A review of young people's vulnerabilities to online grooming

This review explores risk factors that may make a young person vulnerable to being groomed online. Even though research in this area is extremely limited, adolescents appear to be the age group most vulnerable to online grooming. Other vulnerabilities appear to be consistent with those associated with offline sexual abuse. The review suggests that behaviors specific to online grooming include: engaging in risk taking behavior online, high levels of internet access, and lack of parental involvement in the young person's internet use. Vulnerabilities to carry out these types of behavior and be more exposed to the risk of online grooming, are set within the context of the Ecological Model of child protection, consisting of: individual, family, community, and cultural risk factors. Patterns of vulnerability regarding living environment, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and personality are tentative, but are often interconnected. The more risk taking behaviors the young person carries out, plus greater levels of vulnerability factors, the less resilient they are likely to be towards protecting themselves against online grooming. A protective factor appears to be parental involvement in their child's use of the internet. Therefore, this, in combination with internet safety education at school, is encouraged.     

The way of authenticity and the quest for personal integrity1,2

The author reviews the respective conceptions of authenticity proposed by the existentialist philosophers, Fredrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, each of whom situate it in the inherent difficulty of resisting the herd instinct in one's interpersonal relationships, then sets out to show how, despite the absence of authenticity as a technical term in the psychoanalytic lexicon, the technical principles of psychoanalysis enumerated by Freud are compatible with the views of both Nietzsche and Heidegger. The author then gives examples of other psychoanalytic authors who similarly embrace the spirit of authentic relating in their conception of the clinical situation, including the work of D. W. Winnicott, Wilfred Bion, and Jacques Lacan. The author concludes that in the psychoanalytic context the imposition and experience of suffering are invaluable components of authenticity and therapeutic change.     

Situated Behavior and the Place of Measurement in Psychological Theory

Measured values of human behavior may entail contradictory attributes of wave and particle by analogy with the wave/particle attributes of the electron. 1/f scaling is the wave attribute in this analogy and punctate data points are the particle attribute. One consequence of the wave/particle duality in physics was to elevate measurement to a primary place in physical theory, and one purpose of the present analogy is to likewise elevate measurement to a primary place in psychological theory. Another purpose is to emulate Robert Shaw's creative use of analogies, consistent with the brief quotation that begins this article.     

The armchair and the trolley: an argument for experimental ethics

Ethical theory often starts with our intuitions about particular cases and tries to uncover the principles that are implicit in them; work on the ‘trolley problem’ is a paradigmatic example of this approach. But ethicists are no longer the only ones chasing trolleys. In recent years, psychologists and neuroscientists have also turned to study our moral intuitions and what underlies them. The relation between these two inquiries, which investigate similar examples and intuitions, and sometimes produce parallel results, is puzzling. Does it matter to ethics whether its armchair conclusions match the psychologists’ findings? I argue that reflection on this question exposes psychological presuppositions implicit in armchair ethical theorising. When these presuppositions are made explicit, it becomes clear that empirical evidence can (and should) play a positive role in ethical theorising. Unlike recent assaults on the armchair, the argument I develop is not driven by a naturalist agenda, or meant to cast doubt on the reliability of our moral intuitions; on the contrary, it is even compatible with non-naturalism, and takes the reliability of intuition as its premise. The argument is rather that if our moral intuitions are reliable, then psychological evidence should play a surprisingly significant role in the justification of moral principles.     

Teachers’ epistemological beliefs as an antecedent of autonomy-supportive teaching

A large body of research has been devoted to the outcomes of autonomy-supportive teaching (AST). However, research on its antecedents is scarce. The present study explored teachers’ personal epistemology as a possible predictor of students’ perceptions of AST. We administered surveys to 622 students in 23 seventh- and eighth-grade classrooms regarding the extent to which their teachers tried to take the students’ perspective and to provide rationale—major aspects of autonomy support. At the same time, their teachers’ personal epistemologies were assessed. Hierarchical linear model analysis revealed that students of teachers scored with more objectivist (absolutist) personal epistemologies reported that their teachers were less likely to be autonomy supportive. AST, in turn, predicted students’ optimal internalization of pro-social behavior. Further exploration of a range of teachers’ personal characteristics, then, would appear to be an important and productive approach to understanding the variability of teachers’ engagement in autonomy supportive practices.     

Gamelike features might not improve data

Many psychological experiments require participants to complete lots of trials in a monotonous task, which often induces boredom. An increasingly popular approach to alleviate such boredom is to incorporate gamelike features into standard experimental tasks. Games are assumed to be interesting and, hence, motivating, and better motivated participants might produce better data (with fewer lapses in attention and greater accuracy). Despite its apparent prevalence, the assumption that gamelike features improve data is almost completely untested. We test this assumption by presenting a choice task and a change detection task in both gamelike and standard forms. Response latency, accuracy, and overall task performance were unchanged by gamelike features in both experiments. We present a novel cognitive model for the choice task, based on particle filtering, to decorrelate the dependent variables and measure performance in a more psychologically meaningful manner. The model-based analyses are consistent with the hypothesis that gamelike features did not alter cognition. A postexperimental questionnaire indicated that the gamelike version provided a more positive and enjoyable experience for participants than the standard task, even though this subjective experience did not translate into data effects. Although our results hold only for the two experiments examined, the gamelike features we incorporated into both tasks were typical of—and at least as salient and interesting as those usually used by—experimental psychologists. Our results suggest that modifying an experiment to include gamelike features, while leaving the basic task unchanged, may not improve the quality of the data collected, but it may provide participants with a better experimental experience.     

The emotional consequences of donation opportunities

Charities often circulate widespread donation appeals, but who is most likely to donate and how do appeals impact the well-being of individual donors and non-donors, as well as the entire group exposed to the campaign? Here, we investigate three factors that may influence donations (recent winnings, the presence of another person, and matched earnings) in addition to the changes in affect reported by individuals who donate in response to a charitable opportunity and those who do not. Critically, we also investigate the change in affect reported by the entire sample to measure the net impact of the donation opportunity. Results reveal that people winning more money donate a smaller percentage to charity, and the presence of another person does not influence giving. In addition, large donors experience hedonic boosts from giving, and the substantial fraction of large donors translates to a net positive influence on well-being for the entire sample.     

Functional magnetic resonance imaging study of Piaget's conservation-of-number task in preschool and school-age children: a neo-Piagetian approach

Jean Piaget’s theory is a central reference point in the study of logico-mathematical development in children. One of the most famous Piagetian tasks is number conservation. Failures and successes in this task reveal two fundamental stages in children’s thinking and judgment, shifting at approximately 7 years of age from visuospatial intuition to number conservation. In the current study, preschool children (nonconservers, 5-6 years of age) and school-age children (conservers, 9-10 years of age) were presented with Piaget’s conservation-of-number task and monitored by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The cognitive change allowing children to access conservation was shown to be related to the neural contribution of a bilateral parietofrontal network involved in numerical and executive functions. These fMRI results highlight how the behavioral and cognitive stages Piaget formulated during the 20th century manifest in the brain with age.