Forewarning of a Threat and Prior Knowledge of Outcome Effects on Children's Emotional Responses to a Film Sequence

An experiment examined the influence of prior information on children's emotional responses to a frightening program. Children at two age levels (5–7 and 9–11 years) viewed a program that included a threatening scene and a happy resolution. Before viewing, they heard one of four audiotaped introductions created by factorially varying information about the threat (forewarning, no forewarning) and the happy outcome (prior knowledge, no prior knowledge). Emotional responses were assessed through self-reports, facial expressions (coded using hard's Affex coding scheme), and skin temperature (as an index of physiological arousal). Self-reports of emotion revealed that forewarning of the threat increased anticipatory fear but did not affect emotional responses to the threatening scene. Prior knowledge of the happy outcome tended to reduce anticipatory fear but had a somewhat inconsistent effect on fear during the threatening scene. Changes in skin temperature over time were consistent with predictions, but no effects of the manipulations emerged for facial expressions of negative affect. Expected age differences were not observed for either type of prior information. Responses to the happy outcome were also examined. Children's reports of coping strategies and the results of manipulation checks were considered in interpreting the findings.     

ENDURANTISM, DIACHRONIC VAGUENESS AND THE PROBLEM OF THE MANY

Abstract: A plausible desideratum for an account of the nature of objects, at, and across time, is that it accommodate the phenomenon of vagueness without locating vagueness in the world. A series of arguments have attempted to show that while universalist perdurantism – which combines a perdurantist account of persistence with an unrestricted mereological account of composition – meets this desideratum, endurantist accounts do not. If endurantists reject unrestricted composition then they must hold that vagueness is ontological. But if they embrace unrestricted composition they are faced with the problem of the many, and cannot plausibly accommodate vagueness. This paper disambiguates two related sub-problems of the problem of the many, and argues that universalist perdurantism is not superior to universalist endurantism with respect to either of these.     

AN EMPIRICAL TEST OF A MODEL OF RESISTANCE TO PERSUASION

This investigation synthesized research from several related areas to produce a model of resistance to persuasion based upon variables not considered by earlier congruity and inoculation models. Support was found for the prediction that the kind of critical response set induced and the target of the criticism are mediators of resistance to persuasion. The more critical acts are focused on arguments presented in a persuasive message, the more likely that the critical act will not be distracting and therefore promote counterarguing which will lead people to be resistant to subsequent persuasive messages arguing on the same side of given attitudinal issue. When criticism is less central to message variables and focuses on speaker and/or delivery characteristics, distraction occurs which decreases the probability of counterarguing and induces people to be vulnerable to forthcoming persuasive messages. This is especially true when negative criticism of speaker characteristics reduces threat to present attitudes and reduces motivation to counterargue to protect privately held beliefs. A completely counterbalanced design employing several manipulation checks was created to rule out competing explanations for differential resistance to persuasion.     

Children's Responses to Conflicting Auditory and Visual Features of a Televised Narrative

Children at three age levels (5–6, 8–9, and 10–12 years) were exposed to a televised story in which the auditory and visual content conflicted at the semantic level: a character was depicted as behaving kindly in one channel and cruelly in the other. Comparison groups were exposed to audio-only and video-only versions of the program. It was found that awareness of the auditory-visual discrepancy, assessed at the end of the testing session, increased with age. On a recognition memory test, the presence of conflicting video significantly reduced recognition of the audio content among children in the two older groups, but not among those in the youngest group. This pattern did not emerge for recognition of video content. However, the tendency to interpret video depictions in terms of the inconsistent audio information increased with age. On a measure of free recall, mention of the content of both channels, rather than only one channel, also increased with age. Finally, for all three age groups, personality ratings of the central character were less extreme among respondents exposed to the mismatch version of the program than among those exposed to the audio-only or video-only versions (in which the character exhibited only one type of behavior). Overall, the results were interpreted as indicating a developmental increase in utilization of the semantic content of both channels to form a unified representation of the events in the narrative. However, evaluations of the character's personality suggest that children at all three age levels integrated the content of both channels to some degree.     

“A Matter of Life and Death”: Kawabata on the Value of Art after the Atomic Bombings

This article explores the possible interpretations—and the implications of those interpretations—of a comment about the importance of art made by Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972), later the first Japanese Nobel laureate for literature: that “looking at old works of art is a matter of life and death.” (In 1949, Kawabata visited Hiroshima in his capacity as president of the Japan literary society P.E.N. to inspect the damage caused by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima that helped end World War II. On his way back to his home in Kamakura, he stopped in Kyoto. He came under severe criticism for “sightseeing” at such a time. This comment was his response.) The introduction explains why we should take him seriously as a commentator on art. The body of the article examines why our looking at art might be more, not less, important after the post‐War situation, the kinds of art Kawabata might have meant, why some possibilities are more likely than others, and how they differ in what they offer us and the value of art under conditions of trauma and mass trauma.