Beyond Skills and Structure: Justice Dispositions as Antecedents of Young Citizens' Volunteering and Political Participation

Community involvement is usually attributed to opportunity structures and individuals' ability to be involved. Building on psychological justice research, this paper proposes that justice dispositions add to explaining why young citizens become active in their communities or not. Furthermore, it is argued that justice dispositions help to understand why most studies find only moderate relationships between youth volunteering and forms of political involvement. In a sample of 321 young Swiss volunteers, this study shows justice centrality and belief in a just world to predict the extent of volunteering and political participation, even after controlling for civic skills and opportunity structures. However, scrutinising the motivations to volunteer, self‐oriented motivations (enhancement, social, career and understanding) more strongly affected the level of volunteering than motivations related to justice dispositions (political responsibility and social responsibility). These findings have implications for the attraction and retention of volunteers as well as for the politics of volunteering and community development in general. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The observing self: Diminishing egocentrism through brief mindfulness meditation

Reflecting the egocentrism that permeates contemporary society, people often believe they stand out in the eyes of others (i.e., the spotlight effect), a conviction that is entirely misplaced. Although considerable efforts have focused on elucidating the consequences of the spotlight effect, much less is known about factors that may attenuate this illusory perception. Accordingly, the current study explored the possibility that, via shifts in perspectives on the self (i.e., first person vs. third person), brief mindfulness‐based meditation may reduce a future‐oriented variant of this bias. The results revealed that, compared with responses in the control conditions (i.e., control meditation or no mediation), brief mindfulness‐based meditation fostered the adoption of a third‐person vantage point during mental imagery and diminished perceptions of personal salience.     

Does childhood general cognitive ability at age 12 predict subjective well-being at age 52?

Drawing on a broad, multidimensional conceptualization of subjective well-being, this study examined the power of childhood general cognitive ability to predict life satisfaction, satisfaction with eight individual life domains, and the frequency of experiencing positive and negative affect in middle adulthood. Data were obtained from a representative Luxembourgish sample (N = 738; 53% female) in a longitudinal study conducted in 1968 and 2008. Childhood general cognitive ability was unrelated to life satisfaction, negatively related to negative affect and satisfaction with free time, and positively related to positive affect and satisfaction with some of the life domains associated with socioeconomic success (i.e. finances, self, housing, work, or health). This predictive power persisted even when childhood socioeconomic status was controlled.     

Anticipation of visual form independent of knowing where the form will occur

We investigated how selective preparation for specific forms is affected by concurrent preknowledge of location when upcoming visual stimuli are anticipated. In three experiments, participants performed a two-choice response time (RT) task in which they discriminated between standard upright and rotated alphanumeric characters while fixating a central fixation cross. In different conditions, we gave the participants preknowledge of only form, only location, both location and form, or neither location nor form. We found main effects of both preknowledge of form and preknowledge of location, with significantly lower RTs when preknowledge was present than when it was absent. Our main finding was that the two factors had additive effects on RTs. A strong interaction between the two factors, such that preknowledge of form had little or no effect without preknowledge of location, would have supported the hypothesis that form anticipation relies on depictive, perception-like activations in topographically organized parts of the visual cortex. The results provided no support for this hypothesis. On the other hand, by an additive-factors logic Sternberg (Sternberg, Acta Psychologica 30:276?C315, 1969), the additivity of our effects suggested that preknowledge of form and location, respectively, affected two functionally independent, serial stages of processing. We suggest that the two stages were, first, direction of attention to the stimulus location and, subsequently, discrimination between upright and rotated stimuli. Presumably, preknowledge of location advanced the point in time at which attention was directed at the stimulus location, whereas preknowledge of form reduced the time subsequently taken for stimulus discrimination.     

Pitting intuitive and analytical thinking against each other: The case of transitivity

Identifying which thinking mode, intuitive or analytical, yields better decisions has been a major subject of inquiry by decision-making researchers. Yet studies show contradictory results. One possibility is that the ambiguity is due to the variability in experimental conditions across studies. Our hypothesis is that decision quality depends critically on the level of compatibility between the thinking mode employed in the decision and the nature of the decision-making task. In two experiments, we pitted intuition and analytical thinking against each other on tasks that were either mainly intuitive or mainly analytical. Thinking modes, as well as task characteristics, were manipulated in a factorial design, with choice transitivity as the dependent measure. Results showed higher choice consistency (transitivity) when thinking mode and the characteristics of the decision task were compatible.     

Bio-Inspired Design of Soft Robotic Assistive Devices: The Interface of Physics,Biology, and Behavior

Wearable assistive robotic devices are characterized by an interface, a meeting place of living tissue and mechanical forces, at which potential and kinetic energy are converted to one or the other form. Ecological scientists may make important contributions to the design of device interfaces because of a functional perspective on energy and information exchange. For ecological scientists, (a) behavioral forms are an assembly of whole functional systems from available parts, emerging in energy flows, and (b) nature explores for informationally based adaptive solutions to assemble behavioral forms by generating spontaneous patterns containing fluctuations. We present data from ongoing studies with infants that demonstrate how infants may explore for adaptive kicking solutions. Inspired by the ecological perspective and data from developing humans, ecological scientists may design interfaces to assist individuals with medical conditions that result in physical and/or mental impairment. We present one such device, what is called the “second skin,” to illustrate how a soft, prestressed material, worn on the skin surface, may be used synergistically with synthetic and biological muscles for assisting action. Our work on the second skin, thus far, suggests a set of ecologically inspired principles for design of wearable assistive robotic devices.     

Muscle Damaging Exercise Affects Isometric Force Fluctuation as well as Intraindividual Variability of Cognitive Function

Healthy untrained men (N = 11) were asked to perform 10 series of 12 repetitions of knee eccentric extension (EE) at 160° per second. Quadriceps muscle torques evoked by electrical stimulation at 20 Hz (P20) and 100 Hz (P100), maximal voluntary isometric contraction torque (MVC), maximal isokinetic concentric torque (IT) at 30° per second, voluntary activation index (VA), simple reaction time (RTs), complex reaction time (RTc), and torque variability at 30% of MVC were measured before EE, immediately after EE, and 60 min and 24 hr after EE. MVC, IT, P20, P100, and VA decreased significantly after EE and remained depressed 24 hr later. Torque variability increased significantly after EE. Average RTs and RTc did not change after EE, whereas intraindividual variability in RTs and RTc increased significantly after EE.     

Consequentializing and Underdetermination

The paper explores a new interpretation of the consequentializing project. Three prominent interpretations are criticized for neglecting the explanatory dimension of moral theories. Instead, it is argued that consequentializing leads to a phenomenon that is structurally analogous to one in science—the underdetermination of theory by evidence. This provides important insights into the consequentializing debate, and advances our general understanding of the moral domain.