Sociocultural antecedents of academic motivation and achievement: Role of values and achievement motives in achievement goals and academic performance

With a view to understand the influence of culture on achievement motivation, the study aimed to test the hypothesized mediating role of individual‐oriented and social‐oriented achievement motives in linking value orientations (e.g. achievement, security, conformity, hedonism) to achievement goals (i.e. mastery‐approach, mastery‐avoidance, performance‐approach, and performance‐avoidance goals) as predictors of English and mathematics achievements. These hypothesized relationships were tested in the one‐path analytic model with a sample of Indonesian high‐school students (n = 356; 46% girls, M age = 16.20 years). The findings showed that security and conformity values positively predicted social‐oriented achievement motive; self‐direction values positively predicted individual‐oriented achievement motive; and hedonism values negatively predicted both achievement motive orientations. Both individual‐oriented and social‐oriented achievement motives positively predicted mastery‐approach and performance‐approach goals. Interestingly, social‐oriented achievement motive also positively predicted mastery‐avoidance and performance‐avoidance goals, which in turn, negatively predicted English and mathematic achievement. There was also some evidence for the direct effects of values on performance‐approach goals and achievement. Taken together, the findings evinced the relevance of achievement goal constructs to Indonesian students and the psychometric properties of the Indonesian version of the Achievement Goals Questionnaire for further use in Indonesia. The study concludes that the meanings of academic motivation and achievement should be seen from a sociocultural perspective relevant to the context in which they are being studied.     

Let the Vat-Brains Speak for Themselves

It's pretty standard to find pretty compelling the claim that for all one can tell one may be a vat-brain: not least, to say the least, because it's a version of Descartes' demon thought-experiment in the First Meditation. Here I refute that claim. Like Descartes I start with the idea that one has an undeniable grip on most of what one is thinking. To this I add the idea that knowing thinking as thinking is being able to engage in it. Then I argue that one can't engage in the (purported) thinking of a vat-brain (there are various specimens of vat-brain to be considered). The essential point is that one cannot make anything of what a vat-brain's intended ontology would be, and how the brain might conceive of it. So one cannot engage with any vat-brain's (purported) thinking. Yet one engages with one's own. So one isn't any of them. I'm not, anyway: you can speak for yourself.     

Experts, amateurs, and refrigerators: Comparing expert and amateur negotiators in a novel task

Recently a controversy has arisen among behavioral decision theory researchers concerning the generalizability of research based upon student subject samples to the behavior of expert decision makers. This study compared the influence of framing and performance constraints (goals or limits) on the ability of expert and amateur negotiators to reach integrative agreements in a negotiation task novel to both. The results suggested that while experts did outperform amateurs on comparable competitive market simulations, the patterns of their performance as influenced by framing and performance constraints were consistent.     

Methodological naturalism and epistemic internalism

Epistemic naturalism holds that the results or methodologies from the cognitive sciences are relevant to epistemology, and some have maintained that scientific methods are more compatible with externalist theories of justification than with internalist theories. But practically all discussions about naturalized epistemology are framed exclusively in terms of cognitive psychology, which is only one of the cognitive sciences. The question addressed in this essay is whether a commitment to naturalism really does favor externalism over internalism, and we offer reasons for thinking that naturalism in epistemology is compatible with both internalist and externalist conceptions of justification. We also argue that there are some distinctively internalist aims that are currently being studied scientifically and these notions, and others, should be studied by scientific methods. This essay is dedicated to Deborah Mayo, who has long advocated using error statistical techniques to analyze and resolve epistemological puzzles in the philosophy of science. This essay follows the same spirit by advocating that computational concepts and techniques be applied within the heart of traditional, analytic epistemology.     

Affective synchrony: individual differences in mixed emotions

Most models of affect suggest either inverse or null associations between positivity and negativity. Recent work has highlighted situations that sometimes lead to mixed positive-negative affect. Focusing on the counterpart to these situational factors, the authors explore the individual-difference tendency toward mixed emotions, which they term affective synchrony. In five studies, the authors show that some individuals demonstrate affective synchrony (overlapping experience of positive and negative moods), others a-synchrony (positive and negative mood that fluctuate independently), and still others de-synchrony (positive and negative moods that function as bipolar opposites). These tendencies are stable over time within persons, vary broadly across individuals, and are associated with individual differences in cognitive representation of self and of emotions.     

Developing stimulus control of young children's requests to teachers: classwide applications of multiple schedules

Children may recruit their teachers' attention at undesirably high rates or at inconvenient times. Tiger and Hanley (2004) described a multiple-schedule procedure to reduce ill-timed requests, which involved providing children with two distinct continuous signals that were correlated with periods in which teacher attention was either available or unavailable. The current study extended the application of multiple schedules by evaluating the effectiveness of the procedure when implemented by private-school teachers in 3 elementary classrooms. Following the introduction of the multiple schedules, student approaches toward their teacher were maintained during desirable periods but were minimized during undesirable periods.     

QUESTIONING SCIENTIFIC FAITH IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

The late nineteenth century was not only a time in which religious faith was questioned in light of increasing claims of natural science. It is more accurate to see the familiar Victorian crisis of faith as but one aspect of a larger historical phenomenon, one in which the methods of both religion and science came under scrutiny. Among several examinations of the status of scientific knowledge in the waning decades of the century, the treatment of the subject by the German theologian Wilhelm Herrmann and philosopher Hans Vaihinger rejected its objective nature and denied that either scientists or theologians had access to the truth of nature. Although this stance regarding the nature of science, religion, and their relationship was limited to intellectuals in German society at the time, it foreshadowed developments in our own day in which the traditional search for truth has been problematized.     

Attention to faces and gaze-following in social anxiety: preliminary evidence from a naturalistic eye-tracking investigation

Social attentional biases are a core component of social anxiety disorder, but research has not yet determined their direction due to methodological limitations. Here we present preliminary findings from a novel, dynamic eye-tracking paradigm allowing spatial–temporal measurement of attention and gaze-following, a mechanism previously unexplored in social anxiety. 105 participants took part, with those high (N?=?27) and low (N?=?25) in social anxiety traits (HSA and LSA respectively) entered into the analyses. Participants watched a video of an emotionally-neutral social scene, where two actors periodically shifted their gaze towards the periphery. HSA participants looked more at the actors’ faces during the initial 2s than the LSA group but there were no group differences in proportion of first fixations to the face or latency to first fixate the face, although HSA individuals’ first fixations to the face were shorter. No further differences in eye movements were found, nor in gaze-following behaviour, although these null effects could potentially result from the relatively small sample. Findings suggest attention is biased towards faces in HSA individuals during initial scene inspection, but that overt gaze-following may be impervious to individual differences in social anxiety. Future research should seek to replicate these effects.