Larval antlions show a cognitive ability/hunting efficiency trade-off connected with the level of behavioural asymmetry

Recently, antlion larvae with greater behavioural asymmetry were shown to have improved learning abilities. However, a major evolutionary question that remained unanswered was why this asymmetry does not increase in all individuals during development. Here, we show that a trade-off exists between learning ability of larvae and their hunting efficiency. Larvae with greater asymmetry learn better than those with less, but the latter are better able to sense vibrational signals used to detect prey and can capture prey more quickly. Both traits, learning ability and hunting efficiency, present obvious fitness advantages; the trade-off between them may explain why behavioural asymmetry, which presumably stems from brain lateralization, is relatively rare in natural antlion populations.     

How to answer an unanswerable question? Factors affecting correct “don't know” responding in memory tasks

When reporting from memory, people may often be asked unanswerable questions—questions for which the correct answer has never been encoded. These unanswerable questions should be met with an “I don't know” response. Previous research has shown that a manipulation commonly used to enhance memory at retrieval—context reinstatement—reduces appropriate “do not know” responding to unanswerable questions. Here we investigated whether this reduction is due to increased belief that a given question is answerable, or solely to increased confidence in specific responses for questions already believed to be answerable. In two experiments, we show that context reinstatement reduces “do not know” responding even when a “do not remember” option is available to express beliefs that particular questions are answerable. These results indicate that improved access to contextual information at retrieval creates an erroneous belief that unanswerable questions are in fact answerable.     

Facial emotion recognition in violent men

The goal of this study was to explore the ability of violent men to recognise facial affect. In contrast to traditional approaches to this research question, we took the effects of the models' sex and different types of violent behaviour into consideration. Data obtained from 71 violent men revealed that they recognised facial expressions of fear (p = .019) and disgust (p = .013) more accurately when displayed by female than male models. The opposite was found for angry faces (p = .006), while the models' sex did not affect the recognition of sad, happy and surprised facial expressions or neutral faces. Furthermore, sexual coercion perpetrators were more accurate than other violent men in the recognition of female facial disgust (p = .006). These results are discussed in the context of social learning theory, and the hypothesis that female facial expressions of disgust could be subtle cues to their sexual infidelity that motivate sexual coercion in some men.     

Language deficits in pre-symptomatic Huntington's disease: evidence from Hungarian

A limited number of studies have investigated language in Huntington’s disease (HD). These have generally reported abnormalities in rule-governed (grammatical) aspects of language, in both syntax and morphology. Several studies of verbal inflectional morphology in English and French have reported evidence of over-active rule processing, such as over-suffixation errors (e.g., walkeded) and over-regularizations (e.g., digged). Here we extend the investigation to noun inflection in Hungarian, a Finno-Ugric agglutinative language with complex morphology, and to genetically proven pre-symptomatic Huntington’s disease (pre-HD). Although individuals with pre-HD have no clinical, motor or cognitive symptoms, the underlying pathology may already have begun, and thus sensitive behavioral measures might reveal already-present impairments. Indeed, in a Hungarian morphology production task, pre-HD patients made both over-suffixation and over-regularization errors. The findings suggest the generality of over-active rule processing in both HD and pre-HD, across languages from different families with different morphological systems, and for both verbal and noun inflection. Because the neuropathology in pre-HD appears to be largely restricted to the caudate nucleus and related structures, the findings further implicate these structures in language, and in rule-processing in particular. Finally, the need for effective treatments in HD, which will likely depend in part on the ability to sensitively measure early changes in the disease, suggests the possibility that inflectional morphology, and perhaps other language measures, may provide useful diagnostic, tracking, and therapeutic tools for assessing and treating early degeneration in pre-HD and HD.     

Two Sexes,Two Genders Only: Measuring Attitudes toward Transgender Individuals in Poland

Transphobia is an under-examined but important type of prejudice to study in Polish culture. Poland is a country where a majority of transgender people feel discriminated against. There is a need for a more evidence-based measures for researchers and practitioners to better understand transphobia. The main purpose of the present three studies (n?=?300 participants for each study) was to validate the Genderism and Transphobia Scale (GTS; Hill and Willoughby 2005) and the Transphobia Scale (TS; Nagoshi et al. 2008) in Polish culture and to identify the possible psychological and demographic factors that matter in forming attitudes toward transgender individuals. The results confirm that Polish versions of both the GTS and the TS are reliable instruments to measure attitudes toward transgender individuals. Moreover, the studies revealed that both traditional and modern homonegativity, right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, religious fundamentalism, attitudes toward gender roles, and biological and cultural beliefs about the origins of gender differences were significant predictors of transphobia. As in previous studies, men were more prejudiced toward gender nonconformists in comparison to women. These studies contribute well-adapted tools for measuring transphobia and data-driven collection of significant predictors of transphobia.

     

Spinoza on the Limits of Explanation

Commentators standardly ascribe to Spinoza a belief in an exceptionless conceptual closure of mental and physical realms: no intention can allow us to understand a bodily movement, no bodily injury can make intelligible a sensation of pain. This counterintuitive doctrine, most often now referred to as Spinoza's 'attribute barrier', has weighty repercussions for his views on intelligibility, nature of the mind, identity, and causality. I argue against the standard reading of the doctrine, by showing that it produces an inconsistent epistemological picture, contradicting Spinoza's theory of mind and his commitment to universal intelligibility. The alternative account I propose is also philosophically more compelling and plausible as an account of thought in its essential intentionality.     

Mentalizing in Parents after Traumatic Loss. Analysis of Couple Counseling

Abstract

The aim of the study is to explore whether bereaved parents’ capacity to mentalize is related to their progression through grieving and how it changes during couple therapy. The clients’ RF levels were assessed using the Reflective Functioning Scale and Psychotherapy Reflective Functioning Scale Manual. The content of the sessions was analyzed using Thematic Analysis. At the beginning of the therapy, concrete images of the child’s death were more frequent and the parents’ RF was lower than their general RF level. As the therapy progressed these images were gradually supplanted by more mental references to the deceased child.