Evaluation strategies for some nonstandard conditionals during adolescence.

380 adolescents and young adults between the ages of 11 and 29 years participated in three experiments in which they were asked to evaluate both universally quantified nonstandard and standard conditionals using items of information bearing upon them. Subjects found it much easier to avoid a biconditional interpretation with the nonstandard than with the standard conditionals, which throws doubt on the explanation of desire for symmetry of biconditional conversion. It was argued, from data of other studies, that a modified version of the Piagetian view that biconditional conversion occurs as a result of a desire to avoid the complications of dealing with three factors explains most cases of such conversion in adolescence. Results also confirmed that it is more profitable to analyse performance on tasks of this kind using a two-stage model of interpretation and information use previously developed to explain performance with standard universally quantified conditionals than to view such tasks as providing truth-table values. Such an analysis was extended to the nonstandard conditionals studied in the present paper. The origins of the dramatic differences in information-use strategies adopted by adolescents for standard and nonstandard conditionals remain unclear.     

Rigidity, Occasional Identity and Leibniz' Law

André Gallois' recent book Occasions of Identity attempts to defend the coherence of the view that objects may be identical at one time but distinct at another (the occasional identity thesis). The defence requires a special account of rigid designation and a special version of Leibniz' law. This paper shows Gallois' proposals in this regard to be inadequate, and suggests a better line of defence for occasional identity theorists.     

What is the Cause of Confidence Inflation in the Life Events Inventory (LEI) Paradigm?

Briefly imagining, paraphrasing, or explaining an event causes people to increase their confidence that this event occurred during childhood—the imagination inflation effect. The mechanisms responsible for the effect were investigated with a new paradigm. In Experiment 1, event familiarity (defined as processing fluency) was varied by asking participants to rate each event once, three times, or five times. No inflation was found, indicating that familiarity does not account for the effect. In Experiment 2, richness of memory representation was manipulated by asking participants to generate zero, three, or six details. Confidence increased from the initial to the final rating in the three- and six-detail conditions, indicating that the effect is based on reality-monitoring errors. However, greater inflation in the three-detail condition than in the six-detail condition indicated that there is a boundary condition. These results were also consistent with an alternative hypothesis, the mental workload hypothesis.     

Gender Differences in the Suicide-Related Behaviors of Adolescents and Young Adults

Gender differences in suicide-related behaviorswere examined in an older adolescent and a young adultsample (primarily Caucasian). Suicide-related behaviorswere assessed by the Life Attitudes Schedule (LAS) as well as by measures of depressivesymptomatology and hopelessness. The LAS measures a broadcontinuum of potentially life-diminishing orlife-enhancing behaviors. There are four LAScontent-category subscales: overtly suicidal and death-related,self-related, risk and injury-related, and health-relatedbehaviors. As hypothesized, in both samples, genderdifferences in the expression of suicide-related behaviors were obtained. Males from both samplesendorsed substantially more risk-taking andinjury-producing behaviors than females. Males in bothsamples also reported more negative health-relatedbehaviors than females. In contrast, females reported moresymptoms of depression than males. Hopelessness scoresonly differentiated male and female young adults; maleand female adolescents did not differ significantly on the hopelessness measure. These findings areprimarily discussed in terms of gender-role socializationtheory. Implications for the treatment of suicidality aredrawn.     

A defence of anti-criterialism

According to philosophical orthodoxy, there are informative criteria of identity over time. Anti-criterialism rejects this orthodoxy and claims that there are no such criteria. This paper examines anti-criterialism in the light of recent attacks on the thesis by Matt Duncan, Sydney Shoemaker and Dean Zimmerman. It is argued that those attacks are not successful. Along the way, a novel strategy to defend anti-criterialism against the critics’ most challenging objection is developed. Under-appreciated difficulties for criterialism are also raised which, I claim, there is no obvious way to solve. It is concluded that anti-criterialism may be a much stronger rival to criterialism than is often supposed.