Not doing is not the opposite of doing: implications for attitudinal models of behavioral prediction

This study argues for and tests the prediction that cognitions about not performing a behavior are not simple opposites of cognitions about performing the same behavior because they rely on separate goals. Three behaviors (i.e., eating meat, doing vigorous physical activity, and breastfeeding) are examined, for which performing and not performing are means to different goals. In the context of the theory of planned behavior, the discriminant validity of constructs related to performing and not performing behaviors is tested. Moreover, the simultaneous validities of perceived behavioral control over doing and not doing for the prediction of both intentions and the incremental validity of both intentions in predicting behavior are investigated. Results show that the constructs related to performing and not performing a behavior independently contribute to the prediction of intentions and behaviors. Implications of considering separable motivational systems underlying doing and not doing are discussed.     

At the core of cyberaggression: A group-based explanation

In this study, prototypicality of the aggressor was tested as a group-level factor predicting social media users’ active participation in cyberaggression. Participants were exposed to a fictitious conversation, in which either a prototypical versus non-prototypical user posted an aggressive comment as a reply to a provocative comment. In line with self-categorization theory, we hypothesized that bystander participants would post an aggressive comment and rate the aggression as acceptable to a greater extent in the prototypical than in the non-prototypical condition. Furthermore, we predicted that perceived normativity of aggression would mediate the effect of prototypicality. Results supported these predictions and showed that prototypical members affect the extent to which collective aggressive behaviors in online interactions are approved and enacted. These findings highlight the importance of group-level factors in the study of cyberaggression and provide important information for understanding the psychological underpinnings of collective forms of online aggression.     

Divergent thinking in Italian elementary school children: the key role of probabilistic reasoning style

Cognitive Processing - Divergent thinking is widely recognised as an individual creative potential and an essential factor in fostering creativity since the early stages of life. Albeit previous...     

How children approach the false belief test: social development,pragmatics, and the assembly of Theory of Mind

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - Evidence from the knowledge access task and the diverse belief task suggests that, before age four, children may find it difficult to attribute false...     

A Twin Study of the Relationships among Inattention, Hyperactivity/Impulsivity and Sluggish Cognitive Tempo Problems

We investigated the etiological relationships between the three ADHD dimensions of Inattentive Problems (INP), Hyperactivity-Impulsivity Problems (HIP) and Sluggish Cognitive Tempo (SCT) as measured by the CBCL 6–18 questionnaire. Multivariate models were applied to 398 twin pairs (374 boys and 422 girls) aged 8 to 17 years (M?=?13.06, SD?=?2.59) belonging to the population-based Italian Twin Registry. The INP, HIP and SCT problem scores were moderately-to-substantially (range 0.29–0.47) intercorrelated. The best fitting model showed that these 3 dimensions are correlated both at the genetic (correlations’ range: 0.65–0.83) and the environmental (correlations: 0.29 and 0.44) levels, but they are also distinct. While SCT showed moderate heritability and large non-shared environmental influences, variance for both INP and HIP was substantially explained by genetic influences. We also found evidence of negative sibling interaction for INP, implying that a given behavior in one twin leads to an opposite behavior in the co-twin. Our results support at the etiological level the findings of previous psychometric and longitudinal studies of ADHD, which yielded evidence of the 3 distinct—albeit correlated—problem dimensions of inattentiveness, hyperactivity-impulsivity, and sluggish cognitive tempo.     

Factor structure and behavioural correlates of the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised [PCL-R] in a Brazilian prisoner sample

The present study examines the reliability, factor structure, and criterion-related validity of Hare (2003) Revised Psychopathy Checklist [PCL-R] in a Latin American forensic context. Brazilian male inmates (124) were administered the PCL-R, along with relevant subscales of an inventory of normal personality [Personality Factorial Inventory], an intelligence scale [Standard Progressive Matrices], and a semi-structured interview based in DSM IV. Criminal offence records were obtained from prison files. Several theoretical factorial structures for the PCL-R were tested and compared. A bifactor model with three factors, one general factor reflecting the overlap across all items, and two independent subfactors reflecting the unique covariation among particular groups of items, shows the better fit. Overall scores on the PCL-R correlated with the number of criminal offenses committed by participants. No significant correlations were found between PCL-R scores and personality or intelligence measures. It was concluded that the PCL-R is a reliable and valid instrument for the assessment of psychopathy in the Brazilian male forensic population.     

A database of orthography-semantics consistency (OSC) estimates for 15,017 English words

Orthography–semantics consistency (OSC) is a measure that quantifies the degree of semantic relatedness between a word and its orthographic relatives. OSC is computed as the frequency-weighted average semantic similarity between the meaning of a given word and the meanings of all the words containing that very same orthographic string, as captured by distributional semantic models. We present a resource including optimized estimates of OSC for 15,017 English words. In a series of analyses, we provide a progressive optimization of the OSC variable. We show that computing OSC from word-embeddings models (in place of traditional count models), limiting preprocessing of the corpus used for inducing semantic vectors (in particular, avoiding part-of-speech tagging and lemmatization), and relying on a wider pool of orthographic relatives provide better performance for the measure in a lexical-processing task. We further show that OSC is an important and significant predictor of reaction times in visual word recognition and word naming, one that correlates only weakly with other psycholinguistic variables (e.g., family size, word frequency), indicating that it captures a novel source of variance in lexical access. Finally, some theoretical and methodological implications are discussed of adopting OSC as one of the predictors of reaction times in studies of visual word recognition.     

Desirability foundations of robust rational decision making

Recent work has formally linked the traditional axiomatisation of incomplete preferences à la Anscombe-Aumann with the theory of desirability developed in the context of imprecise probability, by showing in particular that they are the very same theory. The equivalence has been established under the constraint that the set of possible prizes is finite. In this paper, we relax such a constraint, thus de facto creating one of the most general theories of rationality and decision making available today. We provide the theory with a sound interpretation and with basic notions, and results, for the separation of beliefs and values, and for the case of complete preferences. Moreover, we discuss the role of conglomerability for the presented theory, arguing that it should be a rationality requirement under very broad conditions.