Primary School Correlates of Secondary School Achievement

This study is an investigation of the relationship between third grade final marks, achievement test scores, and subsequent achievement in elementary and secondary school. It was focused on the early identification of students for whom changes in the curriculum might be indicated.     

Unfamiliar Untrained Observers’ Ratings of Adolescent Safety Behaviors Within Social Interactions with Unfamiliar Peer Confederates

Adolescents experiencing social anxiety often engage in safety behaviors―covert avoidance strategies for managing distress (e.g., avoiding eye contact)―that factor into the development and maintenance of their concerns. Prior work supports the psychometric properties of the Subtle Avoidance Frequency Examination (SAFE), a self-report survey of safety behaviors. Yet, we need complementary methods for assessing these behaviors within contexts where adolescents often experience concerns, namely, interactions with unfamiliar peers. Recent work indicates that, based on short, direct social interactions with adolescents, individuals posing as unfamiliar peers (i.e., peer confederates) and without assessment training can capably report about adolescent social anxiety. We built on prior work by testing whether we could gather valid SAFE reports from unfamiliar untrained observers (UUOs), who observed adolescents within archived recordings of these short social interactions. A mixed clinical/community sample of 105 adolescents self-reported on their functioning and participated in a series of social interaction tasks with peer confederates, who also provided social anxiety reports about the adolescent. Based on video recordings of these tasks, trained independent observers rated adolescents’ observed social skills, and an additional set of UUOs completed SAFE reports of these same adolescents. Unfamiliar untrained observers’ SAFE reports (a) related to adolescents’ SAFE self-reports, (b) distinguished adolescents on clinically elevated social anxiety concerns, (c) related to trained independent observers’ ratings of adolescent social skills within interactions with peer confederates, and (d) related to adolescents’ self-reported arousal within these same interactions. Our findings support use of unfamiliar observers’ perspectives to understand socially anxious adolescents’ interpersonal functioning.     

Losing My Religion as a Natural Experiment: How State Pressure and Taxes Led to Church Disaffiliations between 1940 and 2010 in Germany

The sociological literature has produced a remarkably consistent picture of the quantitative patterns of religious disaffiliations in Western countries. This article argues, and demonstrates, that strong changes in a social context may lead individuals to disaffiliate rapidly, leading to very different aggregate effects from those in the “western model.” We use the unique situation of the separation of Germany from 1949 to 1989 and its subsequent reunification as a “natural experiment” to show just how much the relationships routinely found can be disrupted under changed conditions. The state socialist “treatment” affected religious disaffiliations in East Germany profoundly as it (a) made disaffiliations 10 times more probable in the East than in the West in the 1950s and 1960s, (b) shielded East German church members from factors that led to mass disaffiliations in the West in the late 1960s and early 1970s, (c) reversed the education‐disaffiliation link in the East, thus making disaffiliation more likely among the less educated, and (d) led to an especially strong increase in disaffiliations in the East right after the reunification     

Pooling Modalities and Pointwise Intersection: Axiomatization and Decidability

Studia Logica - We establish completeness and the finite model property for logics featuring the pooling modalities that were introduced in Van De Putte and Klein (Pooling modalities and...     

Expressivity results for deontic logics of collective agency

We use a deontic logic of collective agency to study reducibility questions about collective agency and collective obligations. The logic that is at the basis of our study is a multi-modal logic in the tradition of stit (‘sees to it that’) logics of agency. Our full formal language has constants for collective and individual deontic admissibility, modalities for collective and individual agency, and modalities for collective and individual obligations. We classify its twenty-seven sublanguages in terms of their expressive power. This classification enables us to investigate reducibility relations between collective deontic admissibility, collective agency, and collective obligations, on the one hand, and individual deontic admissibility, individual agency, and individual obligations, on the other.

     

The Drawback of Sexual Empowerment: Perceiving Women as Emancipated but Still as Sexual Objects

Sex Roles - The belief that sexualization might be used as a source of power for women in Western societies is spreading (Anderson 2014; Erchull and Liss 2013). The present research aims at...     

Memory and Counterfactual Simulations for Past Wrongdoings Foster Moral Learning and Improvement

In four studies, we investigated the role of remembering, reflecting on, and mutating personal past moral transgressions to learn from those moral mistakes and to form intentions for moral improvement. Participants reported having ruminated on their past wrongdoings, particularly their more severe transgressions, and they reported having frequently thought about morally better ways in which they could have acted instead (i.e., morally upward counterfactuals; Studies 1–3). The more that participants reported having mentally simulated morally better ways in which they could have acted, the stronger their intentions were to improve in the future (Studies 2 and 3). Implementing an experimental manipulation, we then found that making accessible a morally upward counterfactual after committing a moral transgression strengthened reported intentions for moral improvement—relative to resimulating the remembered event and considering morally worse ways in which they could have acted instead (Study 4). We discuss the implications of these results for competing theoretical views on the relationship between memory and morality and for functional theories of counterfactual thinking.