Are country level prevalences of rule violations associated with knowledge overclaiming among students?

Cultural norms of behaviour influence desirable and problematic behaviours of individuals. In particular, cultural norms should influence individuals' dishonesty. In a recent Nature study, prevalence of rule violations was introduced as a new country‐level measure of behavioural norms. However, information on individuals' actual honesty was not available due to characteristics of the experimental design. Overcoming this limitation, we show that country‐level behavioural norms are related to individual‐level knowledge overclaiming behaviour (i.e., claiming to know concepts that do not exist, a measure of individuals' actual behavioural dishonesty) among 290,954 students from 57 countries (from the 2012 PISA study). Our study represents a crucial test of the argument that cultural norms influence individual's behaviour and of the validity of the measurement of countries' prevalences of rule violations. These results imply that shaping the behaviour of today's students may result in new behavioural norms that emphasise honesty and rule adherence more strongly.     

Is there a supervenience problem for robust moral realism?

Philosophical Studies - The paper describes the problem for robust moral realism of explaining the supervenience of the moral on the non-moral, and examines five objections to the argument: (1) The...     

Personal and parents’ life stories in patients with borderline personality disorder

Patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) display disturbances in understanding self and others. We examined whether these disturbances extended to how patients described their personal and parents’ life stories and to measures of identity, alexithymia, empathy, and emotional intelligence. Thirty BPD patients and 30 matched control participants described personal and parents’ life stories and completed measures of identity disturbance, alexithymia, empathy, and emotional intelligence. Compared to the controls, patients with BPD described their personal and their parents’ life stories more negatively and with fewer themes of agency and communion fulfillment. Patients and controls showed equally complex reasoning about their personal life stories, but patients displayed less complexity and more self‐other confusion, when reasoning about their parents’ stories. Patients also differed from controls on identity disturbance, alexithymia, and empathy. The results suggest that patients’ storied understanding of themselves and others are disturbed and should be taken into account to better understand BPD.     

Do quality teacher–student relationships protect teachers from emotional exhaustion? The mediating role of enjoyment and anger

Social Psychology of Education - Teaching can be an emotionally exhausting profession, thus mechanisms that protect teachers from feeling emotionally overextended need to be investigated. In two...     

Analysis of precursors to multiply controlled problem behavior: A replication

We replicated Fritz, Iwata, Hammond, and Bloom (2013) by evaluating the efficacy of an experimental methodology to identify precursors to aggression displayed by an adolescent with autism spectrum disorder. Using their trial‐based precursor analysis, we identified seven precursors to aggression. Next, we compared the outcomes of separate precursor and aggression functional analyses and showed that both precursors and aggression were multiply controlled by the same variables.     

Emotion knowledge,emotion regulation,and psychosocial adjustment in children with nonverbal learning disabilities

Nonverbal learning disability is a childhood disorder with basic neuropsychological deficits in visuospatial processing and psychomotor coordination, and secondary impairments in academic and social-emotional functioning. This study examines emotion recognition, understanding, and regulation in a clinic-referred group of young children with nonverbal learning disabilities (NLD). These processes have been shown to be related to social competence and psychological adjustment in typically developing (TD) children. Psychosocial adjustment and social skills are also examined for this young group, and for a clinic-referred group of older children with NLD. The young children with NLD scored lower than the TD comparison group on tasks assessing recognition of happy and sad facial expressions and tasks assessing understanding of how emotions work. Children with NLD were also rated as having less adaptive regulation of their emotions. For both young and older children with NLD, internalizing and externalizing problem scales were rated higher than for the TD comparison groups, and the means of the internalizing, attention, and social problem scales were found to fall within clinically concerning ranges. Measures of attention and nonverbal intelligence did not account for the relationship between NLD and Social Problems. Social skills and NLD membership share mostly overlapping variance in accounting for internalizing problems across the sample. The results are discussed within a framework wherein social cognitive deficits, including emotion processes, have a negative impact on social competence, leading to clinically concerning levels of depression and withdrawal in this population.     

Blunted amygdala activity is associated with depression severity in treatment-resistant depression

Up to 50% of individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD) do not recover after two antidepressant medication trials, and therefore meet the criteria for treatment-resistant depression (TRD). Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) is one promising treatment; however, the extent to which MBCT influences clinical outcomes relative to baseline neural activation remains unknown. In the present study we investigated baseline differences in amygdala activation between TRD patients and healthy controls (HCs), related amygdala activation to depression symptoms, and examined the impacts of MBCT and amygdala activation on longitudinal depression outcomes. At baseline, TRD patients (n = 80) and HCs (n = 37) participated in a functional magnetic resonance imaging task in which they identified either the emotion (affect labeling) or the gender (gender labeling) of faces, or passively viewed faces (observing). The TRD participants then completed eight weeks of MBCT or a health enhancement program (HEP). Relative to HCs, the TRD patients demonstrated less amygdala activation during affect labeling, and marginally less during gender labeling. Blunted amygdala activation in TRD patients during affect labeling was associated with greater depression severity. MBCT was associated with greater depression reductions than was HEP directly following treatment; however, at 52 weeks the treatment effect was not significant, and baseline amygdala activation across the task conditions predicted depression severity in both groups. TRD patients have blunted amygdala responses during affect labeling that are associated with greater concurrent depression. Furthermore, although MBCT produced greater short-term improvements in depression than did HEP, overall baseline amygdala reactivity was predictive of long-term clinical outcomes in both groups.     

Arabic digit naming speed: task context and redundancy gain

There is evidence for both semantic and asemantic routes for naming Arabic digits, but neuropsychological dissociations suggest that number-fact retrieval (2x3=6) can inhibit the semantic route for digit naming. Here, we tested the hypothesis that such inhibition should slow digit naming, based on the principle that reduced access to multiple routes would counteract redundancy gain (the response time advantage expected from parallel retrieval pathways). Participants named two single digit numbers and then performed simple addition or magnitude comparison (Experiment 1), multiplication or magnitude comparison (Experiment 2), and multiplication or subtraction (Experiment 3) on the same or on a different pair of digits. Addition and multiplication were expected to inhibit the semantic route, whereas comparison and subtraction should enable the semantic route. Digit naming time was approximately 15ms slower when participants subsequently performed addition or multiplication relative to comparison or subtraction, regardless of whether or not the same digit pair was involved. A letter naming control condition in Experiment 3 demonstrated that the effect was specific to digit naming. Number fact retrieval apparently can inhibit Arabic digit naming processes.