What Punishment for the Murder of 10,000?

Those who commit crime on a grand scale, numbering their victims in the thousands, seem to pose a special problem both for consequentialist and for non-consequentialist theories of punishment, a problem the International Criminal Court makes practical. This paper argues that at least one non-consequentialist theory of punishment, the fairness theory, can provide a justification of punishment for great crimes. It does so by dividing the question into two parts, the one of proportion which it answers directly, and the other of ‘anchoring points’ which it assigns to a broader theory of enforcement (which may have a non-consequentialist or consequentialist version).     

The change-of-standard effect: Distorted standards and adjusted impressions

Previous accounts of the memory distortion known as the change-of-standard effect hypothesize that participants form a relative impression of a target at encoding and later use that impression with the average of all items to recall the target (Higgins & Lurie, 1983). In three experiments, we investigated the standard and the integration of the standard with the relative impression. Experiments 1 and 2 show that participants’ subjective average at recall is distorted toward recent stimuli: It is computed when required and is therefore affected by the items’ accessibility at that time. Furthermore, the impression’s influence on recall is relatively small when the context changes between encoding and decoding. Experiment 3 shows that this change in the impression’s influence occurs only when the participant integrates information across sessions, suggesting that such tasks make participants aware of the changed context and cause them to adjust the use of their impression in recalling the target.     

Bare’ing it all for the Camera: Women’s Experience of Having Erotic Photographs Taken

One area in which a change in women’s sexual behavior has been observed is in the growing number of women who are having erotic photographs taken of themselves by professional photographers. The current research is an attempt to learn more about this unstudied phenomenon. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 16 women who have had erotic photographs taken by a professional photographer. The interviews were subjected to thematic analysis. The women described the erotic photography experience as having positive implications, such as increased body esteem and feelings of empowerment, as well as giving the women the ability to see themselves as sexual and an opportunity to celebrate their bodies. Having erotic photos taken also provided women with the opportunity to create a sexual image in a photograph on their own terms. The findings provide insight into the changing nature of attitudes about women’s sexuality.     

Decreased Sensitivity to Phonemic Mismatch in Spoken Word Processing in Adult Developmental Dyslexia

Initial lexical activation in typical populations is a direct reflection of the goodness of fit between the presented stimulus and the intended target. In this study, lexical activation was investigated upon presentation of polysyllabic pseudowords (such as p rocodile for crocodile) for the atypical population of dyslexic adults to see to what extent mismatching phonemic information affects lexical activation in the face of overwhelming support for one specific lexical candidate. Results of an auditory lexical decision task showed that sensitivity to phonemic mismatch was less in the dyslexic population, compared to the respective control group. However, the dyslexic participants were outperformed by their controls only for word-initial mismatches. It is argued that a subtle speech decoding deficit affects lexical activation levels and makes spoken word processing less robust against distortion.     

How to have a radically minimal ontology

In this paper I further elucidate and defend a metaontological position that allows you to have a minimal ontology without embracing an error-theory of ordinary talk. On this view ‘there are Fs’ can be strictly and literally true without bringing an ontological commitment to Fs. Instead of a sentence S committing you to the things that must be amongst the values of the variables if it is true, I argue that S commits you to the things that must exist as truthmakers for S if it is true. I rebut some recent objections that have been levelled against this metaontological view.     

Determinants of Partner Opportunism in Strategic Alliances: A Conceptual Framework

Purpose  

We present a comprehensive framework of the key determinants of partner opportunism in strategic alliances.     

Social Cognition and Interpersonal Impairment in Young Adolescents with ADHD

The purpose of this study is twofold. First, it aims to examine whether the impairment in peer functioning and social-cognitive deficits (i.e., hostile attribution bias, social comprehension, social problem-solving) found in elementary school aged children with ADHD also occur in adolescence. Second, it aims to provide evidence for a predictive relationship between these social-cognitive deficits and an adolescent’s functional impairment in the social domain. To address these aims, several social-cognitive tasks were administered to a small sample of young adolescents with ADHD (N = 27) and a comparison sample without an ADHD diagnosis (N = 18). Parent report of functional impairment and peer sociometric data were also gathered. Comparisons of both parent and peer report of adolescent social functioning suggest that individuals with ADHD continue to experience difficulties with peers into the adolescent years and data from the social-cognitive tasks show evidence of social comprehension and problem-solving deficits. Further analyses indicated a significant link between functional impairment and social cognition. Findings herein are discussed in the context of both the developmental changes that arise during adolescence and consideration of the importance of social cognition for understanding the impaired social functioning experienced by adolescents with ADHD.     

A resource-bounded agent addresses the newcomb problem

In the Newcomb problem, the standard arguments for taking either one box or both boxes adduce what seem to be relevant considerations, but they are not complete arguments, and attempts to complete the arguments rely upon incorrect principles of rational decision making. It is argued that by considering how the predictor is making his prediction, we can generate a more complete argument, and this in turn supports a form of causal decision theory.     

Patterns of Emotional Reactivity and Regulation in Children with Anxiety Disorders

Emotion dysregulation is believed to be a key factor in anxiety disorders. However, the empirical basis for this view is limited, particularly in children and adolescents. This study aimed to examine whether anxious children display negative emotional hyper-reactivity and deficits in emotion regulation, using a new task that presents ambiguous situations with potentially threatening meanings. Forty-nine children diagnosed with either generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety, or separation anxiety disorder, were compared with 42 non-anxious controls. Relative to controls, anxious children demonstrated (a) greater intensity and frequency of negative emotional responses, (b) deficits in using reappraisal in negative emotional situations and corresponding deficits in reappraisal self-efficacy, and (c) greater reliance on emotion regulation strategies that increase the risk of functional impairment, intense negative emotion, and low emotion regulation self-efficacy. Implications for the assessment and treatment of childhood anxiety are discussed.