Prehistoric dangers and contemporary prejudices

We review the logical principles that guide the application of evolutionary ideas to psychological problems, and show how these principles can be used to derive novel, testable hypotheses about contemporary prejudice processes. We summarise two recent lines of research employing this approach. One line of research examines prejudices resulting from perceived vulnerability to physical injury. The other examines prejudices resulting from perceived vulnerability to disease. Results from both lines of research support novel psychological hypotheses identifying variables--pertaining to both personality and to local context--that trigger specific prejudices against specific categories of people. We conclude by discussing more broadly some of the useful conceptual and practical implications of this evolutionary approach to prejudice.     

Breaks are Better: A Tier II Social Behavior Intervention

Multi-tiered systems of social behavioral support in schools provide varying levels of intervention matched to student need. Tier I (primary or universal) systems are for all students and are designed to promote pro-social behavior. Tier III (tertiary or intensive) supports are for students who engage in serious challenging behavior that has not responded to other efforts. In between Tier I and Tier III are Tier II (secondary or targeted interventions), for students at risk for developing more serious problematic behavior. The purpose of this study was to evaluate Breaks are Better, a Tier II intervention designed for students who engage in problem behavior maintained by avoidance of instructional activities. Breaks are Better builds on an evidence-based Tier II intervention, Check-in/Check-out, but includes key components to enhance its effectiveness for students who avoid instruction. Working with three typically developing elementary school students, we documented changes in problem behavior during academic instruction following the implementation of Breaks are Better. Further, students and teachers rated the intervention as both feasible and valuable.     

The approximate number system and its relation to early math achievement: Evidence from the preschool years

Humans rely on two main systems of quantification; one is nonsymbolic and involves approximate number representations (known as the approximate number system or ANS), and the other is symbolic and allows for exact calculations of number. Despite the pervasiveness of the ANS across development, recent studies with adolescents and school-aged children point to individual differences in the precision of these representations that, importantly, have been shown to relate to symbolic math competence even after controlling for general aspects of intelligence. Such findings suggest that the ANS, which humans share with nonhuman animals, interfaces specifically with a uniquely human system of formal mathematics. Other findings, however, point to a less straightforward picture, leaving open questions about the nature and ontogenetic origins of the relation between these two systems. Testing children across the preschool period, we found that ANS precision correlated with early math achievement but, critically, that this relation was nonlinear. More specifically, the correlation between ANS precision and math competence was stronger for children with lower math scores than for children with higher math scores. Taken together, our findings suggest that early-developing connections between the ANS and mathematics may be fundamentally discontinuous. Possible mechanisms underlying such nonlinearity are discussed.     

Immediate Movement History Influences Reach-to-Grasp Action Selection in Children and Adults

The authors review studies of mentally simulated movements. In automatic or cyclical movements, actual and motor imagery (MI) durations are similar. When athletes simulate only dynamic phases of movement or perform MI just before competing, however, environmental and time constraints lead to an underestimation of actual duration. Conversely, complex attention-demanding movements take longer to image. Finally, participants can modify the speed of MI voluntarily when they receive specific instructions. To complete the available data, the authors compared imagined and actual durations in tennis and gymnastics. Results showed systematic and disproportionate overestimation of actual duration. The authors found a relationship between complex motor skills and MI duration. They discuss the factors leading to over- and underestimation and the hypotheses that could be tested.     

Differences in Rapid Initiation and Termination of Voluntary Postural Sway Associated with Ageing and Falls-Risk

The authors examined differences between young adults (n = 25) and healthy older adults (n = 48) in reaction time and the relations between center of pressure (COP) and center of mass (COM) motions during rapid initiation and termination of voluntary postural sway. Older adults were divided into low and high falls-risk groups based on Physiological Profile Assessment scores of sensorimotor function. Low falls-risk older adults had slower reaction times during anteroposterior sway initiation and decreased COP–COM separation during anteroposterior and medialateral sway initiation and anteroposterior continuous voluntary sway compared with young adults. High falls-risk older adults had slower initiation and termination reaction times in all response directions and decreased COP–COM separation during sway initiation and continuous voluntary sway in the anteroposterior and medialateral directions compared with young adults. Compared with low falls-risk older adults, high falls-risk older adults had slower initiation and termination reaction times in all response directions and decreased COP–COM separation during medialateral continuous voluntary sway. Reaction time and COP–COM measures significantly predicted group status in discriminant models with sensitivities and specificities of 72–100%. Overall, these findings highlight important associations of age-related declines in sensorimotor function related to an increased risk of falling with slower postural reaction time and reduced postural stability.     

A Review of Finn,Fischer, and Handler (Eds.), Collaborative/Therapeutic Assessment: A Casebook and Guide

Abstract

Oscar N. Myer The Language of Handwriting. Reviewed by Rose Wolfson

Klara Roman Handwriting: a Key to Personality. Reviewed by Rose Wolfson

Frank Victor Handwriting: A Personality Projection. Springfield, Illinois: Charles C. Thomas, 1952. American Lecture Series Monograph No. 96. Reviewed by Gerald S. Blum, Ph.D.

Robert I. Watson The Clinical Method in Psychology. New York: Harper &; Bros. 1951. $4.50. Reviewed by Walter G. Klopfer, Ph.D.     

Anxiety and expectancy violations: Neural response to false feedback is exaggerated in worriers

This study investigated how individual differences in anxiety modulate the neural response to errors and performance feedback. The design included false feedback on some trials in order to test the hypothesis that anxious people show stronger neural reactions to feedback that is worse than expected. Participants completed a trial-and-error learning task that required learning the correct key to press in response to face images. EEG was recorded during the task, and the response-locked error-related negativity (ERN) and feedback-locked ERN were computed to measure neural responses to error commission and feedback. As expected, errors produced a response-locked ERN and false feedback produced a feedback-locked ERN in the group as a whole. High levels of trait worry predicted a disproportionately larger ERN following false feedback, but did not predict the magnitude of the response-locked ERN following errors. These results imply that worry-prone people react more strongly to violations of expectations, rather than to errors themselves.     

Emotion and narrative fiction: Interactive influences before,during, and after reading

Emotions are central to the experience of literary narrative fiction. Affect and mood can influence what book people choose, based partly on whether their goal is to change or maintain their current emotional state. Once having chosen a book, the narrative itself acts to evoke and transform emotions, both directly through the events and characters depicted and through the cueing of emotionally valenced memories. Once evoked by the story, these emotions can in turn influence a person's experience of the narrative. Lastly, emotions experienced during reading may have consequences after closing the covers of a book. This article reviews the current state of empirical research for each of these stages, providing a snapshot of what is known about the interaction between emotions and literary narrative fiction. With this, we can begin to sketch the outlines of what remains to be discovered.     

Intelligence,Dominance, Masculinity,and Self-Monitoring: Predicting Leadership Emergence in a Military Setting

Organizations today place great emphasis on the selection of their managerial and supervisory personnel. Consequently, the need to develop strong predictors of leadership for use in selection tests is immense. Theoretically and historically, intelligence, dominance, masculinity-femininity, and self-monitoring have been strong indicators of leadership. Accordingly, biographical questionnaires and personality inventories were administered to 1137 Air Force officers attending Squadron Officer School to determine their levels of intelligence, dominance, femininity, masculinity, and self-monitoring. These traits and individual difference variables were then used in a discriminant analysis to predict the subject's classification into one of four leadership categories. Analyses showed differences between leaders and nonleaders for intelligence, dominance, and femininity, but not for self-monitoring. However, a discriminant analysis and associated cross-validation resulted in no predictive capability. A possible reason for the lack of classification capability was the uniqueness of the military sample. Since military individuals seem to share very common experiences and beliefs, the sample appeared to be quite homogeneous, making differences between leaders and nonleaders extremely difficult to detect. Future studies should address this potential problem.     

Reasons-responsiveness and degrees of responsibility

Ordinarily, we take moral responsibility to come in degrees. Despite this commonplace, theories of moral responsibility have focused on the minimum threshold conditions under which agents are morally responsible. But this cannot account for our practices of holding agents to be more or less responsible. In this paper we remedy this omission. More specifically, we extend an account of reasons-responsiveness due to John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza according to which an agent is morally responsible only if she is appropriately receptive to and reactive to reasons for action. Building on this, we claim that the degree to which an agent is responsible will depend on the degree to which she is able to recognize and react to reasons. To analyze this, we appeal to relations of comparative similarity between possible worlds, arguing that the degree to which an agent is reasons-reactive depends on the nearest possible world in which given sufficient reason to do otherwise, she does so. Similarly, we argue that the degree to which an agent is reasons-receptive will depend on the intelligibility of her patterned recognition of reasons. By extending an account of reasons-responsiveness in these ways, we are able to rationalize our practice of judging people to be more or less responsible.