideway Tunnel (Tideway) megaproject. The study examines the “transformational” power of occupational safety and health (OSH) interventions across the multiple organizations and supply chains in the megaproject. The study shows how the method can be adapted in-flight to accommodate shifting lines of inquiry as the intervention activities progress and change. This feature along with its resource-efficient operation, make it an attractive option where interventions are likely to have differential effects across multiple sites of enactment.     

Bedding down new words: Sleep promotes the emergence of lexical competition in visual word recognition

Lexical competition processes are widely viewed as the hallmark of visual word recognition, but little is known about the factors that promote their emergence. This study examined for the first time whether sleep may play a role in inducing these effects. A group of 27 participants learned novel written words, such as banara, at 8 am and were tested on their learning at 8 pm the same day (AM group), while 29 participants learned the words at 8 pm and were tested at 8 am the following day (PM group). Both groups were retested after 24 hours. Using a semantic categorization task, we showed that lexical competition effects, as indexed by slowed responses to existing neighbor words such as banana, emerged 12 h later in the PM group who had slept after learning but not in the AM group. After 24 h the competition effects were evident in both groups. These findings have important implications for theories of orthographic learning and broader neurobiological models of memory consolidation.     

The nature of the language faculty and its implications for evolution of language (Reply to Fitch, Hauser, and Chomsky)

In a continuation of the conversation with Fitch, Chomsky, and Hauser on the evolution of language, we examine their defense of the claim that the uniquely human, language-specific part of the language faculty (the “narrow language faculty”) consists only of recursion, and that this part cannot be considered an adaptation to communication. We argue that their characterization of the narrow language faculty is problematic for many reasons, including its dichotomization of cognitive capacities into those that are utterly unique and those that are identical to nonlinguistic or nonhuman capacities, omitting capacities that may have been substantially modified during human evolution. We also question their dichotomy of the current utility versus original function of a trait, which omits traits that are adaptations for current use, and their dichotomy of humans and animals, which conflates similarity due to common function and similarity due to inheritance from a recent common ancestor. We show that recursion, though absent from other animals' communications systems, is found in visual cognition, hence cannot be the sole evolutionary development that granted language to humans. Finally, we note that despite Fitch et al.'s denial, their view of language evolution is tied to Chomsky's conception of language itself, which identifies combinatorial productivity with a core of “narrow syntax.” An alternative conception, in which combinatoriality is spread across words and constructions, has both empirical advantages and greater evolutionary plausibility.     

Impairment in risk-sensitive decision-making in older suicide attempters with depression

Suicidal behavior is a potentially lethal complication of late-life depression. In younger adults, suicide has been linked to abnormal decision-making ability. Given that there are substantial age-related decreases in decision-making ability, and that older adults experience environmental stressors that require effective decision-making, we reasoned that impaired decision-making may be particularly relevant to suicidal behavior in the elderly. We thus compared performance on a probabilistic decision-making task that does not involve working memory ("Cambridge Gamble Task") in four groups of older adults: (1) individuals with major depression and a history of suicide attempt (n = 25), (2) individuals with major depression with active suicidal ideation but no suicide attempt (n = 13), (3) individuals with major depression without suicidality (n = 35), and (4) nondepressed control subjects (n = 22). There was a significant effect of group on quality of decision-making, whereby the suicide attempters exhibited poorer ability to choose the likely outcome, compared with the nonsuicidal depressed and nondepressed comparison subjects. There were no group differences in betting behavior. The suicide attempters differed in several aspects of social problem-solving on a self-report scale. Quality of decision-making was negatively correlated with the score on the impulsive/careless problem-solving subscale. These data suggest that older suicide attempters have a deficit in risk-sensitive decision-making, extending observations in younger adults. More specifically, older suicide attempters seem to neglect outcome probability and make poor choices. These impairments may precipitate and perpetuate suicidal crisis in depressed elders. Identification of decision-making impairment in suicidal elders may help with designing effective interventions.