Psychology's contributions to understanding and addressing global climate change

Global climate change poses one of the greatest challenges facing humanity in this century. This article, which introduces the American Psychologist special issue on global climate change, follows from the report of the American Psychological Association Task Force on the Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change. In this article, we place psychological dimensions of climate change within the broader context of human dimensions of climate change by addressing (a) human causes of, consequences of, and responses (adaptation and mitigation) to climate change and (b) the links between these aspects of climate change and cognitive, affective, motivational, interpersonal, and organizational responses and processes. Characteristics of psychology that cross content domains and that make the field well suited for providing an understanding of climate change and addressing its challenges are highlighted. We also consider ethical imperatives for psychologists' involvement and provide suggestions for ways to increase psychologists' contribution to the science of climate change.     

Exploring Initiative as a Signal of Knowledge Co‐Construction During Collaborative Problem Solving

Peer interaction has been found to be conducive to learning in many settings. Knowledge co‐construction (KCC) has been proposed as one explanatory mechanism. However, KCC is a theoretical construct that is too abstract to guide the development of instructional software that can support peer interaction. In this study, we present an extensive analysis of a corpus of peer dialogs that we collected in the domain of introductory Computer Science. We show that the notion of task initiative shifts correlates with both KCC and learning. Speakers take task initiative when they contribute new content that advances problem solving and that is not invited by their partner; if initiative shifts between the partners, it indicates they both contribute to problem solving. We found that task initiative shifts occur more frequently within KCC episodes than outside. In addition, task initiative shifts within KCC episodes correlate with learning for low pre‐testers, and total task initiative shifts correlate with learning for high pre‐testers. As recognizing task initiative shifts does not require as much deep knowledge as recognizing KCC, task initiative shifts as an indicator of productive collaboration are potentially easier to model in instructional software that simulates a peer.     

Free-flying honeybees extrapolate relational size rules to sort successively visited artificial flowers in a realistic foraging situation

Learning and applying relational concepts to solve novel tasks is considered an indicator of cognitive-like ability. It requires the abstraction of relational concepts to different objects independent to the physical nature of the individual objects. Recent research has revealed the honeybee’s ability to rapidly learn and manipulate relations between visual stimuli such as ‘same/different’, ‘above/below’, or ‘larger/smaller’ despite having a miniature-sized brain. While honeybees can solve problems using rule-based relative size comparison, it remains unresolved as to whether bees can apply size rules when stimuli are encountered successively, which requires reliance on working memory for stimuli comparison. Additionally, the potential ability of bees to extrapolate acquired information to novel sizes beyond training sets remains to be investigated. We tested whether individual free-flying honeybees could learn ‘larger/smaller’ size rules when visual stimuli were presented successively, and whether such rules could then be extrapolated to novel stimulus sizes. Honeybees were individually trained to a set of four sizes such that individual elements might be correct, or incorrect, depending upon the alternative stimulus. In a learning test, bees preferred the correct size relation for their respective learning group. Bees were also able to successfully extrapolate the learnt relation during transfer tests by maintaining the correct size relationships when considering either two smaller, or two larger, novel stimulus sizes. This performance demonstrates that an insect operating in a complex environment has sufficient cognitive capacity to learn rules that can be abstracted to novel problems. We discuss the possible learning mechanisms which allow their success.     

The birth of a faith school in the post‐Dearing era: asking questions and consultation,and getting things done

The article is an historical account of the establishment of a new voluntary aided secondary school, named Nottingham Emmanuel School. The national and local contexts are established and discussed in practical and theological reflective ways by examining four key questions; (1) will the church take risks in education; (2) can the church deliver in education, (3) how can a new VA school gain credibility and (4) will the new VA school survive?     

Threat, Authoritarianism, and Selective Exposure to Information

We examined the hypothesis that threat alters the cognitive strategies used by high authoritarians in seeking out new political information from the environment. In a laboratory experiment, threat was manipulated through a "mortality salience" manipulation used in research on terror management theory ( Pyszczynski, Solomon & Greenberg, 2003 ). Subjects (N = 92) were then invited to read one of three editorial articles on the topic of capital punishment. We found that in the absence of threat, both low and high authoritarians were responsive to salient norms of evenhandedness in information selection, preferring exposure to a two-sided article that presents the merits of both sides of an issue to an article that selectively touts the benefits of the pro or con side of the issue. However, in the presence of threat, high but not low authoritarians became significantly more interested in exposure to an article containing uniformly pro-attitudinal arguments, and significantly less interested in a balanced, two-sided article. Finally, a path analysis indicated that selective exposure to attitude-congruent information led to more internally consistent policy attitudes and inhibited attitude change. Discussion focuses on the role of threat in conditioning the cognitive and attitudinal effects of authoritarianism.