The interactive effects of temperament and maternal parenting on toddlers' externalizing behaviours

The present study aimed to determine the potential moderating effects of temperamental traits on the relation between parenting and toddlers' externalizing behaviours. For that purpose, this study examined the interplay between temperament and maternal parenting behaviours in predicting the level as well as the development of toddlers' externalizing behaviours. Participants were 115 boys (wave 1, M=16.9 months; wave 2, M=23.2 months) and their mothers, who were observed in a 13‐min structured play session at home. With regard to the prediction of the level of externalizing behaviours at wave 1, main effects were found for children's temperamental characteristics. In addition, maternal negative control interacted significantly with children's inhibitory control in predicting this level of externalizing behaviours. The findings with regard to the development of externalizing behaviours showed that the effects of maternal negative control and lack of maternal sensitivity were stronger for toddlers with a difficult temperament: maternal negative control and lack of maternal sensitivity were related to an increase in externalizing behaviours for temperamentally difficult children only. These results offer support for the goodness‐of‐fit hypothesis, stressing the idea that the effects of temperament and the social environment depend to a large extent on their interplay. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Creation of visual long-term memory

Currently, it is not known by which mechanisms novel visual representations are stored in long-term memory (LTM). Here we report evidence that visual working memory (WM) plays an important role in the formation of visual LTM. By varying exposure times and perceptual difficulty of the stimuli, we find that the rate-limiting factor constraining storage in LTM is the amount of information that can be simultaneously kept in WM, whereas the time needed to store this information into LTM is constant irrespective of the size of the WM content. These results support the hypothesis that visual WM serves as a gate for the storage of information into LTM.     

Beliefs in Equality for Women and Men as Related to Economic Factors in Central and Eastern Europe and the United States

Do economic indicators predict the general level of support for gender equality? This question was investigated in a sample of countries in Central and Eastern Europe, a region that has been undergoing rapid economic changes since the early 1990s. In this overall sample of male and female college students from ten countries, including the United States as a comparison, the predicted association between stronger beliefs in gender role egalitarianism and positive economic factors was generally supported. Also, consistent with other research, women were more in support of gender equality than men were. There was no support for a predicted trend in less support for gender equality over the time period of the present study.     

Pacifism and Moral Integrity

The paper has three parts. The first is a discussion of the values as goals and means. This is a known Moorean distinction between intrinsic and instrumental values, with one other Moorean item - the doctrine of value wholes. According to this doctrine the value wholes are not simply a summation of their parts, which implies a possibility that two evils might be better than one (e. g. crime + punishment, two evils, are better than either one of them taken separately). In this first part I will discuss peace as an end value, and war as a means value. The second part dicsusses briefly the issue of sincerity. The third, last and for me the most important part of the paper explores the issue of moral integrity in pacifism: could a pacifist preserve the integrity of the attacker, or, for that matter her own integrity, or must she destroy anyone’s integrity and dehumanize the attacker and also herself?     

Pacifism: Equipment or Accessory of War?

It is my intention to attempt to define pacifism, in its engagement and concept, as a necessary requisite of war and military action, following a phrase used over a hundred years ago by Franz Rosenzweig when speaking of pacifism as “necessary equipment of war.” I will try to defend the importance of pacifism as an integral part of war (as such, pacifism as a requisite of war ought to shorten the period of war and mitigate destruction) and oppose this concept of pacifism to Jan Narveson’s old attempt at constructing pacifism as a position and then designating it as “untenable and unreasonable,” and then further oppose this to his later attempt to find in pacifism the cause of further (and more) violence for ever more vicious wars.     

Gödel,Kant, and the Path of a Science

Gödel's philosophical views were to a significant extent influenced by the study not only of Leibniz and Husserl, but also of Kant. Both Gödel and Kant aimed at the secure foundation of philosophy, the certainty of knowledge and the solvability of all meaningful problems in philosophy. In this paper, parallels between the foundational crisis of metaphysics in Kant's view and the foundational crisis of mathematics in Gödel's view are elaborated, especially regarding the problem of finding the “secure path of a science” for both mathematics and philosophy. Gödel's temporal subjectivism and metaphysical conceptual objectivism are presented as positively or negatively motivated by Kant's viewpoints. A remark on Gödel's collapse of modalities (in accordance with the collapse of objective time) is added.