The consequences of pairing questions: context effects in personality measurement

The effect of context on responses to questions has been a prominent focus in social and political survey research. However, little investigation of context effects has been done for the measurement of psychological constructs. A measure of anger experience and expression in development uses vignettes describing interpersonal situations that provoke varying degrees of anger and require respondents to indicate their affective and/or expressive response to the situation. In this study, the consequences of pairing the two questions for each vignette are investigated. Pairing the anger-experience and likelihood-of-expression questions changes the item's context. Item response theory analysis similar to that used to detect differential item functioning was performed. For some of the items, responding to a single or paired question affected the extremity of responses. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for personality measurement.     

Contemporary research on parenting. The case for nature and nurture

Current findings on parental influences provide more sophisticated and less deterministic explanations than did earlier theory and research on parenting. Contemporary research approaches include (a) behavior-genetic designs, augmented with direct measures of potential environmental influences; (b) studies distinguishing among children with different genetically influenced predispositions in terms of their responses to different environmental conditions; (c) experimental and quasi-experimental studies of change in children's behavior as a result of their exposure to parents' behavior, after controlling for children's initial characteristics; and (d) research on interactions between parenting and nonfamilial environmental influences and contexts, illustrating contemporary concern with influences beyond the parent-child dyad. These approaches indicate that parental influences on child development are neither as unambiguous as earlier researchers suggested nor as insubstantial as current critics claim.     

(Im)maturity of judgment in adolescence: why adolescents may be less culpable than adults

A crucial step in the establishment of effective policies and regulations concerning legal decisions involving juveniles is the development of a complete understanding of the many factors-psychosocial as well as cognitive-that affect the evolution of judgment over the course of adolescence and into adulthood. This study examines the influence of three psychosocial factors (responsibility, perspective, and temperance) on maturity of judgment in a sample of over 1,000 participants ranging in age from 12 to 48 years. Participants completed assessments of their psychosocial maturity in the aforementioned domains and responded to a series of hypothetical decision-making dilemmas about potentially antisocial or risky behavior. Socially responsible decision making is significantly more common among young adults than among adolescents, but does not increase appreciably after age 19. Individuals exhibiting higher levels of responsibility, perspective, and temperance displayed more mature decision-making than those with lower scores on these psychosocial factors, regardless of age. Adolescents, on average, scored significantly worse than adults, but individual differences in judgment within each adolescent age group were considerable. These findings call into question recent arguments, derived from studies of logical reasoning, that adolescents and adults are equally competent and that laws and social policies should treat them as such.     

What is Evagrian ΓΝΩΣΙΣ?

Abstract: Evagrius famously characterises divine nature as γνῶσις οὐσιώδης, ‘substantial knowledge’. In the Alexandrian, Cappadocian, and other intellectual contexts informed by Platonic, Aristotelian, and Philonic thought, characterisations of God as a noetic or intellectual being are fairly common. However, these traditions concur in using the term νοῦς rather than γνῶσις. How can we explain that Evagrius deviates from the metaphysical mainstream? In this paper, I review this question from an historical and systematic point of view. I propose to examine ancient theories of Mind about the function and structure of the νοῦς, compare them to the Evagrian theory, and identify a possible explanation for the substitution of γνῶσις to the νοῦς. Since God is the key element in Evagrius's metaphysics, a clearer vision of the divine essence will help us appreciate the whole system more fully.     

Community engagement,greening, and violent crime: A test of the greening hypothesis and Busy Streets

Researchers have documented that vacant lot greening can reduce community-level crime and violence. Busy Streets Theory (BST) suggests that residents who are involved in the greening process can help to improve physical environments and build social connections that deter crime and violence. Yet few researchers have explored how community engagement in the greening process may affect crime and violence outcomes. We applied BST to test the effects of community-engaged vacant lot greening compared to vacant lots that received either professional mowing or no treatment, on the density of violent crime around study lots. Using mixed effects regression models, we analyzed trends in violent crime density over the summer months from 2016 to 2018 at 2102 street segments in Youngstown, OH. These street segments fell within 150 meters of an intervention parcel that was classified as one of three conditions: community-engaged maintenance, professional mowing, or no treatment (control). We found that street segments in areas receiving community-engaged maintenance or professional mowing experienced greater declines in violent crime density than street segments in areas receiving no treatment, and more decline occurred in the community-engaged condition compared to the professional mow condition. Our findings support BST and suggest that community-engaged greening of vacant lots in postindustrial cities with a concentrated vacancy can reduce crime and violence.     

Affect,Desire, and Judgement in Spinoza's Account of Motivation

Two priority problems frustrate our understanding of Spinoza on desire [cupiditas]. The first problem concerns the relationship between desire and the other two primary affects, joy [laetitia] and sadness [tristitia]. Desire seems to be the oddball of this troika, not only because, contrary to the very definition of an affect (3d3; 3 General Definition of the Affects), desires do not themselves consist in changes in one's power of acting, but also because desire seems at once more and less basic than joy and sadness. The second problem concerns the priority of desires and evaluative judgements. While 3p9s and 3p39s suggest that evaluative judgements are (necessarily) posterior to desires, Andrew Youpa has recently argued that passages in Ethics 4 indicate that rational evaluative judgements can give rise to, rather than arise out of, desires. I aim to offer solutions to these problems that reveal the elegance and coherence of Spinoza's account of motivation. Ultimately, I argue that whereas emotions and desires stand in a non-reductive, symmetrical relationship to one another, evaluative judgements must be understood as asymmetrically dependent on, and reducible to, emotions or desires. This interpretation sheds light on our understanding of Spinoza's cognitivist account of emotion. For Spinoza, while emotions are representational, they are not underpinned by evaluative judgements. Rather than inflating emotions to include evaluative judgements, he deflates evaluative judgements, treating them as emotions, or valenced representations, and nothing more.     

Adolescent mice,unlike adults,consume more alcohol in the presence of peers than alone

One hallmark of adolescent risk‐taking is that it typically occurs when adolescents are with peers. It has been hypothesized that the presence of peers primes a reward‐sensitive motivational state that overwhelms adolescents' immature capacity for inhibitory control. We examined this hypothesis using a rodent model. A sample of mice were raised in same‐sex triads and were tested for alcohol consumption either as juveniles or as adults, with half in each age group tested alone and half tested with their cagemates. The presence of ‘peers’ increased alcohol consumption among adolescent mice, but not adults. The peer effect on human adolescent reward‐seeking may reflect a hard‐wired, evolutionarily conserved process through which the presence of agemates increases individuals' sensitivity to potential rewards in their immediate environment.