Seeing Through the Fog: Love and Injustice in Bleak House

The author takes up a provocative question poised by Charles Taylor about the relationship between our commitments to a good such as neighbor love and the possibilities of achieving and sustaining social justice. Taylor's concern is not only that we make such a commitment but that we make it in such a way that we avoid its ability to lead us towards injustice rather than justice. After articulating conceptions of love, justice, and injustice, the author turns to Charles Dickens's treatment of love and injustice in Bleak House , to explore more fully how love can lead to injustice, and also its potential role in promoting justice. Dickens's view, profoundly shaped by his own sense of Christian virtues, helps us see the inner workings of love, justice, and injustice, so that we can appreciate their interconnectedness anew and understand better the urgency of Taylor's question for our time.     

Disruptive effects of stimulus intensity on two variations of a temporal discrimination procedure

Previous reports using stimulus intensity changes to disrupt temporal discrimination have shown shifts in the psychophysical curve for time, while studies using other disruptors have shown a flattening of the curve. The current study investigated the impact of increases and decreases in stimulus intensity on temporal discrimination in pigeons, to determine if a flattening of the curve could be extended to this disruptor. The brightness of the sample to be timed was manipulated under two procedural variations, in which the response alternatives were differentiated by color or location. Results showed that all subjects in the color procedure, and one in the location procedure, showed a flattening of the psychophysical curve when they experienced increased stimulus intensity in descending order. No subjects exposed to an ascending order of stimulus intensities, and none of the other subjects in the location procedure, showed any impact of changed stimulus intensity. Minimal disruption was found when test sessions presented decreased stimulus intensity levels in a second series. These results, together with those using other types of disruptors, add to the evidence of a flattening of the psychophysical curve when temporal discrimination is disrupted.     

Therapeutic Factors Contributing to Change in Cognitive-Behavioral Group Therapy for Older Persons with Schizophrenia

The contributions of homework, therapy participation, cognitive insight, and skills acquisition to treatment outcomes in group CBT for schizophrenia were examined. Increased cognitive insight was associated with reduced positive, negative and total symptoms, but not improved psychosocial functioning. Greater participation was associated with increased cognitive insight, reduction in total and negative symptoms, and a trend was found for positive symptoms. Greater homework adherence was associated with greater skill acquisition, but skill acquisition was not significantly associated with change in any outcome. The therapeutic factors contributing to change in CBT for schizophrenia appear different for symptom and psychosocial functioning outcomes.     

Exploring the regulation of need-satisfying goals: A baseline model

Intrinsic goals fulfill fundamental psychological needs for relatedness, competence, and autonomy. They tend to be self-determined, effectively pursued, and contribute to well-being. But even need-satisfying goals are pursued in the context of finite resources: How do we prioritize amongst multiple need-satisfying goals? Integrating self-determination theory with other needs theories, we proposed a baseline model whereby goals that are predominately relevant to relatedness would be prioritized over those predominately relevant to competence or autonomy. 202 participants completed a web survey about personal goals, including a goal sacrifice measure capturing within-person prioritization. Relatedness-predominant goals were prioritized over competence- and autonomy-predominant goals; this pattern was not accounted for by between-need differences in commitment and motivation regulation. People need autonomy, competence, and relatedness for optimal functioning, but in the face of limited resources they may prioritize goals that are predominately relevant to relatedness.     

The Biological Roots of Complex Thinking: Are Heritable Attitudes More Complex?

ABSTRACT Are highly heritable attitudes more or less complex than less heritable attitudes? Over 2,000 participant responses on topics varying in heritability were coded for overall integrative complexity and its 2 subcomponents (dialectical complexity and elaborative complexity). Across different heritability sets drawn from 2 separate prior twin research programs, the present results yielded a consistent pattern: Heritability was always significantly positively correlated with integrative complexity. Further analyses of the subcomponents suggested that the manner in which complexity was expressed differed by topic type: For societal topics, heritable attitudes were more likely to be expressed in dialectically complex terms, whereas for personally involving topics, heritable attitudes were more likely to be expressed in elaboratively complex terms. Most of these relationships remained significant even when controlling for measurements of attitude strength. The authors discuss the genetic roots of complex versus simple attitudes, implications for understanding attitude development more broadly, and the contribution of these results to previous work on both heritability and complexity.     

A mechanism for reducing delay discounting by altering temporal attention

Rewards that are not immediately available are discounted compared to rewards that are immediately available. The more a person discounts a delayed reward, the more likely that person is to have a range of behavioral problems, including clinical disorders. This latter observation has motivated the search for interventions that reduce discounting. One surprisingly simple method to reduce discounting is an "explicit-zero" reframing that states default or null outcomes. Reframing a classical discounting choice as "something now but nothing later" versus "nothing now but more later" decreases discount rates. However, it is not clear how this "explicit-zero" framing intervention works. The present studies delineate and test two possible mechanisms to explain the phenomenon. One mechanism proposes that the explicit-zero framing creates the impression of an improving sequence, thereby enhancing the present value of the delayed reward. A second possible mechanism posits an increase in attention allocation to temporally distant reward representations. In four experiments, we distinguish between these two hypothesized mechanisms and conclude that the temporal attention hypothesis is superior for explaining our results. We propose a model of temporal attention whereby framing affects intertemporal preferences by modifying present bias.     

Sources of Social Support: Examining Congregational Involvement,Private Devotional Activities,and Congregational Context

Previous studies examining the relationship between religion and providing social support have claimed that religious involvement and social networks explain the higher levels of social support among religious Americans. By limiting its focus to attenders of religious congregations, this study seeks to understand if private devotional activities and congregational context also matter for predicting the provision of social support in a highly religious sample. Utilizing a sample of attenders and their congregations from the 2008/2009 U.S. Congregational Life Survey, a national survey representative of American congregations, this study uses multilevel models to examine the relationships that congregational involvement, private devotional activities, and congregational context have with providing social support. Results suggest that, among attenders of religious congregations, congregational involvement and private devotional activities matter for predicting the provision of social support, but two aspects of congregational context—size and theology—do not.     

Discounting Attributions and Multiple Determinants

The discounting principle in attribution theory was considered a well-established phenomenon until recently, when both the empirical and theoretical basis for discounting have been questioned. Many instances of strong discounting have used measures that constrain explanations, such as a forced-choice and bipolar measures. Two studies were performed simulating Thibaut and Riecken's study of attributions for target persons' compliance to a request, which used a forced-choice measure. In the present studies, a range of measures were used. Responses of two samples of Oxford students and one sample of Oxford teachers indicate that multiple causation was perceived and subjects did not greatly discount either of two relevant causes, but there was nonetheless a compensatory relation between the causes. The results also indicate that the attributions were affected by the social categories of the target person and the subjects.     

Classical fear conditioning in the anxiety disorders: a meta-analysis

Fear conditioning represents the process by which a neutral stimulus comes to evoke fear following its repeated pairing with an aversive stimulus. Although fear conditioning has long been considered a central pathogenic mechanism in anxiety disorders, studies employing lab-based conditioning paradigms provide inconsistent support for this idea. A quantitative review of 20 such studies, representing fear-learning scores for 453 anxiety patients and 455 healthy controls, was conducted to verify the aggregated result of this literature and to assess the moderating influences of study characteristics. Results point to modest increases in both acquisition of fear learning and conditioned responding during extinction among anxiety patients. Importantly, these patient-control differences are not apparent when looking at discrimination studies alone and primarily emerge from studies employing simple, single-cue paradigms where only danger cues are presented and no inhibition of fear to safety cues is required.