Construction of a tape-controlled system of presenting visual-spatial and visual-temporal stimulus patterns for use in cross-modal and intramodal matching tests

A technique of tape construction is described for use in the generation and control of all combinations of auditory-temporal, visual-temporal, and visual-spatial stimulus patterns. This technique allows the development of a set of nine tasks for testing cross-modal and intramodal matching.     

Do people with low self-esteem really want to feel better? Self-esteem differences in motivation to repair negative moods.

This research examined the hypothesis that people with low self-esteem (LSE) are less motivated than people with high self-esteem (HSE) to repair their negative moods. In Study 1, participants completed diaries in response to either a success or a failure in their everyday lives. Participants described what they intended to do next and the reasons behind those plans. After failure, fewer LSE than HSE participants expressed a goal to improve their mood. A follow-up investigation (Study 2) suggested that this difference was not due to a self-esteem difference in knowledge of mood repair strategies. In Study 3, after undergoing a negative mood induction, fewer LSE than HSE participants chose to watch a comedy video, even though both groups believed the comedy video would make them happy. Studies 4 and 5 explored possible reasons why LSE people are less motivated than HSE people to repair their negative moods.     

Reading Wittgenstein: The Rehersal of Prejudice A response to Dr. McCarty

Studies in Philosophy and Education -     

Relations between behavioral reactivity at 4 months and attachment classification at 14 months in a selected sample

Attachment at 14 months of age was examined in a sample of infants who had been selected for high or low levels of positive or negative affective reactivity and motor activity at 4 months of age. The type of early emotional reactivity was not clearly associated with attachment security or insecurity. The proposal of Belsky and Rovine [Belsky, J., & Rovine, M. (1987). Temperament and attachment security in the strange situation: An empirical rapprochement. Child Development, 58, 787–795] that infants classified as B3/B4 or C1/C2 are temperamentally more negatively reactive than those classified as A1/A2 or B1/B2 was supported. Compared with infants who showed high levels of positive affect and infants who scored low on affective reactivity, infants who showed high levels of negative affect in response to stimulation at 4 months of age were significantly more likely to be classified as B3/B4 or C1/C2 in the Strange Situation at 14 months of age. These findings are discussed in the context of prior inconsistent findings about the relations between temperament and groups of attachment sub-classifications. The role of different methods of assessing temperament and the importance of selected samples in clarifying such relations is discussed.     

Are facilitated mentoring programs beneficial? A randomized experimental field study

Results from a pretest–posttest randomized field experiment study with a control group comparing the impact of high- and low-level-facilitated mentoring programs on new employees’ performance and perceptions about their jobs and organization were reported in this paper. Results indicated increases in job satisfaction, organizational commitment, person-organization fit and performance by participants in both mentoring programs with larger gains made by the high-level-facilitated group. These results suggest that a formal mentoring program can have positive effects on employee’s work-related attitudes, cognition and behavior with significantly greater gains made by formal mentoring programs with higher levels of facilitation.     

‘Developing’ the Self in the Knowledge Economy

The term ‘knowledge economy’, like the term ‘globalisation’, has become a catchword in political and educational debate over the last decade or so, especially in debates upon educational policy where the role of education in preparing young people to take their part in the Knowledge Economy is often seen as paramount over other traditional schooling activities. It is said in such debates that the production of knowledge, information and skills, will become more valuable than traditional primary and secondary production. A lot is said about the knowledge required in the Knowledge Economy, and about how institutions, businesses, activities and human beings are to be ordered or structured in accordance with views of knowledge and new Management theories. But little is said of the young people expected to take their part in the knowledge economy. Do they have a choice? Is lying on a surfboard excluded from their life options? How will they be developed, trained or educated to take their part? Will they be committed to developing their selves in accordance with the model of the IT Knowledge Entrepreneur (hereinafter TIKE) presented as a model for education by policy makers in the Knowledge Economy? This article will argue against this latter notion of the development of the self, arguing that because knowledge is prioritised over ethics, there is both an inadequate notion of the self and the educational development of the self and, because of its implicit view only of ethics, an inadequate ethical and moral view of education [246 words].     

Learning to attend: a connectionist model of situated language comprehension

Evidence from numerous studies using the visual world paradigm has revealed both that spoken language can rapidly guide attention in a related visual scene and that scene information can immediately influence comprehension processes. These findings motivated the coordinated interplay account ( Knoeferle & Crocker, 2006 ) of situated comprehension, which claims that utterance-mediated attention crucially underlies this closely coordinated interaction of language and scene processing. We present a recurrent sigma-pi neural network that models the rapid use of scene information, exploiting an utterance-mediated attentional mechanism that directly instantiates the CIA. The model is shown to achieve high levels of performance (both with and without scene contexts), while also exhibiting hallmark behaviors of situated comprehension, such as incremental processing, anticipation of appropriate role fillers, as well as the immediate use, and priority, of depicted event information through the coordinated use of utterance-mediated attention to the scene.     

Fluency Training a Writing Skill: Editing for Concision

The Psychological Record - The goal of this study was to design and evaluate fluency-based training units to help students eliminate inconcision. Participants first completed a 1.5-hr lesson on...     

Illocutionary Force and Its Relation to Mood: Comparative Methodology Reconsidered

It is sometimes argued that the study of grammar is irrelevant or unimportant in the business of comparative philosophy, or that it ought to be avoided in favor of methods that presuppose a strongly pragmatic point of view. In this regard, some philosophers have expressed skepticism about whether facts about grammar have anything to offer in the adjudication of competing theories of interpretation or translation. This essay argues that a strongly pragmatic orientation in comparative philosophy invariably overlooks an important role that the study of grammar can play in shedding light on the nature of intention and communicative practice, and that an essential part of the methodology of comparative philosophy should involve a grammatical approach to interpretation and translation. These points are supported by a semantical analysis of passages from Confucius’ Analects that clarifies the relationship between illocutionary force and grammatical mood.