Choosing Your Words and Pictures Wisely: When Do Individuation Instructions Reduce the Cross‐Race Effect?

Recognition accuracy for faces of an individual's own race typically exceeds recognition accuracy for other‐race faces. The categorization–individuation model (Hugenberg, Young, Bernstein, & Sacco, 2010) attributes this cross‐race effect to motivation to encode distinctive features of own‐race faces but category defining features for other‐race faces. Two experiments using different stimuli tested hypotheses generated from this model with both Black and White participants. For White participants, instructions to individuate reduced the cross‐race effect in both studies but did not eliminate it in Study 1. Black participants did not exhibit the cross‐race effect in either study, but individuation instructions improved both their same‐race and other‐race sensitivity. The present quality of interracial contact moderated the relationship between instructions and other‐race sensitivity for both Black and White participants in Study 1 but not in Study 2. Overall, results provide mixed support for this social categorization model. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reasons and Promotion

A number of philosophers accept promotionalism, the view that whether there is a normative reason for an agent to perform an action or have an attitude depends on whether her doing so promotes a value, desire, interest, goal, or end. I show that promotionalism faces a prima facie problem when it comes to reasons for belief: it looks extensionally inadequate. I then articulate two general strategies promotionalists can (and have) used to solve this problem and argue that, even if one of these two strategies can successfully solve the problem with reasons for belief, promotionalists face a symmetrical problem in a range of structurally similar cases. As I'll argue, the problem is that promotionalism cannot account for reasons grounded in the ‘fit’ between an attitude and its object. I offer an alternative to promotionalism and explain how adopting this alternative solves the problems with promotionalism while preserving much of what made promotionalism attractive in the first place.     

Suicide in bipolar disorder: Risks and management

Bipolar disorders are prevalent, often severe, and disabling illnesses with elevated lethality largely due to suicide. Suicide rates average approximately 1% annually, or perhaps 60 times higher than the international population rate of 0.015% annually. Suicidal acts typically occur early in bipolar disorders and in association with severe depressive or mixed states. The high lethality of suicidal acts in bipolar disorders is suggested by a much lower ratio of attempts:suicide (approximately 3:1) than in the general population (approximately 30:1). Risk factors can help to identify patients at increased suicidal risk, but ongoing clinical assessment is essential to limit risk. Empirical short-term interventions to manage acute suicidal risk include close clinical supervision, rapid hospitalization, and electroconvulsive therapy. Remarkably, however, evidence of the long-term effectiveness of most treatments against suicidal behavior is rare. A notable exception is lithium prophylaxis, which is associated with consistent evidence of major (approximately 80%), sustained relative reductions of risk of suicides and attempts, and lower lethality (increased attempts:suicide ratio). Such benefits are unproved for other treatments commonly used to treat bipolar disorder patients, including anticonvulsants, antipsychotics, antidepressants, and psychosocial interventions. Applying available knowledge systematically, with close and sustained clinical supervision, can enhance management of suicidal risk in bipolar disorders patients.     

"In the storminess": multi-disciplinary approaches to scriptural images representing ethical challenges in the pastor-congregant relationship

In this qualitative study the authors examine the Scriptural images that 10 Lutheran pastors employed in describing the ethical challenges in the pastor-congregant relationship. The analysis of Scriptural images is part of a larger study on pastors' experiences of a mandatory workshop, "Crossing the Boundaries (CTB),"which is required of Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada (ELCIC) seminarians. The pastors' images were analyzed from the four perspectives of depth psychology, theology, social ethics, and sociology. In commenting on tensions in the pastors' Scriptural images the authors note commonalities among the four theoretical perspectives and discuss implications for practice and future research.     

Temporal differences in trait self-ascription: when the self is seen as an other

Seven studies exploring people's tendency to make observer-like attributions about their past and future selves are presented. Studies 1 and 2 showed temporal differences in trait assessments that paralleled the classic actor-observer difference. Study 3 provided evidence against a motivational account of these differences. Studies 4-7 explored underlying mechanisms involving differences in the focus of attention of the sort linked to the classic actor-observer difference. In Study 4, people perceived past and future selves from a more observer-like perspective than present selves. In Studies 5 and 6, manipulating attention to internal states (vs. observable behavior) of past and future selves led people to ascribe fewer traits to those selves. Study 7 showed an inverse relationship for past and present selves between observer-like visual focus and salience of internal information.     

Toward an alternative evolutionary theory of religion: looking past computational evolutionary psychology to a wider field of possibilities

Cognitive science of the last half-century has been dominated by the computational theory of mind and its picture of thought as information processing. Taking this picture for granted, the most prominent evolutionary theories of religion of the last fifteen years have sought to understand human religiosity as the product or by-product of universal information processing mechanisms that were adaptive in our ancestral environment. The rigidity of such explanations is at odds with the highly context-sensitive nature of historical studies of religion, and thus contributes to the apparent tug-of-war between scientific and humanistic perspectives. This essay argues that this antagonism stems in part from a deep flaw of computational theory, namely its notion of information as pre-given and context-free. In contrast, non-computational theories that picture mind as an adaptive, interactive process in which information is jointly constructed by organism and environment offer an alternative approach to an evolutionary understanding of human religiosity, one that is compatible with historical studies and amenable to a wide range of inquiries, including some limited kinds of theological inquiry.     

Investigating the predictive roles of working memory and IQ in academic attainment

There is growing evidence for the relationship between working memory and academic attainment. The aim of the current study was to investigate whether working memory is simply a proxy for IQ or whether there is a unique contribution to learning outcomes. The findings indicate that children’s working memory skills at 5 years of age were the best predictor of literacy and numeracy 6 years later. IQ, in contrast, accounted for a smaller portion of unique variance to these learning outcomes. The results demonstrate that working memory is not a proxy for IQ but rather represents a dissociable cognitive skill with unique links to academic attainment. Critically, we find that working memory at the start of formal education is a more powerful predictor of subsequent academic success than IQ. This result has important implications for education, particularly with respect to intervention.     

The exponential learning equation as a function of successful trials results in sigmoid performance

While the exponential learning equation, indicating a gradually diminishing improvement, is one of the standard equations to describe learning, a sigmoid behavior with initially increasing then decreasing improvement has also been suggested. Here we show that the sigmoid behavior is mathematically derived from the standard exponential equation when the independent variable of the equation is restricted to the successful trials alone. It is suggested that for tasks promoting success-based learning, performance is better described by the derived sigmoid curve.     

How to have a radically minimal ontology

In this paper I further elucidate and defend a metaontological position that allows you to have a minimal ontology without embracing an error-theory of ordinary talk. On this view ‘there are Fs’ can be strictly and literally true without bringing an ontological commitment to Fs. Instead of a sentence S committing you to the things that must be amongst the values of the variables if it is true, I argue that S commits you to the things that must exist as truthmakers for S if it is true. I rebut some recent objections that have been levelled against this metaontological view.