Does having a pet make a difference? Highlights from the HBSC Portuguese study

Pets are part of many adolescent’s lives. Objectives: To identify in a large national representative sample of Portuguese adolescents (HSBC study), the percentage of adolescents that have pets, what kind of feelings pets provide, differences by gender and age (through school grades) and to verify whether adolescent health, well-being, life satisfaction and psychological symptoms are associated with having a pet. Methods: The 2014 study provided national data of 6026 Portuguese adolescents (52.3% of which were girls), whose mean age was 13.8 years, randomly selected from those attending 6th, 8th and 10th grades. Measures included asking the participant if he/she had pets, which pet was, and the relationship they had with the pet, ISS, perception of well-being, life satisfaction and psychological symptoms. Results: The large majority of Portuguese adolescents had a pet. Adolescents who referred having a pet reported more frequently having dogs and cats. As for positive feelings related to pets, results showed that pets give them feelings of happiness, companionship, nurturing, tranquility, security and responsibility always/almost always, especially in girls and younger boys. The results also showed that having a dog was associated with a higher socio-economic status, better perception of well-being, more life satisfaction and less psychological symptoms. Conclusion: Since research shows that young people who have pets report higher rates of well-being/health perception, that information should be used to conduct more studies and change policies in ways that benefit adults and children.     

Within a hair's breadth of buying the product: The impact of tangible and intangible bodily cues of contamination: The role of disgust and mental imagery

In most retail environments, customers can handle products. However, the downside of this freedom to touch products is product contamination. The objectives of this paper are threefold: (a) to examine the effects of contamination cues (tangible vs. intangible) on consumer responses; (b) to show the mediating role of contamination, disgust, and mental imagery; and (c) to assess the robustness of the results on three product categories for different levels of contact intimacy. Three experimental laboratory studies on different product categories (a book [n = 95], T‐shirt [n = 118], and apple [n = 102]) showed that tangible contamination cues decreased product evaluation and purchase intentions more than intangible contamination cues did. Moreover, contamination, disgust, and mental imagery mediated the effects of contamination cues on product evaluation and purchase intention. The findings provide theoretical and practical insights to help researchers and retailers understand the effect of tangible contamination cues on consumer responses.     

The Effects of Anxiety on Attention Problems and Rule-Breaking Behavior: The Moderating Effect of Work Adjustment in the Workplace

We investigated the relationship between anxiety and attention problems and rule-breaking in a population of subclinical employees and identified the moderating role of work adjustment. After screening 9938 employees at a power company, we obtained a subclinical sample of 269. Our results demonstrate that anxiety is related to attention problems and rule-breaking behavior, and that work adjustment moderates these relationships. Study findings extend our knowledge of adjustment in the workplace, which may act to protect technicians from factors that affect occupational functioning.     

Toward an Anthropology of Exchange in Tamil Nadu

This article is an attempt to present the cultural conceptions of exchange that appear in studies of medieval South Indian redistributive processes and the anthropology of Tamil caste, kinship, and marital transactions. As such it does not engage theological understandings of gifts to and from South Indian deities. The approach is sociological, and the argument is that whether the mode is redistributive or donative, Tamil exchanges create social relationships that are embedded in meanings of distinction and precedence. What is handed out is a position in a social order that is first and foremost hierarchical, a rank in a social sequence, so that not merely things and services but social distinctions move through the social landscape.     

Exploring Conflict Resolution and Psychological Abuse Across Romantic Relationships

Although strengthening skills is recommended to improve the effectiveness of programs to prevent dating violence, little research has analyzed how conflict resolution strategies relate to victimization/perpetration trajectories. This study explores retrospectively self-reported conflict resolution strategies (positive problem-solving, engagement, and withdrawal) across 2 romantic relationships, paying special attention to possible changes. Participants were 309 college students who had been involved in 1, 2, or no abusive relationships. Based on these experiences, they were first classified into 4 groups according to their psychological victimization (non-victimized, pre-victimized, newly-victimized, and re-victimized) in each of their 2 relationships. Subsequently, they were also classified into 4 different groups according to their perpetration (non-perpetrators, pre-perpetrators, new perpetrators, and re-perpetrators). Changes in conflict resolution strategies were self-reported by both the victims and the perpetrators with a single abusive relationship, whereas persistence was detected in those involved in either 2 abusive relationships (re-victimized and re-perpetrators) or none at all. The results can help prevent dating violence across relationships and its negative consequences for health.     

Mate preferences in Argentinean transgender people: An evolutionary perspective

Transgender people provide a unique opportunity to examine the effect of biological sex versus gender identity on mating preferences. This study aimed at identifying the mate characteristics that are most and least valued by transgender people and at examining to what extent their biological sex or their gender identity determined their mate preferences. A convenience sample of 134 male‐to‐female (MTF) and 94 female‐to‐male (FTM) individuals from Argentina rated Buss's list of 18 mate attributes. Compared to FTM, MTF individuals placed significantly more emphasis on attractiveness and socioeconomic status, whereas FTM, more than MTF individuals, valued partners with a dependable character. Although biological sex differences were present in both groups, providing support to the evolutionary theory, MTF individuals valued the same characteristics as both biological male and female individuals do.     

Adolescents’ inhibitory control: keep it cool or lose control

Inhibitory control (i.e., the ability to resist automatisms, temptations, distractions, or interference and to adapt to conflicting situations) is a determinant of cognitive and socio‐emotional development. In light of the discrepancies of previous findings on the development of inhibitory control in affectively charged contexts, two important issues need to be addressed. We need to determine (a) whether cool inhibitory control (in affectively neutral contexts) and hot inhibitory control (in affectively charged contexts) follow the same developmental pattern and (b) the degree of specificity of these two types of inhibitory control at different ages. Thus, in the present study, we investigated the developmental patterns of cool and hot inhibitory control and the degree of specificity of these abilities in children, adolescents and adults. Typically developing children, adolescents, and adults performed two Stroop‐like tasks: an affectively neutral one (Cool Stroop task) and an affectively charged one (Hot Stroop task). In the Cool Stroop task, the participants were asked to identify the ink color of the words independent of color that the words named; in the Hot Stroop task, the participants were asked to identify the emotional expression of a face independent of the emotion named by a simultaneously displayed written word. We found that cool inhibitory control abilities develop linearly with age, whereas hot inhibitory control abilities follow a quadratic developmental pattern, with adolescents displaying worse hot inhibitory control abilities than children and adults. In addition, cool and hot inhibitory control abilities were correlated in children but not in adolescents and adults. The present study suggests (a) that cool and hot inhibitory control abilities develop differently from childhood to adulthood – i.e., that cool inhibition follows a linear developmental pattern and hot inhibition follows an adolescent‐specific pattern – and (b) that they become progressively more domain‐specific with age.     

Subjectivism and the Framework of Constitutive Grounds

Philosophers have applied the framework of constitutive grounds to make sense of the disagreement between subjectivism and objectivism. The framework understands the two theories as being involved in a disagreement about the extent to which value is determined by attitudes. Although the framework affords us with some useful observations about how this should be interpreted, the question how value can be determined by attitudes in the first place is left largely unanswered. Here we explore the benefits of a positive interpretation which aims to address this oversight and make the framework more informative. This interpretation, which is inspired by the recent work of Schroeder (2007) and Sobel (2016), claims that the relevant sense in which value can be determined by attitudes is discovered by seeing how facts can be endowed with the normative property of being a reason. We argue that this interpretation significantly deepens our understanding of the disagreement between subjectivism and objectivism.     

Is a bad will a weak will? Cognitive dispositions modulate folk attributions of weakness of will

In line with recent efforts to empirically study the folk concept of weakness of will, we examine two issues in this paper: (1) How is weakness of will attribution (WWA) influenced by an agent’s violations of best judgment and/or resolution, and by the moral valence of the agent’s action? (2) Do any of these influences depend on the cognitive dispositions of the judging individual? We implemented a factorial 2?×?2?×?2 between-subjects design with judgment violation, resolution violation, and action valence as independent variables, and measured participants’ cognitive dispositions using Frederick’s Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT). We conclude that intuitive and reflective individuals have two different concepts of weakness of will. The study supports this claim by showing that: (1) the WWA of intuitive subjects is influenced by the action’s (and probably also the commitment’s) moral valence, while the WWA of reflective subjects is not; (2) judgment violation plays a small role in the WWA of intuitive subjects, while reflective subjects treat resolution violation as the only relevant trait. Data were collected among students at two different universities. All subjects (N?=?710) answered the CRT. A three-way ANOVA was first conducted on the whole sample and then on the intuitive and reflective groups separately. This study suggests that differences in cognitive dispositions can significantly impact the folk understanding of philosophical concepts and thus suggests that analysis of folk concepts should take cognitive dispositions into account.