The Philosophical Personality

The authors adopt a critico‐sociological methodology to investigate the current state of the philosophical profession. According to them, the question concerning the status of philosophy (“What is philosophy?”) cannot be answered from within the precinct of philosophical reason alone, since philosophy—understood primarily as a profession—is marked by a constitutive type of self‐ignorance that prevents it from reflecting upon its own sociological conditions of actuality. This ignorance, which is both cause and effect of the organization and investment of philosophical desire, causes philosophers to lose themselves in an ideological myth (“the philosopher as idea(l)”) according to which philosophers are unaffected by the material conditions in which they exist. This myth prevents philosophers from noticing the extent to which their activity is influenced by extra‐philosophical determinants that shape, empirically, who becomes a professional philosopher (“the philosopher as imago”) and who doesn't. This article explores the relationship between philosophy's “idea(l)” and its “imago” as a way of shedding light on some of the mechanisms that make philosophy inhospitable for so many women, people of color, and economic minorities.     

Recollection and familiarity for words and faces: a study comparing Remember–Know judgements and the Process Dissociation Procedure

Measures of recollection and familiarity often differ depending on the paradigm utilised. Remember–Know (R–K) and Process Dissociation Procedure (PDP) methods have been commonly used but rarely compared within a single study. In the current experiments, R–K and PDP were compared by examining the effect of attention at study and time to respond at test on recollection and familiarity using the same experimental procedures for each paradigm. We also included faces in addition to words to test the generality of the findings often obtained using words. The results from the R–K paradigm revealed that recollection and familiarity were similarly affected by attention at study and time to respond at test. However, in the case of PDP, the measures of recollection and familiarity showed a different pattern of results. The effects observed for recollection were similar to those obtained with the R–K method, whereas familiarity was affected by time to respond but not by attention at study. These results are discussed in relation to the controlled-automatic processing distinction and the contribution of each paradigm to research on recognition memory.     

Academic Cheating in Mathematics Classes: A Motivational Perspective

We investigated the frequency of secondary school students’ self-reported cheating in mathematics and relationships between cheating and motivational beliefs, as well as neutralizing attitudes. Two types of cheating were examined: active cheating, which is aimed to increase a person’s own success, and second-party cheating, aimed to help other students achieve success. Students use second-party cheating very often and more than active cheating. Motivational beliefs are significantly related to active cheating but uncorrelated with second-party cheating. Thus, although active and second-party cheating are both classified as dishonest acts, they do not have the same motivational mechanisms in their background.     

Factors Associated with Interest in Gene-Panel Testing and Risk Communication Preferences in Women from <Emphasis Type="Italic">BRCA1/2</Emphasis> Negative Families

Scientific advances have allowed the development of multiplex gene-panels to assess many genes simultaneously in women who have tested negative for BRCA1/2. We examined correlates of interest in testing for genes that confer modest and moderate breast cancer risk and risk communication preferences for women from BRCA negative families. Female first-degree relatives of breast cancer patients who tested negative for BRCA1/2 mutations (N = 149) completed a survey assessing multiplex genetic testing interest and risk communication preferences. Interest in testing was high (70 %) and even higher if results could guide risk-reducing behavior changes such as taking medications (79 %). Participants preferred to receive genomic risk communications from a variety of sources including: primary care physicians (83 %), genetic counselors (78 %), printed materials (71 %) and the web (60 %). Factors that were independently associated with testing interest were: perceived lifetime risk of developing cancer (odds ratio (OR) = 1.67: 95 % confidence interval (CI) 1.06–2.65) and high cancer worry (OR = 3.12: CI 1.28–7.60). Findings suggest that women from BRCA1/2 negative families are a unique population and may be primed for behavior change. Findings also provide guidance for clinicians who can help develop genomic risk communications, promote informed decision making and customize behavioral interventions.     

Parenting Assessed by Observation versus Parent-report: Moderation by Parent Distress and Family Socioeconomic Status

Assessment of parenting frequently relies on parent self-report despite well-documented discrepancies between this methodology and observational measures. In the current study, we investigated patterns of disagreement between self-reported and observational measures of positive parenting and negative parenting with 102 dyads of parents and 4–6 year-old children. Specifically, we tested whether differences in parent distress and family socioeconomic status (SES) moderated the association between self-reported and observed parenting. Results showed significant interactions with less agreement between self-report and observational measures among parents reporting higher levels of distress and among families from lower SES backgrounds. Effects were more pronounced in models of negative parenting than those of positive parenting. Findings suggest that two factors relevant to parenting quality, emotional distress and SES, predict meaningful differences in manner of parent-report relative to observational measures. We discuss implications for the extant literature and for future efforts regarding effective and efficient parenting measurement.     

The Minho Word Pool: Norms for imageability,concreteness, and subjective frequency for 3,800 Portuguese words

Words are widely used as stimuli in cognitive research. Because of their complexity, using words requires strict control of their objective (lexical and sublexical) and subjective properties. In this work, we present the Minho Word Pool (MWP), a dataset that provides normative values of imageability, concreteness, and subjective frequency for 3,800 (European) Portuguese words—three subjective measures that, in spite of being used extensively in research, have been scarce for Portuguese. Data were collected with 2,357 college students who were native speakers of European Portuguese. The participants rated 100 words drawn randomly from the full set for each of the three subjective indices, using a Web survey procedure (via a URL link). Analyses comparing the MWP ratings with those obtained for the same words from other national and international databases showed that the MWP norms are reliable and valid, thus providing researchers with a useful tool to support research in all neuroscientific areas using verbal stimuli. The MWP norms can be downloaded along with this article or from http://p-pal.di.uminho.pt/about/databases.     

Moved by words: Affective ratings for a set of 2,266 Spanish words in five discrete emotion categories

The two main theoretical accounts of the human affective space are the dimensional perspective and the discrete-emotion approach. In recent years, several affective norms have been developed from a dimensional perspective, including ratings for valence and arousal. In contrast, the number of published datasets relying on the discrete-emotion approach is much lower. There is a need to fill this gap, considering that discrete emotions have an effect on word processing above and beyond those of valence and arousal. In the present study, we present ratings from 1,380 participants for a set of 2,266 Spanish words in five discrete emotion categories: happiness, anger, fear, disgust, and sadness. This will be the largest dataset published to date containing ratings for discrete emotions. We also present, for the first time, a fine-grained analysis of the distribution of words into the five emotion categories. This analysis reveals that happiness words are the most consistently related to a single, discrete emotion category. In contrast, there is a tendency for many negative words to belong to more than one discrete emotion. The only exception is disgust words, which overlap least with the other negative emotions. Normative valence and arousal data already exist for all of the words included in this corpus. Thus, the present database will allow researchers to design studies to contrast the predictions of the two most influential theoretical perspectives in this field. These studies will undoubtedly contribute to a deeper understanding of the effects of emotion on word processing.     

A computational framework for attentional object discovery in RGB-D videos

We present a computational framework for attention-guided visual scene exploration in sequences of RGB-D data. For this, we propose a visual object candidate generation method to produce object hypotheses about the objects in the scene. An attention system is used to prioritise the processing of visual information by (1) localising candidate objects, and (2) integrating an inhibition of return (IOR) mechanism grounded in spatial coordinates. This spatial IOR mechanism naturally copes with camera motions and inhibits objects that have already been the target of attention. Our approach provides object candidates which can be processed by higher cognitive modules such as object recognition. Since objects are basic elements for many higher level tasks, our architecture can be used as a first layer in any cognitive system that aims at interpreting a stream of images. We show in the evaluation how our framework finds most of the objects in challenging real-world scenes.     

Temporal and spatial dimensions in the perception of environmental problems: An investigation of the concept of environmental hyperopia

Environmental problems have been perceived as more worrying when they take place at greater distances. This phenomenon has been called “environmental hyperopia” ( 9 Uzzell, 2000; 7 Uzzell, Rice, Ballantyne, & Podlucká, 1994). Some studies have demonstrated that local environmental problems are perceived as being less important than the problems generated in other places, such as global warming or Amazon deforestation, unless the problem leads to an immediate risk. This article is part of a broader research programme, which tries to analyse the most relevant variables in the formation of pro‐environmental attitudes. More precisely, our intention is to explore the difference between attitudes about local and global environments. We present a study of the assessment of several environmental problems, in which 12 scales measured the importance given to these problems by a sample of students. The results were analysed with multidimensional methods, allowing us to establish temporal and space dimensions in the perception of environmental problems. The conclusions allowed us not only to explore the social representation of environmental problems, but also to establish priorities and recommendations for future environmental education programmes.