Self‐construal and students’ math self‐concept,anxiety and achievement: An examination of achievement goals as mediators

This study examines the role of self‐construal in student learning by testing a mediation model: through math achievement goals, self‐construal predicts math self‐concept and anxiety, which further predict math achievement. A sample of 1196 students from 104 secondary classes in Singapore took a survey and a math achievement test. The results from multi‐group structural equation modelling support measurement invariance and equal path coefficients in the mediation model between boys and girls. Interdependent self‐construal positively predicted mastery approach and avoidance goals, through which interdependent self‐construal had a positive total indirect effect on math anxiety. Independent self‐construal positively predicted mastery approach, performance approach and performance avoidance goals, and through the two approach goals, high independent self‐construal was associated with high math self‐concept. Overall, self‐construal was not associated with math achievement. The findings enhance our understanding of achievement motivation from a sociocultural perspective and help explain East Asian students’ relatively higher anxiety and lower self‐concept in comparison with their Western counterparts as reported in international studies.     

Apologia pro Vita‐Fabula Sua: Defending Narrativity and How We Make Sense of Our Lives

This paper attempts to provide a defence for a narrative theory of the self in the face of criticisms from the anti‐narrative camp. It begins by addressing certain uncontroversial premises that both pro‐ and the anti‐narrative camps might be thought to agree on: the status of humans as homo significans or meaning‐makers, the natural form‐finding tendency and certain desiderata for significance and value that we possess, and the raw material of life and its constituents that we proceed from. Whereas the pro‐narrative camp seeks to provide the narrative theory of the self as a valid argument for how we proceed from the raw material of life and undifferentiated experience and these desiderata and tendencies (i.e.: the premises) to a conception of both selfhood and moral responsibility (i.e.: the conclusion), the anti‐narrative camp holds the conclusion to be false and the narrative theory of the self to be invalid. The Parfitian view holds the conception of the self to be ultimately false, whereas the Strawsonian view holds both the conception of the self and the conception of moral responsibility to be ultimately false. The grounds they provide, however, tend to be metaphysical in nature, demonstrating that they have fundamentally misunderstood how the narrative theory of the self functions as a semantic thesis. I will demonstrate certain defects in the metaphysical arguments that anti‐narrativists like Parfit and Strawson have made against what is essentially a semantic thesis about how we make sense of our lives. I will also attempt to shore up the semantic thesis in other relevant aspects.     

Care,Narrativity, and the Nature of Disponibilité

This paper attempts to make more explicit the relationship between narrativity and feminist care ethics. The central concern is the way in which narrativity carries the semantic load that some accounts of feminist care ethics imply but leave hanging. In so doing, some feminist theorists of care‐based ethics then undervalue the major contribution that narrativity provides to care ethics: it carries the semantic load that is essential to the best care. In this article, I defend the narrative as the central medium though which we make sense of and communicate our lives and their attendant hopes and cares. More than just working with the narrative of the cared‐for, caring is about investing in the narrative of the cared‐for in order to meet the needs of this cared‐for and how this narrative might turn out. I will further demonstrate how the attitude of caring or investing in a narrative would amount to what Gabriel Marcel has described as the attitude of disponibilité.     

The Role of Anger in the Relationship Between Internalising Symptoms and Aggression in Adolescents

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of anger in the relationships between various internalising symptoms and direct and indirect aggression. A sample of 241 adolescents aged 12–17 years completed the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders, Centre for Epidemiological Studies Depression scale (CES-D) and the Buss–Warren Aggression Questionnaire (AQ-15). Symptoms of panic disorder, generalised anxiety disorder and depression, but not social phobia, were positively correlated with anger, direct aggression and indirect aggression. When considered simultaneously in regression analyses, only symptoms of depression contributed to variance in the anger and aggression variables. However, using indirect effect modelling, no direct relationships were found between the internalising symptom variables and the aggression variables. Instead, the data suggested that the relationship between internalising symptoms and aggression is mediated by the emotion of anger. These findings suggest that the degree to which anger co-occurs with internalising symptoms may play an important role in an individual’s propensity to engage in aggressive behaviour.     

Individual differences in visual word recognition: insights from the English Lexicon Project

Empirical work and models of visual word recognition have traditionally focused on group-level performance. Despite the emphasis on the prototypical reader, there is clear evidence that variation in reading skill modulates word recognition performance. In the present study, we examined differences among individuals who contributed to the English Lexicon Project (http://elexicon.wustl.edu), an online behavioral database containing nearly 4 million word recognition (speeded pronunciation and lexical decision) trials from over 1,200 participants. We observed considerable within- and between-session reliability across distinct sets of items, in terms of overall mean response time (RT), RT distributional characteristics, diffusion model parameters (Ratcliff, Gomez, & McKoon, 2004), and sensitivity to underlying lexical dimensions. This indicates reliably detectable individual differences in word recognition performance. In addition, higher vocabulary knowledge was associated with faster, more accurate word recognition performance, attenuated sensitivity to stimuli characteristics, and more efficient accumulation of information. Finally, in contrast to suggestions in the literature, we did not find evidence that individuals were trading-off their utilization of lexical and nonlexical information.