How Values Congeal into Facts

The paper plays against the philosophical stereotype that facts are bits of reality, ‘furniture of the universe’, and that values in contrast are either mysterious bits of reality or responses to facts. It follows Strawson in regarding facts as interpretative constructs. Values also are interpretative constructs, characterized by a normal (but not universal) connection with motivations. So is there a deep difference? There is a sense of ‘facts’, marked by phrases such as ‘Stick to the facts’, in which the interpretative element embedded in a ‘fact’ is uncontentious and would be invisible to most people. The interpretative element in values, in contrast, usually is very noticeable. But values in which this element comes to be uncontentious and taken for granted congeal into facts.     

Measuring Theodicy: Individual Differences in the Perception of Divine Intervention

The attribution of control to God may have particularly interesting psychological properties. Theodicy refers to the perception of God controlling history—even the minutiae of daily events. The current study examines the psychometric properties of a new instrument, the Theodicy Scale. Results support the reliability of the brief scale when administered to college students, and some evidence is provided suggesting construct validation. Theodicy appears to represent a unitary construct and scores vary independent of social desirability bias. The absence of a relationship between Theodicy scores and simulated medical advice raises questions to be addressed in future research.     

Mexican American Mothers and Fathers’ Prenatal Attitudes and Father Prenatal Involvement: Links to Mother–Infant Interaction and Father Engagement

The present study examines the associations between Mexican American mothers’ and fathers’ pregnancy intentions, fathers’ participation in prenatal activities and mother–infant interactions and father engagement with 9 month-old infants in a nationally representative sample of 735 infants and their parents participating in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Birth Cohort. After controlling for a host of variables, multiple regressions revealed that when mothers wanted the pregnancy, fathers engaged in more literacy and caregiving activities than when mothers did not want the pregnancy. When couples disagreed about wanting the pregnancy, fathers engaged in more literacy activities and showed more warmth than when they agreed. Relationship quality significantly moderated the effects of parents’ wantedness on mother–infant interactions and fathers’ engagement in literacy activities.     

Research With African Americans: Lessons Learned About Recruiting African American Women

The authors briefly explore literature related to recruiting African American research participants, reflect on their experiences conducting body image research with a sample of African American college women in an earlier study (s. Kashubeck‐West et al., 2008), and discuss some methodological and cultural challenges that they encountered during data collection for the study. Los autores exploran brevemente la literatura relacionada con el reclutamiento de individuos afroamericanos para participar en estudios de investigación, reflexionan sobre sus experiencias al llevar a cabo estudios sobre imagen corporal con una muestra de mujeres afroamericanas universitarias en un estudio anterior (S. Kashubeck‐West et al., 2008) y por último discuten algunos de los desafíos metodológicos y culturales con los que tuvieron que enfrentarse durante la recopilación de datos para el estudio.     

Relational Anxiety in Interracial Interactions

ABSTRACT— Most of the research on intergroup anxiety has examined the impact of people's own anxiety on their own outcomes. In contrast, we show that in intergroup interactions, one's partner's anxiety is just as important as one's own anxiety (if not more important). Using a diary study among college roommates, we show that partners' anxiety predicts respondents' anxiety across time on a daily basis, as well as respondents' interest in living together again the next year. We discuss the importance of taking a relational approach to understanding intergroup interactions.     

The psychometricians' fallacy: Too clever by half?

The psychometricians' fallacy concludes that an attribute is quantitative from the premise that it is ordinal. This fallacy occupies a central place in the paradigm of psychometrics. Most of the founders of the discipline committed it and it makes sense of otherwise anomalous developments within the discipline, such as the permissible statistics controversy and the dominant form taken by item response theories. The fallacy is displayed by showing (1) that an attribute's quantitative structure reduces to a weak order upon differences between degrees that satisfies the double cancellation, solvability, and Archimedean conditions of conjoint measurement theory and (2) the fact that any order on the degrees themselves does not entail sufficient structure on this weak order to guarantee satisfaction of these conditions. Thus, it is possible that an ordered attribute is non‐quantitative. Also, each pair of differences between degrees of an ordinal attribute falls into one of two disjoint classes: (1) those where the order relation between the pair follows from an order on the attribute and (2) those where it is independent of that order and possibly diagnostic of quantitative structure and this fact means that the distinction between order and quantity is an empirical one.     

Cover-Copy-Compare and Spelling: One Versus Three Repetitions

Cover, copy, compare (CCC) has been used with success to improve spelling skills. This study adds to existing research by completing an analysis of the rewriting component of the intervention. The impact of varying the number of times a subject copied a word following an error was examined with four elementary age students. An adaptive alternating treatments design with counterbalancing was used to compare the effects of two versions of CCC and baseline during acquisition and retention 2 weeks later. During acquisition, performance in both versions of CCC was greater than that during baseline sessions. There was not an appreciable difference between versions of CCC. Retention of performance was similar for CCC1 and CCC3. Results are discussed in terms of the core components of CCC and directions for future research.     

Further evaluation of idiosyncratic functions for severe problem behavior: Aggression maintained by access to walks

The results of functional analyses of problem behavior can sometimes be undifferentiated. This lack of differentiation might be due to methodological problems or the absence of variables relevant to problem behavior in the assessment. The current case example provides a clarification of undifferentiated functional analysis results through the inclusion of a particular reinforcer that was not a part of the initial functional analysis. In addition, treatment data showed a decrease in problem behavior when the putative reinforcer was provided response‐dependently or response‐independently. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Raising Revenue for Persons with Disabilities

Whereas right-libertarians do not think that it is a requirement of justice that we raise revenues for persons with disabilities, both left-libertarians and liberal egalitarians think that there is such a requirement. An issue remains for the latter two theorists—how ought we to raise this revenue? Liberal egalitarians typically endorse either universal taxation or taxation of the wealthy. Left-libertarians, on the other hand, cannot so easily appeal to the methods of universal taxation and taxation of the wealthy, as they are illegitimately coercive. One such method left open to the left-libertarian is one proposed by Michael Otsuka. He argues that both left-libertarians and liberal egalitarians should find the method of taxation of the unjust to be a reasonably strong way of raising revenue. In this paper, I point out problems with Otsuka’s argument, as well as directly criticize the method of taxation of the unjust.     

Investigating the Awareness of Remembering

ABSTRACT— There is a marked lack of consensus concerning the best way to learn how conscious experiences arise. In this article, we advocate for scientific approaches that attempt to bring together four types of phenomena and their corresponding theoretical accounts: behavioral acts, cognitive events, neural events, and subjective experience. We propose that the key challenge is to comprehensively specify the relationships among these four facets of the problem of understanding consciousness without excluding any facet. Although other perspectives on consciousness can also be informative, combining these four perspectives could lead to significant progress in explaining a conscious experience such as remembering. We summarize some relevant findings from cognitive neuroscience investigations of the conscious experience of memory retrieval and of memory behaviors that transpire in the absence of the awareness of remembering. These examples illustrate suitable scientific strategies for making progress in understanding consciousness by developing and testing theories that connect the behavioral expression of recall and recognition, the requisite cognitive transactions, the neural events that make remembering possible, and the awareness of remembering.