Right and Righteous: Children's Incipient Understanding and Evaluation of True and False Statements

Two studies examined young children's early understanding and evaluation of truth telling and lying and the role that factuality plays in their judgments. Study 1 (one hundred four 2- to 5-year-olds) found that even the youngest children reliably accepted true statements and rejected false statements and that older children's ability to label true and false (T/F) statements as “truth” and “lie” emerged in tandem with their positive evaluation of true statements and “truth” and their negative evaluation of false statements and “lie.” The findings suggest that children's early preference for factuality develops into a conception of “truth” and “lie” that is linked both to factuality and moral evaluation. Study 2 (one hundred twenty-eight 3- to 5-year-olds) revealed that whereas young children exhibited good understanding of the association of T/F statements with “truth,” “lie,” “mistake,” “right,” and “wrong,” they showed little awareness of assumptions about speaker knowledge underlying “lie” and “mistake.” The results further support the primacy of factuality in children's early understanding and evaluation of truth and lies.     

Defining Communication and Language from Within a Pluralistic Evolutionary Worldview

Topoi - New definitions are proposed for communication and language. Communication is defined as the evolution of physical, biochemical, cellular, community, and technological information exchange....     

Older adults' configural processing of faces: role of second-order information

Problems with face recognition are frequent in older adults. However, the mechanisms involved have only been partially discovered. In particular, it is unknown to what extent these problems may be related to changes in configural face processing. Here, we investigated the face inversion effect (FIE) together with the ability to detect modifications in the vertical or horizontal second-order relations between facial features. We used a same/different unfamiliar face discrimination task with 33 young and 33 older adults. The results showed dissociations in the performances of older versus younger adults. There was a lack of inversion effect during the recognition of original faces by older adults. However, for modified faces, older adults showed a pattern of performance similar to that of young participants, with preserved FIE for vertically modified faces and no detectable FIE for horizontally modified faces. Most importantly, the detection of vertical modifications was preserved in older relative to young adults whereas the detection of horizontal modifications was markedly diminished. We conclude that age has dissociable effects on configural face-encoding processes, with a relative preservation of vertical compared to horizontal second-order relations processing. These results help to understand some divergent results in the literature and may explain the spared familiar face identification abilities in the daily lives of older adults.     

Contingent Stimuli Signal Subsequent Reinforcer Ratios

Conditioned reinforcer effects may be due to the stimulus' discriminative rather than its strengthening properties. While this was demonstrated in a frequently‐changing choice procedure, a single attempt to replicate in a relatively static choice environment failed. We contend that this was because the information provided by the stimuli was nonredundant in the frequently‐changing preparation, and redundant in the steady‐state arrangement. In the present experiments, 6 pigeons worked in a steady‐state concurrent schedule procedure with nonredundant informative stimuli (red keylight illuminations). When a response‐contingent red keylight signaled that the next food delivery was more likely on one of the two alternatives, postkeylight choice responding was reliably for that alternative. This effect was enhanced after a history of extended informative red keylight presentation (Experiment 2). These results lend support to recent characterizations of conditioned reinforcer effects as reflective of a discriminative, rather than a reinforcing, property of the stimulus.     

Examining the discriminative and strengthening effects of reinforcers in concurrent schedules

Reinforcers may increase operant responding via a response-strengthening mechanism whereby the probability of the preceding response increases, or via some discriminative process whereby the response more likely to provide subsequent reinforcement becomes, itself, more likely. We tested these two accounts. Six pigeons responded for food reinforcers in a two-alternative switching-key concurrent schedule. Within a session, equal numbers of reinforcers were arranged for responses to each alternative. Those reinforcers strictly alternated between the two alternatives in half the conditions, and were randomly allocated to the alternatives in half the conditions. We also varied, across conditions, the alternative that became available immediately after a reinforcer. Preference after a single reinforcer always favored the immediately available alternative, regardless of the local probability of a reinforcer on that alternative (0 or 1 in the strictly alternating conditions, .5 in the random conditions). Choice then reflected the local reinforcer probabilities, suggesting some discriminative properties of reinforcement. At a more extended level, successive same-alternative reinforcers from an alternative systematically shifted preference towards that alternative, regardless of which alternative was available immediately after a reinforcer. There was no similar shift when successive reinforcers came from alternating sources. These more temporally extended results may suggest a strengthening function of reinforcement, or an enhanced ability to respond appropriately to "win-stay" contingencies over "win-shift" contingencies.     

Mechanisms for ovarian cycle disruption by immune/inflammatory stress

This review summarizes highlights of our experiments investigating mechanisms, mediators and sites by which endotoxin disrupts reproductive neuroendocrine activity and interferes with the estrous cycle of sheep. Endotoxin, or lipopolysaccharide (LPS), is a commonly used model for immune and inflammatory stress. When administered to ovary-intact ewes, endotoxin interrupts the follicular phase of the cycle by interfering with several steps in the preovulatory chain of endocrine events. One such step is the development of high frequency LH pulses, which provide an essential stimulus for the preovulatory increase in estradiol secretion from the ovarian follicle. Follow-up experiments in ovariectomized ewes demonstrate that endotoxin inhibits pulsatile LH secretion at both the hypothalamic and pituitary levels, suppressing pulsatile GnRH secretion and reducing pituitary responsiveness to GnRH. This disruption of GnRH and LH pulsatility is mediated by pathways that include the synthesis of prostaglandins and cortisol, both of which are increased by endotoxin. It is postulated that a prostaglandin-mediated pathway disrupts the cycle during immune and inflammatory stress, whereas a separate cortisol-mediated pathway reinforces this disruption and also participates more generally in suppressing cyclicity during other stressful situations that activate the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal axis.     

Associations Among Perceived Autonomy Support,Forms of Self-Regulation,and Persistence: A Prospective Study

According to self-determination theory, when the social context is autonomy supportive, people are motivated to internalize the regulation of important activities, and whereas when the context is controlling, self-determined motivation is undermined. A model that incorporates perceptions of coaches' interpersonal behaviors (autonomy support vs. control), 5 forms of regulation (intrinsic motivation, identified, introjected and external regulation, and amotivation), and persistence was tested with competitive swimmers (N = 369) using a prospective 3-wave design. Analyses using structural equation modeling revealed that experiencing relationships as controlling fostered non–self-determined forms of regulation (external regulation and amotivation). Greater levels of self-determined motivation occurred when relationships were experienced as autonomy supportive. Individuals who exhibited self-determined types of regulation at Time 1 showed more persistence at both Time 2 (10 months later) and Time 3 (22 months later). Individuals who were amotivated at Time 1 had the highest rate of attrition at both Time 2 and Time 3. Introjected regulation was a significant predictor of persistence at Time 2 but became nonsignificant at Time 3. External regulation was not a significant predictor of behavior at Time 2, but became negatively associated with persistence at Time 3. The findings are discussed in light of the determinants of the internalization process and the consequences of different forms of self-regulation for psychological functioning.     

Sensitive but not sentimental: Emotionally intelligent people can put their emotions aside when necessary

Are emotionally intelligent people sentimental? Does their greater sensitivity handicap them or are they able, as theory would expect, to experience and regulate emotions flexibly, depending on their goals? We examined this issue in organizational settings. Good managers are indeed expected to be both attuned to feelings (theirs as well as their subordinates’) and able to put them aside when needed to take tough (but necessary) decisions. Our results show that emotionally intelligent managers do make better managers, as reflected by greater managerial competencies, higher team efficiency and less stressed subordinates. Moreover, and most importantly, emotionally intelligent managers are not just nicer managers. As our results show, emotional intelligence has nothing to do with sentimentality. Actually, it is managers with low EI who have the greatest difficulties to put their emotions aside and not let them interfere when inappropriate.