Profiles of Social Anxiety and Impulsivity Among College Students: A Close Examination of Profile Differences in Externalizing Behavior

Prior work indicates the presence of a subtype of Social Anxiety (SA) characterized by disinhibition or high externalizing behaviors such as substance use and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) symptoms. A sample of 375 undergraduates completed an online study including measures of SA, substance use, ADHD symptoms and impulsivity. Latent class analyses revealed three classes of individuals who evidenced: (a) low SA and low impulsivity, (b) high SA and low impulsivity, and (c) high SA and high impulsivity. Individuals high in both SA and impulsivity evidenced greater likelihoods of exhibiting externalizing behavior, relative to the two other classes. Post-hoc analyses revealed the largest and most significant differences between classes were seen with regard to ADHD. This finding extends previous work by replicating distinct profiles of SA and impulsivity, and highlighting that how these profiles relate to externalizing behaviors may depend on the externalizing domain.     

Open source and these United States

Over the past forty years a collaborative form of systems development has evolved on the electronic networks of the world. In the wake of the information technology revolution has come a proven method for developing, deploying, and maintaining these systems. This method, developed under the auspices of Department of Defense research grants, has resulted in the most successful and reliable software in existence. The method, based on collaborative intelligence, peer review and functional evolution, has rippled through the world of Information Technology. Its success depends on the uninhibited distribution of the currency of this realm: the source code, documentation and data that are the building blocks of complex information systems. To enhance collaboration and protect its creators, cutting edge source code is commonly released under Open Source licensing. The associated electronic information is released under open content licensing. Together, I call this duo Open Licensing. The Department of Defense can realize significant gains by the formal adoption, support and use of open licensed systems. We can lower costs and improve the quality of our systems and the speed at which they are developed. Open Licensing can improve the morale and retention of airmen and improve our ability to defend the nation. These benefits are accessible at any point in the acquisition cycle and even benefit deployed and operational systems. Open Licensing can reduce acquisition, development, maintenance and support costs and increased interoperability among our own systems and those of our allies. He has been stationed at the Pentagon and Phillips Laboratory. In addition to his military duties, he has taught at George Washington University and the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. He has an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and graduate degrees in Business Administration and Computer Science.     

The vindication of the language organ

Ape language research presents us with a worthy and successful example of realist bootstrapping of theorizing and experimentation. In the 1940s, the Hayeses set out without a definition of language, merely taking it that it appeared in the normal maturation of the normal human in normal circumstances and so might appear in a chimpanzee similarly placed. The Gardeners, noting the chimpanzee's limited vocalizing apparatus, tried to show that a chimpanzee would develop language in the same way as the human child if only the language were a sign language. Meshing with research by Premack and Terrace, recent work on fluent human signers of American Sign Language has shown that while chimpanzees can be led to use a gestural pidgin-vocabulary to manipulate and socialize, they in no way develop linguistically as the human infant signer does. In terms of homology, a case can be made that the signing chimpanzees have little improved on the Hayeses' chimpanzee, who eventually vocalized five English words. What this stretch of interaction between theory and experiment bears out is the autonomy of the formal linguistic apparatus from other conceptual and perceptual capacities that we undoubtedly share with our primate cogeners.     

The Effect of Cognitive Load on Intent-Based Moral Judgment

When making a moral judgment, people largely care about two factors: Who did it (causal responsibility), and did they intend to (intention)? Since Piaget's seminal studies, we have known that as children mature, they gradually place greater emphasis on intention, and less on mere bad outcomes, when making moral judgments. Today, we know that this developmental shift has several signature properties. Recently, it has been shown that when adults make moral judgments under cognitive load, they exhibit a pattern similar to young children; that is, their judgments become notably more outcome based. Here, we show that all of the same signature properties that accompany the outcome-to-intent shift in childhood characterize the “intent-to-outcome” shift obtained under cognitive load in adults. These findings hold important implications for current theories of moral judgment.     

In this together: Psychological wellbeing of foreign workers in the United Arab Emirates during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic and the associated infection prevention and control measures (e.g. quarantine, lockdown and isolation), have had an adverse impact on mental health. To date, the mental health status and challenges of foreign workers during the pandemic have been neglected in the literature. This cross-sectional web-based survey assessed levels of post-traumatic stress, depression, anxiety and insomnia among an international sample of foreign workers (n = 319) resident in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The majority of participants were female (76%), European (69%) and highly educated (83% had a bachelor's or higher degree). Results indicate high rates of post-traumatic stress, depression, anxiety, and insomnia, especially among women, younger individuals, and those with a previous diagnosis of a psychological disorder. Additionally, foreign workers' perceptions of pandemic severity in their home nations (mild, moderate, severe) were positively correlated with their symptom levels of depression, anxiety and insomnia. Overall, these findings may help inform future public mental health strategy and pandemic preparedness plans with reference to safeguarding the psychological wellbeing of foreign workers.     

Convention,correlation and consistency

Philosophical Studies - Peter Vanderschraaf’s Strategic Justice provides a defense of the egalitarian bargaining solution. Vanderschraaf’s discussion of the egalitarian solution invokes...     

The possibility of resurrection by reassembly

It is widely held that the classic reassembly model of resurrection faces intractable problems. (1) What happens to someone if God assembles two individuals at the resurrection which are equally good candidates for being the original person? (2) If two or more people, such as a cannibal and the cannibal’s victim, were composed of the same particles at their respective deaths, can they both be resurrected? If they can, who gets the shared particles? (3) And would an attempt to reassemble a long-gone individual result in a genuine resurrection, or merely an intrinsic duplicate of the original person? In this paper, I argue that the first of these problems has, in effect, been solved by defenders of a rival view; I propose a novel solution to the second problem; and I show that the third can be solved by upgrading the naïve reassembly model to a novel variety of reassembly model.     

Use of the familiarity difference cue in inferential judgments

The familiarity difference cue has been regarded as a general cue for making inferential judgments (Honda, Abe, Matsuks, & Yamagishi in Memory and Cognition, 39(5), 851–863, 2011; Schwikert & Curran in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(6), 2341–2365, 2014). The current study tests a model of inference based on familiarity differences that encompasses the recognition heuristic (Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 1999, Goldstein & Gigerenzer in Psychological Review, 109(1), 75–90, 2002). In two studies, using a large pool of stimuli, participants rated their familiarity of cities and made choices on a typical city-size task. The data were fitted with the r-s model (Hilbig, Erdfelder, & Pohl in, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition, 37(4), 827–839, 2011), which was adapted to include familiarity differences. The results indicated that people used the familiarity difference cue because the participants ignored further knowledge in a substantial number of cases when the familiarity difference cue was available. An analysis of reaction-time data further indicated that the response times were shorter for heuristic judgments than for knowledge-only-based judgments. Furthermore, when knowledge was available, the response times were shorter when knowledge was congruent with a heuristic cue than when it was in conflict with it. Differences between the familiarity difference cue and the fluency heuristic (Schooler & Hertwig, 2005, Psychological Review, 112, 610–628) are discussed.