Sex-role stereotypes of feminists and nonfeminists

In light of recent attempts by feminists to upgrade the status of women by stressing the positive aspects of femininity, a comparison of sex-role stereotyping by women who endorse women's liberation with those who do not was made. Feminists showed a more positive perception of women; both groups stressed positive feminine traits in describing an ideal woman, but feminists would like to see more dominance in women. Two negative stereotypes, not previously documented, emerged from this analysis: the depiction of men as cooler, more boastful, awkward, and insensitive by the feminists and women's liberationists as more boastful, excitable, and unattractive by the nonfeminists.     

Addressing Relationship Health Needs in Primary Care: Adapting the Marriage Checkup for Use in Medical Settings with Military Couples

The overall objective of this study was to pilot the Marriage Checkup (MC), a brief intervention for enhancing marital resiliency tailored to a military population, for use by internal behavioral health consultants (IBHCs) working in an integrated primary care clinic. The MC was revised to fit into the fast-paced environment of primary care (e.g., streamlined to fit within three 30-min appointments), and military-relevant material was added to the content. IBHCs working in primary care were then trained to offer the intervention. Thirty participants were enrolled in the study and completed a relationship checkup and one-month follow-up questionnaires. Analysis of post-test and one-month follow-up data showed statistically significant improvements in participants’ marital health compared to pre-treatment. The MC intervention appeared to be well received by both couples and IBHCs.     

Language acquisition meets language evolution

Recent research suggests that language evolution is a process of cultural change, in which linguistic structures are shaped through repeated cycles of learning and use by domain-general mechanisms. This paper draws out the implications of this viewpoint for understanding the problem of language acquisition, which is cast in a new, and much more tractable, form. In essence, the child faces a problem of induction, where the objective is to coordinate with others (C-induction), rather than to model the structure of the natural world (N-induction). We argue that, of the two, C-induction is dramatically easier. More broadly, we argue that understanding the acquisition of any cultural form, whether linguistic or otherwise, during development, requires considering the corresponding question of how that cultural form arose through processes of cultural evolution. This perspective helps resolve the "logical" problem of language acquisition and has far-reaching implications for evolutionary psychology.     

Subjective Well-Being of China’s Off-Farm Migrants

Existing research applying the personal wellbeing index (PWI) in China is restricted to urban and rural samples. There are no studies for Chinese off-farm migrants. The specific aims of this study are: (a) ascertain whether Chinese off-farm are satisfied with their lives; (b) investigate the equivalence of the PWI in terms of its psychometric properties; and (c) examine whether the responses to the PWI from participants falls within the normative range predicted by the Theory of Subjective Wellbeing Homeostasis. The PWI demonstrated good psychometric performance in terms of its reliability and validity and was consistent with previous studies for Western and non-Western samples. The data revealed a moderate level of subjective well-being (PWI score = 62.6). While Chinese off-farm migrants lead hard lives, the PWI was within the normative range predicted for Chinese societies by the Theory of Subjective Wellbeing Homeostasis. A likely explanation for this finding rests with the circular nature of migration in China. When China’s off-farm migrants find it too difficult to cope in the cities, most have the fallback position that they can return to their homes in the countryside. This option provides an external buffer to minimize the inherent challenges of life which would otherwise impinge on the life satisfaction of China’s off-farm migrants.     

The earliest electrophysiological correlate of visual awareness?

To examine the neural correlates and timing of human visual awareness, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) in two experiments while the observers were detecting a grey dot that was presented near subjective threshold. ERPs were averaged for conscious detections of the stimulus (hits) and nondetections (misses) separately. Our results revealed that hits, as compared to misses, showed a negativity around 180-350 ms at occipital and posterior temporal sites. It was followed by a positive wave after 400-500 ms, peaking at parietal sites. These correlates were not affected by a manipulation of attention. The early negativity, called 'visual awareness negativity' (VAN), may be a general, primary electrophysiological correlate of visual awareness. The present data show that it can be observed in response to appearance of a stimulus in visual awareness and that it generalizes across different manipulations of stimulus visibility.     

Felt presence: paranoid delusion or hallucinatory social imagery?

Cheyne and Girard characterize felt presence (FP) during sleep paralysis attacks as a pre-hallucinatory expression of a threat-activated vigilance system. While their results may be consistent with this interpretation, they are nonetheless correlational and do not address a parsimonious alternative explanation. This alternative stipulates that FP is a purely spatial, hallucinatory form of a common cognitive phenomenon—social imagery—that is often, but not necessarily, linked with threat and fear and that may induce distress among susceptible individuals. The occurrence of both fearful and non-fearful FPs in a multiplicity of situations other than sleep paralysis attacks supports the notion that FPs are hallucinatory variants of social imagery and that they are not necessarily bound to threat-activated vigilance. Evidence linking FPs with anxiety disorders supports the notion that the distress they evoke may be mediated by a more general affective distress personality factor. To illustrate the predominantly spatial character of FP hallucinations, similarities between FP and phantom limbs are summarized and the possibility that these two phenomena are parallel expressions (self- vs. other-presence) of a mirror neuron system is considered.     

Convergence to the Truth Without Countable Additivity

Must probabilities be countably additive? On the one hand, arguably, requiring countable additivity is too restrictive. As de Finetti pointed out, there are situations in which it is reasonable to use merely finitely additive probabilities. On the other hand, countable additivity is fruitful. It can be used to prove deep mathematical theorems that do not follow from finite additivity alone. One of the most philosophically important examples of such a result is the Bayesian convergence to the truth theorem, which says that conditional probabilities converge to 1 for true hypotheses and to 0 for false hypotheses. In view of the long-standing debate about countable additivity, it is natural to ask in what circumstances finitely additive theories deliver the same results as the countably additive theory. This paper addresses that question and initiates a systematic study of convergence to the truth in a finitely additive setting. There is also some discussion of how the formal results can be applied to ongoing debates in epistemology and the philosophy of science.