Interventionism and Supervenience: A New Problem and Provisional Solution

The causal exclusion argument suggests that mental causes are excluded in favour of the underlying physical causes that do all the causal work. Recently, a debate has emerged concerning the possibility of avoiding this conclusion by adopting Woodward's interventionist theory of causation. Both proponents and opponents of the interventionist solution crucially rely on the notion of supervenience when formulating their positions. In this article, we consider the relation between interventionism and supervenience in detail and argue that importing supervenience relations into the interventionist framework is deeply problematic. However, rather than reject interventionist solutions to exclusion wholesale, we wish to propose that the problem lies with the concept of supervenience. This would open the door for a moderate defence of the interventionist solution to the exclusion argument.     

Nichtspezifische,funktionelle und somatoforme Körperbeschwerden

In the S3 guidelines on non-specific, functional and somatoform bodily complaints, a broad group of medical and psychological societies as well as patient representatives have for the first time achieved an evidence-based consensus on terminology and care of these patients. This paper summarizes the main background information and recommendations for psychotherapists. For mild courses treatment by the general practitioner with establishment of a biopsychosocial explanatory model and physical as well as social activation is usually sufficient. More severe courses call for cooperative, coordinated management, including regular appointments with the general practitioner, graded activation and psychotherapy, especially cognitive behavioral, in addition to psychodynamic interpersonal or hypnotherapeutic imaginative psychotherapy. In particularly severe courses multimodal and if necessary day clinic or inpatient treatment is needed. Additionally the patient guidelines for affected people and their relatives are presented.     

Post‐Learning Verbal Information Changes Visual and Motor Memory for Hand‐Manipulative Tasks

Many instructions of a motor task include visual and verbal information. However, verbal information presented after a visual event has been shown to influence memory. This study examined whether this effect applies for hand‐manipulative motor tasks such as knot tying. Eighty‐six naive participants learned to tie the archaic bowline. Subsequently, half of the participants received misleading verbal information about the cowboy bowline, which differs from the originally instructed archaic bowline in one central detail: At a certain point, the rope crosses from left to right instead of from right to left. The remaining half of the participants received no misinformation. Dependent variables measured visual and motor memory for the knot. Results showed that misleading verbal information influenced visual and motor memory for knot‐tying tasks. More specifically, the misleading information changed memory at exactly this point to which it referred. This study suggests new avenues for our understanding and design of learning environments. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Analogue Mental Transformations in 3‐Year‐Olds: Introducing a New Mental Rotation Paradigm Suitable for Young Children

Until now, a successful application of the mental rotation paradigm was restricted to children 5 years or older. By contrast, recent findings suggest that even infants can perform mental rotation. Unlike the methods used in infant studies (looking time), our new research paradigm allows for the measurement and interpretation of reaction times. Kindergartners (aged 3–6 years) were presented with a stimulus configuration on a touchscreen and asked to bring a rotated stimulus into an upright position using the shortest path. Mean reaction time (RT) increased linearly with angular disparity. The ensuing linear trend was significant not only for the entire sample but also for the youngest age group analysed separately. To exclude the possibility that linearity was due to movement planning, 3‐year‐olds had to manually rotate a stimulus about the same trajectory without the need for a corresponding mental transformation in a second experiment. Here, no linear trend was observed. These results are interpreted as evidence for an analogue mental transformation in 3‐year‐olds, equal to the transformation processes in older children's and adults' mental rotation. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Buy three but get only two: The smallest effect in a 2 × 2 ANOVA is always uninterpretable

Loftus (Memory & Cognition 6:312–319, 1978) distinguished between interpretable and uninterpretable interactions. Uninterpretable interactions are ambiguous, because they may be due to two additive main effects (no interaction) and a nonlinear relationship between the (latent) outcome variable and its indicator. Interpretable interactions can only be due to the presence of a true interactive effect in the outcome variable, regardless of the relationship that it establishes with its indicator. In the present article, we first show that same problem can arise when an unmeasured mediator has a nonlinear effect on the measured outcome variable. Then we integrate Loftus’s arguments with a seemingly contradictory approach to interactions suggested by Rosnow and Rosenthal (Psychological Bulletin 105:143–146, 1989). We show that entire data patterns, not just interaction effects alone, produce interpretable or noninterpretable interactions. Next, we show that the same problem of interpretability can apply to main effects. Lastly, we give concrete advice on what researchers can do to generate data patterns that provide unambiguous evidence for hypothesized interactions.     

Avoid violence,rioting, and outrage; approach celebration,delight, and strength: Using large text corpora to compute valence,arousal, and the basic emotions

Ever since Aristotle discussed the issue in Book II of his Rhetoric, humans have attempted to identify a set of “basic emotion labels”. In this paper we propose an algorithmic method for evaluating sets of basic emotion labels that relies upon computed co-occurrence distances between words in a 12.7-billion-word corpus of unselected text from USENET discussion groups. Our method uses the relationship between human arousal and valence ratings collected for a large list of words, and the co-occurrence similarity between each word and emotion labels. We assess how well the words in each of 12 emotion label sets—proposed by various researchers over the past 118 years—predict the arousal and valence ratings on a test and validation dataset, each consisting of over 5970 items. We also assess how well these emotion labels predict lexical decision residuals (LDRTs), after co-varying out the effects attributable to basic lexical predictors. We then demonstrate a generalization of our method to determine the most predictive “basic” emotion labels from among all of the putative models of basic emotion that we considered. As well as contributing empirical data towards the development of a more rigorous definition of basic emotions, our method makes it possible to derive principled computational estimates of emotionality—specifically, of arousal and valence—for all words in the language.     

Consequences of voluntary job changes in Germany: A multilevel analysis for 1985–2013

Analyzing the development of the consequences of voluntary job changes in Germany between 1985 and 2013, the study focuses on income gains and job satisfaction increases. Drawing on arguments of the job-search literature on the one hand and the proliferation of choices on the other we investigate whether the returns of job changes have increased or decreased. Results show that income gains have decreased over time while the job satisfaction surplus has remained stable. We further conclude that in determining the outcomes of job changes over time, structural factors seem to be more important than individual ones.     

Greater self‐enhancement in Western than Eastern Ukraine,but failure to replicate the Muhammad Ali effect

Based on the cross‐cultural research linking individualism–collectivism and self‐enhancement, this research examines regional pattern of self‐enhancement in Ukraine. Broadly speaking, the western part of Ukraine is mainly Ukrainian speaking and historically oriented towards Europe, whereas Eastern Ukraine is mainly Russian speaking and historically oriented towards the Russian cultural sphere. We found self‐enhancement on a “better than average” task to be higher in a Western Ukrainian sample compared to an Eastern Ukrainian sample, with differences in independent self‐construals supporting assumed regional variation in individualism. However, the Muhammad Ali effect, the finding that self‐enhancement is greater in the domain of morality than intelligence, was not replicated. The discussion focuses on the specific sources of this regional difference in self‐enhancement, and reasons for why the Muhammad Ali effect was not found.