On Selective Left Neglect during Walking in a Child

In this article we describe a child affected by right parieto-occipital lesion due to head injury. The patient showed left hemianopia, but not unilateral spatial neglect on traditional paper-and-pencil tests and on "ecological" tests. However, his parents reported frequent collisions with obstacles on the left side. A specific test was set up: The patient had to kick down skittles put on both sides of a route traced on the floor. He kicked down 89% of skittles on the right, but only 38% on the left side. These findings are discussed in light of recent theories on unilateral neglect.     

Are Conservatives Less Likely to be Prosocial Than Liberals? From Games to Ideology,Political Preferences and Voting

Do political preferences reflect individual differences in interpersonal orientations? Are conservatives less other‐regarding than liberals? On the basis of past theorising, we hypothesised that, relative to individuals with prosocial orientations, those with individualistic and competitive orientations should be more likely to endorse conservative political preferences and vote for conservative parties. This hypothesis was supported in three independent studies conducted in Italy (Studies 1 and 2) and the Netherlands (Study 3). Consistent with hypotheses, a cross‐sectional study revealed that individualists and competitors endorsed stronger conservative political preferences than did prosocials; moreover, this effect was independent of the association between need for structure and conservative political preferences (Study 1). The predicted association of social value orientation and voting was observed in both a four‐week (Study 2) and an eight‐month (Study 3) longitudinal study. Taken together, the findings provide novel support for the claim that interpersonal orientations, as measured with experimental games rooted in game theory, are important to understanding differences in ideology at the societal level. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Asset Legitimacy and Distributive Justice in the Dictator Game: An Experimental Analysis

Distributive justice seems to guide behavior in reward allocation tasks in which subjects in a group jointly produce an endowment that is then allocated by a member of the group. It has been shown that allocators aim to preserve the proportionality between inputs (e.g., effort) and outputs (e.g., monetary rewards) of those in the group, even when this comes at a cost to themselves. We experimentally investigated whether justice considerations of this kind play a role in a double‐blind dictator game when the assets to be allocated are generated exclusively through the effort of the decision maker. The experiment shows that distributive justice is an important source of motivation in highly demanding social environments in which reputational concerns and reciprocity are absent. This finding has been corroborated by an independent validity check and may have important implications for previous experimental findings and for the economics of charity. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Just ignore or counterattack? On the effects of different strategies for dealing with political attacks

During political races, candidates have to decide how to deal with the negative remarks from opposing candidates: just ignore or counterattack? In two studies, we investigated some of the consequences of this choice. In Study 1, participants were presented with a political candidate who systematically attacked his opponent and with the reactions of the attacked candidate: across conditions, the attacked candidate only focused on his political program or counterattacked. Results showed an overt condemnation of the choice to counterattack but a higher spontaneous conformity toward the candidate who counterattacked. Study 2 replicated and extended these results indicating that the gender of the attacked candidate did not affect the results. Moreover, Study 2 showed that conformity toward the attacked candidate was positively related to the predicted chances of winning the election. Results are discussed in relation to their theoretical and applied implications. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The impact of the HEXACO personality model in predicting socio-political attitudes: The moderating role of interest in politics

In this paper, the relationships between the HEXACO personality model and socio-political attitudes were investigated. It was hypothesized that the relationship between Honesty-Humility and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) and that between Openness and Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) were moderated by interest in politics. Three hundred and forty-four individuals participated in the study. Results showed that Honesty-Humility affected SDO and Openness affected RWA more strongly among individuals with a higher level of interest in politics. Facet-level analyses revealed that Humility and Experiential Openness were uniquely connected to ideology. These effects were also moderated by interest in politics.     

A Comfortable Sureness: Knowledge,Animality and Conceptual Investigations in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty

This essay analyses some remarks of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty in which Wittgenstein compares human behaviour to that of animals and says he wants to consider man as an animal. The essay’s main purpose is to show that these remarks are essentially understood as part and parcel of what Wittgenstein calls “conceptual investigations” and that, consequently, they give little support to On Certainty’s naturalistic interpretations. A second purpose of the essay is to show that Wittgenstein does not intend to combat the use of “I know” in contexts such as those evoked by Moore; rather he wants to draw attention to the different ways in which we say or can say “I know.”

     

A new methodological approach to nonverbal behavior analysis in cultural perspective

The measurement of human behavior is a complex task, both for psychologists and human sciences researchers and with respect to technology, since advanced and sophisticated instruments may have to be implemented to manage the plurality of variables involved. In this article, an observational study is presented in which a quantitative procedure, theexternal variables method (Duncan & Fiske, 1977), was integrated with a structural analysis (Magnusson, 1993, 2000) in order to detect the hidden organization of nonverbal behavior in Italian and Icelandic interactions. To this aim, Theme software was introduced and employed. The results showed that both the frequency and the typology of gestures deeply change as a function of culture. Moreover, a high number of patterns was detected in both Italian and Icelandic interactions: They appeared to be complex sequences in which a huge number of events were constantly happening and recurring. In this domain, Theme software provides a methodological progression from the quantitative to the structural approach.     

Agreement and movement: a syntactic analysis of attraction

This paper links experimental psycholinguistics and theoretical syntax in the study of subject-verb agreement. Three experiments of elicited spoken production making use of specific characteristics of Italian and French are presented. They manipulate and examine its impact on the occurrence of 'attraction' errors (i.e. incorrect agreement with a word that is not the subject of the sentence). Experiment 1 (in Italian) shows that subject modifiers do not trigger attraction errors in free inverted VS (Verb Subject) structures, although attraction was found in VS interrogatives in English (Vigliocco, G., & Nicol, J. (1998). Separating hierarchical relations and word order in language production. Is proximity concord syntactic or linear? Cognition, 13-29) In Experiment 2 (in French), we report stronger attraction with preverbal clitic object pronouns than with subject modifiers. Experiment 3 (in French) shows that displaced direct objects in the cleft construction trigger attraction effects, in spite of the fact that the object does not intervene between the subject and the verb in the surface word order (OSV). Moreover, attraction is stronger in structures with subject-verb inversion (...). These observations are shown to be naturally interpretable through the tools of formal syntax, as elaborated within the Principles and Parameters/Minimalist tradition. Three important constructs are discussed: (1) the hierarchical representation of the sentence during syntactic construction, and the role of intermediate positions by which words transit when they move; (2) the role of specific hierarchical (c-command) but also linear (precedence) relations; and (3) the possibility that agreement involves two functionally distinct components. A gradient of computational complexity in agreement is presented which relates empirical evidence to these theoretical constructs.     

Linguistic intergroup bias in political communication

The Linguistic Intergroup Bias (LIB) illustrates the disposition to communicate positive in-group and negative out-group behaviors more abstractly than negative in-group and positive out-group behaviors. The present research examined the function of language in reinforcing this bias in political communication. To illustrate the LIB, the Linguistic Category Model (LCM) was used, including a nouns category. Because social stereotypes are usually conveyed by nominal terms, the aim was to observe the relationship between stereotypes and language in political communication. Moreover, we were interested in analyzing the psychological processes that drive the LIB. Therefore, we verified whether the LIB is more related to language abstractness than to agent-patient causality. Several political debates and interviews, which took place before the latest Italian provincial elections, were analyzed. Results suggested that the language politicians use in communicating about political groups are conceptualized as stereotypes rather than as trait-based categories. Moreover, it seems that the LIB could not be explained only at a lexical level. Social implications of the present findings in interpersonal relations and causal attribution were discussed.     

On the determinants of implicit evaluations: When the present weighs more than the past

It is often assumed that implicit evaluations are influenced by early childhood experiences, whereas explicit evaluations reflect recent experiences. However, previous findings supporting this assumption remain ambiguous as to whether the differential effects of early versus recent experiences are driven by their temporal distance or their affective versus cognitive nature. Controlling for affectivity by using a predominantly affective attitude object (i.e., religion), the present study found that both implicit and explicit evaluations were related to recent, but not early, experiences. This pattern consistently emerged for self-reported experiences as well as independent reports from parents. Moreover, the relation of recent experiences to one type of evaluation remained significant after controlling for the respective other type of evaluation, suggesting that recent experiences influenced implicit and explicit evaluations independently. Implications for attitudinal dissociations and processes of attitude change are discussed.