Natural Compatibilism,Indeterminism, and Intrusive Metaphysics

The claim that common sense regards free will and moral responsibility as compatible with determinism has played a central role in both analytic and experimental philosophy. In this paper, we show that evidence in favor of this “natural compatibilism” is undermined by the role that indeterministic metaphysical views play in how people construe deterministic scenarios. To demonstrate this, we re-examine two classic studies that have been used to support natural compatibilism. We find that although people give apparently compatibilist responses, this is largely explained by the fact that people import an indeterministic metaphysics into deterministic scenarios when making judgments about freedom and responsibility. We conclude that judgments based on these scenarios are not reliable evidence for natural compatibilism.     

The Measurement of Masculinity and Femininity: Historical Perspective and Implications for Counseling

Masculinity and femininity are both psychological and sociocultural constructs that test developers have attempted to assess for many years. The author examines the history of the measurement of masculinity and femininity from the 1920s through 2000, addresses relevant theory, and considers criticisms of masculinity and femininity measurement as well as the challenges of responding to them. Implications of the use of such measures by counselors, researchers, and counselor educators are discussed.     

Exploring gene-environment interactions: socioregional moderation of alcohol use.

Examples of gene-environment interaction in human behavioral data are relatively rare; those that exist have used simple, dichotomous measures of the environment. The authors describe a model that allows for the specification of more continuous, more realistic variations in environments as moderators of genetic and environmental influences on behavior. Using data from a population-based Finnish twin study, the authors document strong moderating effects of socioregional environments on genetic and environmental influences on adolescent alcohol use, with nearly a five-fold difference in the magnitude of genetic effects between environmental extremes. The incorporation of specific environmental measures into genetically informative designs should prove to be a powerful method for better understanding the nature of gene-environment interaction and its contribution to the etiology of behavioral variation.     

In the Final Analysis: More Wisdom From People Who Have Faced Death

Seventeen adults who experienced a life‐threatening situation were interviewed to ascertain what they had learned about life from their confrontation with death. Interview questions focused on participants' philosophies of life, their personal regrets and priorities, and their advice to others. Interviews were analyzed using qualitative grounded theory and discovery‐oriented techniques. Among the most common themes, the participants advocated less materialism, more spirituality, and more caring for and serving of others. After their confrontation with death they worried less about mundane issues and became more optimistic about the future of humankind. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Visual short-term memory in the first year of life: capacity and recency effects.

A span task was developed to assess the amount of information infants could hold in short-term memory. In this task, infants were presented with up to 4 items in succession and then tested for recognition by successively pairing each item with a novel one. A large sample of full-terms and low-birth-weight preterms (< 1,750 g) was tested longitudinally, at 5, 7, and 12 months of age. Results were similar for both groups: (a) Longer spans were more difficult, especially at the 2 younger ages; (b) memory capacity increased over the 1st year of life--whereas less than 25% of the sample could hold as many as 3-4 items in mind at once at the younger ages, nearly half could do so by 12 months of age; (c) there was a marked recency effect (greater memory for the final item) for spans of 3 and 4 at all ages; and (d) there were modest cross-age correlations, indicating that individual differences in memory capacity showed some stability from age to age.     

Intimacy and structure: Sex differences in imagery of same-sex relationships

Thirty-three female and 42 male undergraduates wrote stories in response to verbal Thematic Apperception Test cues of characters of the subject's sex in structured and unstructured situations. Significantly more men than women wrote stories with negative and defused imagery to the unstructured situation cue. In addition, men wrote stories with significantly more negative and defused imagery to the unstructured cue than to the structured cue. Women showed no significant difference in the frequency of negative and defused imagery to unstructured and structured cues. A detailed content analysis, however, indicated that for women structure decreases intimate contact and inhibits satisfying relationships of support and reciprocity. Results suggest that males, perceiving same-sex relationships as dangerous, feel threatened by intimacy, and thus need to impose structure onto interpersonal situations in order to defuse the intimacy: by using rules, roles, and the addition of others, boundaries may be established between people. Women, comfortable with same-sex intimacy, perceive structured situations as hindering the development of satisfying relationships.     

Attenuating the visual suffix effect with color

In previous studies using a short-duration visual presentation (200-340 msec), presentation of a different colored suffix did not attenuate the visual suffix effect. In Experiment 1, color attenuated the suffix effect for a longer duration visual presentation (approximately 3-4 sec) during which the subject engaged in articulatory suppression to prevent auditory recoding. Experiments 2 and 3 confirmed that color does not attenuate the suffix effect for the short-duration presentations. In Experiment 4, recall of a long-duration presentation was not improved when the last digit was a different color, suggesting that the different color of the suffix improves recall by allowing the suffix to be excluded from visual short-term memory. The attenuation by color is consistent with the hypothesis that preattentive grouping governs the entry of information into visual short-term memory.     

Pattern preferences at birth and their interaction with habituation-induced novelty preferences

Three experiments are described which relate to models of infant visual preferences, and to the ways in which preferences can be modified or created by habituation. In all experiments newborn babies were used as subjects. In Experiments equated 1 and 2 infants were presented with pairs of stimuli that were equated for contour density but which differed in spatial frequency components. The preferences obtained give support to Banks and Salapatek's (1981, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 31, 1-45) model of infant preferences which predicts that the maximally preferred stimulus will be that which contains high amplitude spatial frequency components falling within the age group's peak contrast sensitivity. In Experiment 3 an infant-controlled habituation procedure was used. The results obtained suggest that strong natural preferences based on the infants' peak contrast sensitivity cannot be changed by habituating infants either to the preferred or to the nonpreferred member of a stimulus pair. However, where no prior preference exists between two stimuli that are perceptually highly discriminable, very strong novelty preferences are found after habituating newborns to either stimulus. The results suggest that the contrast sensitivity model can be a powerful predictor of preferential looking in newborns, and in addition are further evidence that preferences based on experience can be found from birth.