Smiling when distressed: when a smile is a frown turned upside down

This research tested self-regulation and self-presentation as psychological mechanisms that motivate smiling when distressed. In Study 1, participants viewed moderately and intensely distressing, amusing, and neutral videos in social or nonsocial conditions. Smiling when distressed was most prevalent in conditions in which participants reported the greatest emotional distress. Specifically, while viewing distressing videos, men reported experiencing greater overall distress and also smiled more than women, especially in social conditions and while viewing intensely (as opposed to moderately) distressing stimuli. In general, smiling was related to more negative affect while viewing distressing videos but to more positive affect after viewing such stimuli. Study 2 explored raters' social perceptions of participants from Study 1, confirming that people judge distressed smilers as less socially appropriate and less likable than nonsmilers. Findings suggest that although distressed smiling serves a probable self-regulatory function, it may also bear some negative social consequences.     

Rotational kinematics influence multimodal perception of heaviness

Perceived heaviness has been shown to be specific to an object’s rotational inertia (I ), its resistance to rotational acceleration. According to the kinematic specification of dynamics (KSD) principle, we hypothesized that I is optically specified by rotational kinematics. Using virtual depictions of wielded objects, we investigated whether the visually detected rotational kinematics of wielded objects would influence perceived heaviness in a manner consistent with the inertial model of heaviness perception. We scaled the virtual object’s movement so that it rotated more or less than its wielded counterpart, specifying lower and higher I, respectively. Perceived heaviness was inversely related to the rotational scaling factor, consistent with a KSD interpretation of the inertial model.     

Differentiating the effects of self-control and self-esteem on reactions to mortality salience

Whereas many previous studies suggest that self-esteem may buffer against the psychological threat of death, recent research has begun to suggest that self-control also may serve as a buffer. Two studies examined the possibility that dispositional self-control uniquely predicts responses to mortality salience, above and beyond self-esteem. In Study 1, an initial exercise in emotion regulation increased subsequent accessibility of death thoughts. In Study 2, mortality salience increased worldview defense. Both of these effects were moderated by dispositional self-control, such that the effects occurred among participants with low but not high self-control. More importantly, these moderating effects were observed over and above the moderating effects of self-esteem. Findings suggest that self-control may serve as an important and unique buffer against thoughts of death.     

Mindless decision making and environmental issues: gestalt/feature-intensive processing and contextual reasoning in environmental decisions

In the absence of relevant information in working memory during decision consideration, respondents tend to rely on a style of cognitive processing that may result in premature or inaccurate decision making (M. J. Sharps, 2003). M. J. Sharps and S. S. Martin (2002) demonstrated this effect in executive decision making. In the present study, the authors extended these methods to decisions about environmental issues. Respondents rated decisions about issues such as overpopulation, energy policy, and food production in the presence or absence of simple pertinent information. The presence of such information in the immediate context of environmental decisions, and therefore in working memory, significantly improved respondents' ability to understand negative decision consequences. These results demonstrate the importance of contextual information in environmental decision making.     

The Meno's Metaphilosophical Examples

I propose that an ill‐appreciated contrast between the examples Socrates gives Meno, to show him how he ought to philosophize, is the key to understanding the Meno. I contend that Socrates prefers his definitions of shape to his account of color because the former are concerned with what shape is, while the latter is concerned with how color comes to be. This contrast suggests that Plato intends an analogous contrast between the (properly philosophical) way of inquiry that leads to Socrates' definition of knowledge as “true belief tied down with an account” and the (not properly philosophical) way of inquiry that leads to Socrates' account of how knowledge comes to be, that is, the “theory of recollection.”     

Deaf readers’ response to syntactic complexity: Evidence from self-paced reading

This study was designed to determine the feasibility of using self-paced reading methods to study deaf readers and to assess how deaf readers respond to two syntactic manipulations. Three groups of participants read the test sentences: deaf readers, hearing monolingual English readers, and hearing bilingual readers whose second language was English. In Experiment 1, the participants read sentences containing subject-relative or object-relative clauses. The test sentences contained semantic information that would influence online processing outcomes (Traxler, Morris, & Seely Journal of Memory and Language 47: 69–90, 2002; Traxler, Williams, Blozis, & Morris Journal of Memory and Language 53: 204–224, 2005). All of the participant groups had greater difficulty processing sentences containing object-relative clauses. This difficulty was reduced when helpful semantic cues were present. In Experiment 2, participants read active-voice and passive-voice sentences. The sentences were processed similarly by all three groups. Comprehension accuracy was higher in hearing readers than in deaf readers. Within deaf readers, native signers read the sentences faster and comprehended them to a higher degree than did nonnative signers. These results indicate that self-paced reading is a useful method for studying sentence interpretation among deaf readers.     

The Invincible Summer: On Albert Camus’ Philosophical Neoclassicism

What follows is a work of critical reconstruction of Camus' thought. It aims to answer to the wish Camus expressed in his later notebooks, that he at least be read closely. Specifically, I hope to do three things. In Part I, we will show how Camus' famous philosophy of the absurd represents a systematic scepticism whose closest philosophical predecessor is Descartes' method of doubt, and whose consequence, as in Descartes, is the discovery of a single, orienting certainty, on the basis of which Camus would proceed to pass beyond the 'nihilism' that conservative critics continued to level against him (MS 34). Part II will unfold the central tenets of Camus' mature thought of rebellion, and show how Camus' central political claims follow from his para-Cartesian claim to have found an irreducible or 'invincible' basis for a post-metaphysical ethics, consistent with the most thoroughgoing epistemic scepticism. Part III then undertakes to show that the neoclassical rhetoric and positioning Camus claimed for his postwar thought—as a thought of moderation or mesure, and a renewed Greek or Mediterranean naturalism—is more than a stylistic pretension. It represents, so I argue, a singular amalgam of modern and philosophical classical motifs which makes Camus' voice nearly unique in twentieth century ideas, and all the more worth reconsidering today. So let us proceed.     

A Study of the Perceptions and Worldviews of Mature Age Pre-Service Teachers Aged Between 31 and 53

This study presents the perceptions and worldviews of 17 mature age second-career pre-service teachers in career transition. The aim was to explore the experience of becoming a primary school teacher after a first career. The second-career pre-service teachers were enrolled on a full-time basis at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE/UT). The primary data were collected from 17 separate interviews of approximately 1 h; over two separate calendar years, which totalled a five-month interviewing period. The interviewees volunteered to be part of the study and were aged between 31 and 53 and enrolled in two high academic entry-level accelerated programmes for graduates. The interviewees had previous undergraduate degrees and numerous years?? experience working in a variety of other careers. The overall findings are that individuals who have been involved in well-established careers, present distinct perceptions of teaching, that are not only separate from traditional younger pre-service teachers, but remain as significant factors throughout their teaching programmes. It is argued that perceptions could in turn shape their pedagogy in ways that are either profitable or problematic to primary teaching.     

High-fat diets impair spatial learning in the radial-arm maze in mice

It has been suggested that hyperglycemia and insulin resistance triggered by energy-dense diets can account for hippocampal damage and deficits of cognitive behaviour. We wonder if the impairment of learning and memory processes detected in diet-induced obese (DIO) mice is linked to diet composition itself. With this purpose we have evaluated learning performance in mice undergoing a short-term high-fat (HF) treatment, which leads to a pre-obese state characterized by increased adiposity without significant changes of glucose and insulin plasma levels. C57BL/6J mice were fed either a HF (45 kcal% from fat) or control diet (10 kcal% from fat) during 8 weeks. Learning performance was evaluated by using the four-arm baited version of the eight-arm radial maze test (RAM). Mice were trained to learn the RAM protocol and then memory was tested at different time-points. Time spent to consume food placed in baited arms and errors committed to find them were measured in all sessions. DIO mice significantly spent more time in learning the task and made a greater number of errors than controls. Moreover, retention tests revealed that both working and total memory errors were also more numerous in DIO mice. The current results show that short-term DIO impairs spatial learning and suggest that impairment of hippocampal learning elicited by HF diets might be perceptible before metabolic alterations linked to obesity develop.     

The therapeutic alliance in adolescent substance abuse treatment: a one-with-many analysis

Studies of the therapeutic alliance typically use a one-with-many (OWM) design in which each therapist (the one) treats multiple clients (the many). This study used Kenny, Kashy, and Cook's (2006) OWM method to examine the composition of the therapeutic alliance and to analyze the association between alliance and outcome in a sample of 398 adolescents treated for substance abuse by 14 therapists. Both the client and therapist alliance ratings yielded large relationship variances, with limited consensus among clients treated by the same therapist about the quality of the alliance. If a client reported an especially strong alliance with his or her therapist, the therapist was likely to also report an especially strong alliance with that client (dyadic reciprocity). The association between the components of the alliance and treatment outcome was complicated, with different levels of measurement and different components of the alliance (perceiver, partner, or relationship) derived from different informants (therapist or client) relating to different outcomes.