Development of the Basel Version of the Awareness of Social Inference Test – Theory of Mind (BASIT-ToM) in healthy adults

Impairments of Theory of Mind (ToM) abilities occur in a wide range of brain disorders. Therefore, reliable and ecologically valid examination of these abilities is a crucial part of any comprehensive neuropsychological assessment. An established and ecologically valid, English-language test identifying deficits in ToM abilities is “The Awareness of Social Inference Test – Social Inference Minimal (TASIT-SIM)”. However, no comparable German-language ToM test currently exists. In this study, we aimed to develop the first German-language adaption of TASIT-SIM in healthy adults. We selected 13 scenes [four scenes per message type (i.e., honesty, simple sarcasm, paradoxical sarcasm) and one practice scene] out of the 30 TASIT-SIM scenes. In collaboration with a film institute, we filmed each scene at three different intensities. These intensity version scenes were then administered to 240 healthy adults, equally distributed in sex and age, ranging from 35 to 92 years. By applying Rasch analysis, we selected intensity versions that showed neither floor nor ceiling effects in the majority of ToM questions in participants whose ToM abilities were in the medium range. In conclusion, we have developed the first German-language adaption of TASIT-SIM, i.e., the “Basel Version of the Awareness of Social Inference Test – Theory of Mind (BASIT-ToM)”. The BASIT-ToM incorporates the strengths of TASIT-SIM, while overcoming its limitations such as inconsistencies in cinematic realization and ceiling effects in healthy participants. Next, the BASIT-ToM needs to be validated in healthy people and clinical populations.     

Community engagement,greening, and violent crime: A test of the greening hypothesis and Busy Streets

Researchers have documented that vacant lot greening can reduce community-level crime and violence. Busy Streets Theory (BST) suggests that residents who are involved in the greening process can help to improve physical environments and build social connections that deter crime and violence. Yet few researchers have explored how community engagement in the greening process may affect crime and violence outcomes. We applied BST to test the effects of community-engaged vacant lot greening compared to vacant lots that received either professional mowing or no treatment, on the density of violent crime around study lots. Using mixed effects regression models, we analyzed trends in violent crime density over the summer months from 2016 to 2018 at 2102 street segments in Youngstown, OH. These street segments fell within 150 meters of an intervention parcel that was classified as one of three conditions: community-engaged maintenance, professional mowing, or no treatment (control). We found that street segments in areas receiving community-engaged maintenance or professional mowing experienced greater declines in violent crime density than street segments in areas receiving no treatment, and more decline occurred in the community-engaged condition compared to the professional mow condition. Our findings support BST and suggest that community-engaged greening of vacant lots in postindustrial cities with a concentrated vacancy can reduce crime and violence.     

Scaling behavior in the temporal context model

The Temporal Context Model (TCM) postulates a distributed representation of temporal context that provides the cue for episodic recall tasks. TCM, coupled with the Luce Choice Rule for determining probability of recall, a conjunction referred to as TCMFR, is able to explain the existence of the long-term recency effect, as well as predicting the persistence of associative effects even with the inclusion of a delay between items. Here, quantitative predictions of TCMFR such as the magnitude of the delay interval is increased in continuous-distractor free recall are developed. The magnitude of the recency effect is operationally defined as the ratio of the probability of first recall (PFR) of the last list item to the PFR of the next-to-last item. Properties of associative effects are operationalized by using analogous measures derived from conditional response probability (CRP) curves. TCMFR predicts a decrease in recency with increasing delay. The rate of this decay and the qualitative pattern of change with increasing delay depend on the rate of contextual drift. For a range of values of the rate of contextual drift, TCMFR also predicts a transient increase in the recency effect as the length of the delay increases from zero. The model predicts that contiguity effects in free recall should follow a similar pattern, but that associative asymmetry, ubiquitously observed in free recall, should decay monotonically with increases in the delay interval.     

HOW SHOULD THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION BE WRITTEN? SOME REFLECTIONS ABOUT THE NATURE OF THE DISCIPLINE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THERECEPTION OF OUR WORK

How should history of education be written? To put the question is far more easier than to provide a concrete answer. In contemporary research, there continue to be pedagogistic complaints about finding answers to present-day educational problems via history. In our view, such an ahistorical utilitarianism as well as the legitimizing and/or mythologizing belief in a particular pedagogical system, in which the history of this field is so rich since the institutionalization of the discipline at the end of the nineteenth century, should be avoided at all costs. But the danger of presentism lurks around the corner as a sine qua non condition in any form of historical research. As can be found out via the comments on our own work, much of the criticism goes back to old conceptions of the discipline, conceived as “historical pedagogy” rather than as history of education. Apparently, in the field of pedagogy people are still convinced that the history of education, even if it does not provide edifying examples and useful lessons, must in any case have a training value for professionals – which in the light of modern, advanced research is rather a difficult idea to defend.     

Seeing the Unobservable: Van Fraassen and the Limits of Experience

Van Fraassen maintains that the information that we canglean from experience is limited to those entities and processes that are detectable bymeans of our unaided senses. His challenge to the realist, I suggest, is that the attemptto inferentially transcend those limits amounts to a reversion to rationalism. Under pressurefrom such examples as microscopic observation, he has recently widened the scope of thephenomena to include object-like experiences without empirical objects of experience.With this change in mind, I argue that van Fraassen needs an account of perception whoseconsequence is that we can only see what we see with the unaided eye. I then argue thatreflection on the epistemically significant aspects of the perceptual process rendersvan Fraassen's characterization of the limits of experience implausible; technologicallyenhanced perception brings ``unobservables' within those limits. An empiricismthat is compatible with realism results.     

Differentiating Hostile and Benevolent Sexist Attitudes Toward Positive and Negative Sexual Female Subtypes

Expressions of hostile and benevolent sexism toward a female character whose behavior was consistent with either a positive (i.e., chaste) or negative (i.e., promiscuous) sexual female subtype were examined. Consistent with the theory that benevolent and hostile sexism form complementary ideologies that serve to maintain and legitimize gender-based social hierarchies, men expressed increased hostile, but decreased benevolent,sexism toward a female character who fit a negative subtype, whereas they expressed increased benevolent, but decreased hostile, sexism toward a female character who fit a positive subtype that was consistent with traditional gender roles. Furthermore, men’s sexual self-schema moderated expressions of hostile sexism across subtypes, whichsuggests that men who think of themselves in sexual terms (i.e., those who are sexuallyschematic) may be predisposed to (a) interpret information about women in sexual terms and categorize women into positive or negative sexual female subtypes on the basis of limited information, which leads to (b) increased hostile sexist attributions when womenare perceived as fitting a negative sexual subtype. These findings emphasize the role of both social dominance motives and the more subtle sociocognitive processes underlyinggender stereotyping in the expression of ambivalent sexism.     

Lexique 2 : A new French lexical database

In this article, we present a new lexical database for French:Lexique. In addition to classical word information such as gender, number, and grammatical category,Lexique includes a series of interesting new characteristics. First, word frequencies are based on two cues: a contemporary corpus of texts and the number of Web pages containing the word. Second, the database is split into a graphemic table with all the relevant frequencies, a table structured around lemmas (particularly interesting for the study of the inflectional family), and a table about surface frequency cues. Third,Lexique is distributed under a GNU-like license, allowing people to contribute to it. Finally, a metasearch engine,Open Lexique, has been developed so that new databases can be added very easily to the existing ones.Lexique can either be downloaded or interrogated freely fromhttp://www.lexique.org.     

Dynamics of Interpersonal Political Environment and Party Identification: Longitudinal Studies of Voting in Japan and New Zealand

The dynamical systems theory of groups claims that interpersonal political environment and party identification are dynamically interrelated to provide heuristics under uncertainty. Panel data over the course of a year examined the longitudinal dynamics between social networks, social identifications, and voting behavior among a national sample of registered voters in Japan and a regional sample in Wellington, New Zealand. Respondents with more stable party identification had greater stability in the political preferences of their interpersonal network in both countries; moreover, stability in party identification was predicted by interpersonal political environment and older age in both countries. Stability of party identification predicted voting consistency in both countries, whereas stability of interpersonal political environment made an independent contribution to voting consistency in Japan only. There were cultural differences in levels of interpersonal political environment stability, but the amount of political discussion and ideological stability did not make independent contributions to any of the three main variables. Results provided support for the dynamical systems theory of groups.     

The Ethics of Opinion in Academe: Questions for an Ethical and Administrative Dilemma

If we accept that all plagiarism is wrong, the issue is black and white. But are there more challenging questions that color the issue with shades of gray that may influence or help clarify the ethical underpinnings of the act? Does intent matter? Does the venue matter? Does the form of writing matter? What about a professor when working as a private citizen, rather than in his/her academic role? Might plagiarism be mitigated when there is no associated financial gain? Is a writer’s history that exhibits impeccable ethical integrity relevant? Should these factors, and/or other factors, even be considered in a university’s administrative response — or non-response? What might employing an ethical approach contribute to wrestling with the dilemma? The authors explore critical issues that might face a senior academic administrator when confronting the need to respond on behalf of a university to a charge of plagiarism leveled by an influential newspaper against a university professor for a social responsibility-focused opinion-editorial published in this newspaper.