Metacognitions in Triathletes: Associations With Attention,State Anxiety,and Relative Performance

This study investigated how metacognitive beliefs in triathletes covary with state anxiety dimensions, prior to competition. It also examined how metacognitions relate to concentration, after controlling for state anxiety. Regression analyses revealed that specific metacognitive beliefs were differentially predictive of state anxiety dimensions and concentration. When accounting for the state anxiety variables in a hierarchical model predicting concentration, positive beliefs about worry, negative beliefs about worry, and cognitive anxiety remained as significant predictors. Metacognitive beliefs were also found to differ across time-to-event intervals. Overall, the results demonstrated that a metacognitive framework is a viable pathway for future sporting research.     

Can Romantic Relationship Quality Mediate the Relation Between Psychopathy and Subjective Well-Being?

The relations between psychopathy, romantic relationships, and well-being were investigated in 431 undergraduates. For both males and females, various components of romantic relationship quality were positively correlated with subjective well-being (SWB) and negatively correlated with ill-being. However, only for females was overall romantic relationship quality positively correlated with life satisfaction, happiness and positive affect, and negatively correlated with negative affect and depression. High levels of psychopathy were found in 23.1 % of males and 7.4 % of females. Psychopathy accounted for significant variance in overall relationship quality (7.0 %), commitment (14.1 %), satisfaction (9.3 %), romance (10.7 %) and trust (6.4 %) in romantic relationships for males and in overall relationship quality (3.2 %), commitment (5.3 %), and trust (5.9 %) for females. Romantic relationship quality was able to mediate the relations between psychopathy and SWB and this mediation was moderated by gender.     

Brief Behavioral Intervention for Young Children with Disruptive Behaviors

Parent reported behavioral difficulties in young children are relatively common. Without adequate intervention, some children will later present with more severe problem behaviors. Parent management training is one of the best methods of treatment for behavior problems; however, existing treatments can be lengthy and difficult to conduct outside of a research setting. The Brief Behavioral Intervention was designed as a briefer version of a manualized parent management training treatment package. Thirty-one parents of children aged 2–6.5 presenting with behavior problems were included in this initial study of treatment effectiveness. Based on parent and teacher report, treatment was effective in a mean of 7.2 sessions.     

CAB: Connectionist Analogy Builder

The ability to make informative comparisons is central to human cognition. Comparison involves aligning two representations and placing their elements into correspondence. Detecting correspondences is a necessary component of analogical inference, recognition, categorization, schema formation, and similarity judgment. Connectionist Analogy Builder (CAB) determines correspondences through a simple iterative computation that matches elements in one representation with elements playing compatible roles in the other representation while simultaneously enforcing structural constraints. CAB shows promise as a process model of comparison as its performance can be related to human performance (e.g., solution trajectory, error patterns, time‐on‐task). Furthermore, CAB's bounded working memory allows it to account for the inherent capacity limitations of human processing. CAB's strengths are its parsimony, transparency of operations, and ability to generate performance predictions. In this paper, CAB is evaluated against benchmark phenomena from the analogy literature.     

Direct Associations or Internal Transformations? Exploring the Mechanisms Underlying Sequential Learning Behavior

We evaluate two broad classes of cognitive mechanisms that might support the learning of sequential patterns. According to the first, learning is based on the gradual accumulation of direct associations between events based on simple conditioning principles. The other view describes learning as the process of inducing the transformational structure that defines the material. Each of these learning mechanisms predicts differences in the rate of acquisition for differently organized sequences. Across a set of empirical studies, we compare the predictions of each class of model with the behavior of human subjects. We find that learning mechanisms based on transformations of an internal state, such as recurrent network architectures (e.g., Elman, 1990), have difficulty accounting for the pattern of human results relative to a simpler (but more limited) learning mechanism based on learning direct associations. Our results suggest new constraints on the cognitive mechanisms supporting sequential learning behavior.     

Mands for information generalize across establishing operations

The current study extends the literature on teaching mands for information by assessing whether mands generalize across different establishing operations (EOs). Three children with autism were taught to perform multiple behavior chains, 3 of which included a common response (e.g., “Where is the spoon?”) used for different purposes. An interrupted-behavior-chain procedure was used to contrive the EO for each mand. After teaching a mand for information under 1 EO, the remaining chains were interrupted to determine whether the mand had generalized to different EOs. For all participants, mands for information generalized across EOs. For 2 participants, a new mand-for-information topography emerged after training.     

Alexandre Kojève and philosophical Stalinism

Alexandre Kojève not infrequently claimed that he was a Stalinist. While many have ignored his claim, this paper takes it seriously and outlines several aspects of Kojève’s thought that allow one to read Kojève as a philosopher of Stalinism, as one who articulates the self-consciousness of Stalinism. These aspects are three: (1) Kojève’s association of finality and freedom with the overcoming of individuality; (2) the attempt to achieve finality and freedom so defined in the universal homogeneous state, and (3) the structure of that state as an essentially juridical administrative system. The question remains, however, whether one can truly overcome individuality while one is still living, the conflict between individual material existence and the overarching state being irresolvable.