Invention and convention: Jewish and Christian critique of the Jewish fixed calendar

The institution of the Jewish fixed calendar has provoked muchcontroversial discussion not only among Jewish, but also Christian scholars. The significant contributions to the subject by two of the great sixteenth-century polymaths, the Jew Azariah de' Rossi and the Christian Sebastian Münster, pinpoint the delicate nature of calendrical investigation. Münster's frequent use of one particular piyyut (a religious poem) to undermine the basis of the Jewish fixed calendar is intended to defend the contradictory calendrical data in the Gospels. De' Rossi implicitly attacks Muenster for his recourse to this unhistorical text. Yet de' Rossi himself is intent on proving that the Jewish fixed calendar is a late post-talmudic convention, an iconoclastic approach which was not welcome in certain rabbinic circles. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Measurement invariance of the Belief in a Zero‐Sum Game scale across 36 countries

In this paper, we examined the psychometric properties of cross‐cultural validation and replicability (i.e. measurement invariance) of the Belief in a Zero‐Sum Game (BZSG) scale, measuring antagonistic belief about interpersonal relations over scarce resources. The factorial structure of the BZSG scale was investigated in student samples from 36 countries (N = 9907), using separate confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) for each country. The cross‐cultural validation of the scale was based on multigroup confirmatory factor analyses (MGCFA). The results confirmed that the scale had a one‐factor structure in all countries, in which configural and metric invariance between countries was confirmed. As a zero‐sum belief about social relations perceived as antagonistic, BZSG is an important factor related to, for example, social and international relations, attitudes toward immigrants, or well‐being. The paper proposes different uses of the BZSG scale for cross‐cultural studies in different fields of psychology: social, political, or economic.     

Examining the effects of group‐based instruction on emergent second‐language skills in young children

The present study evaluated the emergence of second‐language intraverbals in typically developing young children following a small‐group teaching intervention. Choral responding was employed with a group of 6 primary school children (5‐6 years old) to teach first‐language tacts (e.g., “What is this in English?” [“Hospital”]) and related second‐language tacts (e.g., “What is this in Welsh?” [“Ysbyty”]). A multiple‐probe design across stimulus sets was used to evaluate subsequent emergence of untrained first‐to‐second‐language derived intraverbals (e.g., “What is hospital in Welsh?” [“Ysbyty”]) and untrained second‐to‐first‐language intraverbals (e.g.,”What is ysbyty in English?” [“Hospital”]). Data indicated that the choral responding intervention produced robust increases in derived intraverbal relations for 3 of the 6 participants.     

Toward Developing Laboratory-Based Parent–Adolescent Conflict Discussion Tasks that Consistently Elicit Adolescent Conflict-Related Stress Responses: Support from Physiology and Observed Behavior

Parent–adolescent conflict poses risk for youth maladjustment. One potential mechanism of this risk is that stress in the form of increased arousal during conflict interactions results in adolescents’ impaired decision-making. However, eliciting consistent adolescent stress responses within laboratory-based tasks of parent–adolescent conflict (i.e., conflict discussion tasks) is hindered by task design. This limitation may stem from how conflict topics are assessed and selected for discussion. Within a sample of 47 adolescents (ages 14–17) and parents, we investigated whether a modified version of a conflict discussion task could elicit physiological (i.e., arousal) and behavioral (i.e., hostility) displays of adolescents’ conflict-related stress responses. We assessed parent–adolescent conflict via structured interview to identify topics for dyads to discuss during the task. We randomly assigned dyads to complete a 5-min task to discuss either a putatively benign topic (i.e., control condition) or a conflict topic while undergoing direct assessments of continuous arousal. Trained raters coded dyad members’ hostile behavior during the task. Adolescents in the conflict condition exhibited significantly greater levels of arousal than adolescents in the control condition. We observed an interaction between discussion condition and baseline conflict. Specifically, higher baseline conflict predicted greater hostile behavior for adolescents in the conflict condition, yet we observed the inverse relation for adolescents in the control condition. Our modified laboratory discussion task successfully elicited both physiological and behavioral displays of adolescent conflict-related stress. These findings have important implications for leveraging experimental paradigms to understand causal links between parent–adolescent conflict and adolescent psychopathology, and their underlying mechanisms.     

“That Really Hurt,Charlie!” Investigating the Role of Sympathy and Moral Respect in Children's Aggressive Behavior

The authors examined the role of sympathy and moral respect in children's overt aggression, and the subtypes of proactive and reactive aggression, in an ethnically diverse sample of 5-, 7-, and 10-year-olds (N = 110). Aggressive behaviors were measured through teacher reports and peer nominations. Sympathy was assessed through teacher reports. Children reported on their moral respect within an interview procedure where they were asked for their feelings of respect toward hypothetical peers who displayed morally relevant behaviors. Results revealed that sympathy and moral respect were both negatively related to overt aggression and to the proactive aggression subtype, but unrelated to the reactive aggression subtype. The authors discuss the implications of the findings in relation to developmental research on the affective antecedents of children's aggressive behavior.     

Absorbed in thought: the effect of mind wandering on the processing of relevant and irrelevant events

This study used event-related potentials to explore whether mind wandering (task-unrelated thought, or TUT) emerges through general problems in distraction, deficits of task-relevant processing (the executive-function view), or a general reduction in attention to external events regardless of their relevance (the decoupling hypothesis). Twenty-five participants performed a visual oddball task, in which they were required to differentiate between a rare target stimulus (to measure task-relevant processes), a rare novel stimulus (to measure distractor processing), and a frequent nontarget stimulus. TUT was measured immediately following task performance using a validated retrospective measure. High levels of TUT were associated with a reduction in cortical processing of task-relevant events and distractor stimuli. These data contradict the suggestion that mind wandering is associated with distraction problems or specific deficits in task-relevant processes. Instead, the data are consistent with the decoupling hypothesis: that TUT dampens the processing of sensory information irrespective of that information's task relevance.     

New Caledonian crows use tools for non-foraging activities

Tool use is of great interest for cognitive research, largely because it can be particularly revealing about the underlying information processing mechanisms. Tool use that is inflexible or requires extensive experience to change, and that is only addressed towards specific targets such as food, is not likely to reflect unusual or particularly complex cognition. On the contrary, if tools are employed flexibly and for a variety of innovative purposes, then conventional combinations of inherited predispositions and associative learning are challenged and interesting questions emerge. Since New Caledonian crows (Corvus moneduloides) are especially adept at using and making tools for food extraction, we decided to examine their ability to generalise this to other contexts. We recorded how five pairs of New Caledonian crows interacted with novel objects that were not associated with food. We observed eight occasions in which the first contact with the novel object was mediated by a tool, suggesting that the function of the tool was for exploration. This is the first report of non-foraging tool use in New Caledonian crows, and it implies that the cognitive operations controlling tool-oriented behaviour in this species are more general than previously thought.