Nietzsche’s cultural elitism

Elitist readers, such as John Rawls, see Nietzsche as concerned only with the flourishing of a few great contributors to culture; egalitarian readers, such as Stanley Cavell, see Nietzschean culture as a universal affair involving every individual’s self-cultivation. This paper offers a compromise, reading Nietzsche as a ‘cultural elitist’ for whom culture demands that a few great individuals be supported in a voluntary, rather than state-mandated way. Rawls, it claims, is therefore misguided in worrying that Nietzsche’s elitism is a threat to justice. The paper focuses on Nietzsche’s Schopenhauer as Educator, the key text in the elitist-egalitarian debate.     

‘It's a boy because he's painting a picture’: Age differences in children's conventional and unconventional gender schemas

Two studies investigated the development of children's gender knowledge using a procedure designed to tap into children's unconventional gender beliefs. Study 1 revealed a developmental progression with 34 3‐ to 4‐year‐old children providing more unconventional reasons than conventional reasons to explain the gender of a series of drawings. By contrast, 39 5‐ to 6‐year‐old and 42 7‐ to 8‐year‐old children provided more conventional than unconventional reasons. Study 2 found that a second sample of 42 3‐ to 4‐year‐old children mastered a close‐ended assessment of gender stereotyping, while they relied on unconventional and conventional reasoning equally when explaining the gender of a series of drawings displaying conventional cues only. This research supports the model that children's conventional gender schemas do not develop before their unconventional gender schemas.     

A neural marker of content-specific active ignoring

The ability to attend to relevant events and to ignore irrelevant stimuli is crucial to survival. Theories disagree on whether this ability is dependent solely on increased neural activation for relevant items or whether active ignoring can also play a role. The authors examined the active ignoring of stimuli using a preview search procedure, where irrelevant faces appeared prior to relevant house stimuli. They found increased activation in brain regions associated with spatial memory and in content-specific face-processing areas when participants ignored the irrelevant faces. Differences arose even on trials when only previewed faces appeared, and the magnitude of these differences predicted how well faces were ignored in search. Activation associated with active ignoring decreased when a secondary task was imposed during the preview. The data reveal a neural marker for the process of actively ignoring the content and locations of irrelevant stimuli.     

Priming third‐party ostracism increases affiliative imitation in children

Human beings are intensely social creatures and, as such, devote significant time and energy to creating and maintaining affiliative bonds with group members. Nevertheless, social relations sometimes collapse and individuals experience exclusion from the group. Fortunately for adults, they are able to use behavioral strategies such as mimicry to reduce their social exclusion. Here we test whether children, too, increase their imitation following an experience of ostracism. Given humans’ profound need to belong, we predicted that the mere hint of social exclusion – even third‐party social exclusion – would be sufficient to increase affiliative imitation in 5‐year‐olds. As predicted, children primed with videos in which one shape was ostracized by a group of other shapes subsequently imitated the actions of a model more closely than children in a control condition. These findings highlight just how sensitive humans are to social exclusion and demonstrate that children, like adults, modify their social behavior in response to ostracism.     

Cradling side preference is associated with lateralized processing of baby facial expressions in females

Women’s cradling side preference has been related to contralateral hemispheric specialization of processing emotional signals; but not of processing baby’s facial expression. Therefore, 46 nulliparous female volunteers were characterized as left or non-left holders (HG) during a doll holding task. During a signal detection task they were then asked to detect the emotional baby faces in a series of baby portraits with neutral and emotional facial expressions, presented either to the left or the right visual field (VFP). ANOVA revealed a significant HG × VFP interaction on response bias data (p < .05). Response bias was lowest when emotional baby faces were presented in the visual field of cradling side preference, suggesting that women’s cradling side preference may have evolved to save cognitive resources during monitoring emotional baby face signals.     

New Mandates and Imperatives in the Revised ACA Code of Ethics

The first major revision of the ACA Code of Ethics in a decade occurred in late 2005, with the updated edition containing important new mandates and imperatives. This article provides interviews with members of the Ethics Revision Task Force that flesh out seminal changes in the revised ACA Code of Ethics in the areas of confidentiality, romantic and sexual interactions, dual relationships, end‐of‐life care for terminally ill clients, cultural sensitivity, diagnosis, interventions, practice termination, technology, and deceased clients.     

Judging response-outcome relations: The role of response-outcome contingency,outcome probability,and method of information presentation

A series of four experiments investigated college students’ judgments of interevent contingency. Subjects were asked to judge the effect of a discrete response Itapping a wire) on the occurrence of a brief outcome (a radio’s buzzing). Pairings of the possible event-state combinations (response-outcome, response-no outcome, no response-outcome, no response-no outcome) were presented in a summary-table (Experiments 2 and 4), in an unbroken-time-line (Experimente 1, 2, and 4), or in a broken-time-line format (Experiment 3). Subjects judged the extent to which the response caused the outcome or prevented it from occurring. Across all methods of information presentation, judgments were a positive function of response-outcome contingency and outcome probability. In the unbroken-time-line condition, judgments of negative response-outcome contingencies were less extreme than judgments of equivalent positive contingencies. This asymmetry was smaller in the broken-time-line condition and in those conditions in which subjects were encouraged to segment an unbroken time line into discrete response outcome units. Finally, judgments of positive and negative relationships were generally symmetrical in the summary-table condition. Relative to the two time-line portrayals, summary table judgments were also less influenced by the overall probability of outcome occurrence. These judgment differences among format conditions suggest that, depending on the method of information presentation, subjects differently partition event sequences into discrete event pairings.     

The proliferation of prizes: Nobel complements and Nobel surrogates in the reward system of science

In the last two decades, prizes in the sciences have proliferated and, in particular, rich prizes with large honoraria. These developments raise several questions: Why have rich prizes proliferated? Have they greatly changed the reward system of science? What effects will such prizes have on scientists and on science? The proliferation of such prizes derives from marked limitations on the numbers and types of scientists eligible for Nobel prizes and consequent increases in the number of uncrowned laureate-equivalents. These would-be surrogates for Nobel prizes extend the reward system of science in its upper reaches but this change is not fundamental. The spread of rich prizes to new fields provides added incentives to potential winners, which has its own disutilities; it reinforces competitiveness, concern for priority and attendant secrecy, all this amplifying ambivalence toward the reward system in science. There may also be modest positive effects of such new awards in the form of heightened popular esteem for science and interest in it.     

Learning conceptual rules: III. Processes contributing to rule difficulty

Eight unique bidimensional conceptual rule forms were compared in a rule learning paradigm. It was predicted that rule difficulty order and error distributions across stimulus class defined by a truth table would be a function of Ss' preexperimental experience predominantly with conjunctive concepts. The hypothesis stated specifically that loci of difficulty with rules derive from: (a) assignment of TT stimuli (those with both relevant attributes) to the negative category; (b) assignment of FF stimuli (those with neither relevant attributes) to the positive category; (c) assignment of TT and FF stimuli to the same category. The main effects of rule and truth table class and the interaction of rule and truth table class were statistically significant. The results confirm all predictions about rule order and error distributions.