Learning from Tolstoy: Forgetfulness and Recognition in Literary Edification

Philosophers have often applied a distinctively epistemic framework to the question of how moral knowledge can be derived from fictional literature, by considering how true propositions, or their argumentative support, can be the cognitive fruits of reading works of fiction. I offer an alternative approach. I focus not on whether readers fail to assent to the truth of a proposition or fail to provide it rational support. Instead, I focus on how readers fail to accord a truth (which they already accept) adequate importance in their web of beliefs about living a good human life. This is a form of ignorance, but in the form of neglect, or failure to pay proper regard – which is one sense of the term ‘forgetfulness’. I argue that works of fictional literature may, at times, stimulate audience members to overcome their own particular forms of forgetfulness in this respect. And I use Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich as a case in point.

What's the subject? Brexit and politics as articulation

This paper focuses on the moment of Brexit and its political aftermath in order to challenge dominant academic and popular conceptions of the political subject as singular and coherent. Instead, we suggest that there is an urgent political and analytical need for a view of the subject as multiple, contradictory, and dialogic. As interdisciplinary scholars working on the borders of policy studies and cultural studies, we think this is a critical site for transdisciplinary conversations about such conceptions of the subject. In the political field, such subjects are selectively and unevenly addressed and mobilized by political projects—such as Vote Leave—that invite them to recognize themselves as part of an imagined collective identity. In the twin disturbances of the European Union referendum and the 2017 general election, we suggest that it is possible to see that other voicings, other identifications, and other projects remain possible. Specific political mobilizations are neither singular nor stable.     

Interpersonal and emotional processes in generalized anxiety disorder analogues during social interaction tasks

Persons with chronic worry and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) report maladaptive social cognitions, interpersonal behaviors, and emotional regulation. Because research has neither investigated these processes in actual social situations nor explored whether they take heterogeneous forms, the present study provides the first attempt to do so in a laboratory investigation. GAD analogue participants and nonanxious controls interacted with confederates in an unstructured collaborative story construction task and an emotional disclosure task with standardized confederate behavior. In both tasks, relative to controls, some GAD analogues highly overestimated, whereas others markedly underestimated, their negative (Hostile-Submissive) interpersonal impact on confederates. Although GAD analogues, as a group, exhibited greater sad affect during disclosures than controls, their openness during disclosures and liking by confederates varied with their level of misestimation of negative interpersonal impact. Results underscore the need to further explore interpersonal processes in chronic worriers and how they may exacerbate or maintain dysfunction.     

Space aliens and nonwords: Stimuli for investigating the learning of novel word-meaning pairs

We describe a set of pictorial and auditory stimuli that we have developed for use in word learning tasks in which the participant learns pairings of novel auditory sound patterns (names) with pictorial depictions of novel objects (referents). The pictorial referents are drawings of “space aliens,” consisting of images that are variants of 144 different aliens. The auditory names are possible nonwords of English; the stimulus set consists of over 2,500 nonword stimuli recorded in a single voice, with controlled onsets, varying from one to seven syllables in length. The pictorial and nonword stimuli can also serve as independent stimulus sets for purposes other than word learning. The full set of these stimuli may be downloaded fromwww.psychonomic.org/archive/.     

Research note: American children's time use in after-school activities

90 Grade 4 children from upstate New York completed a "what I usually do" questionnaire, reporting on their after-school activities. Contrary to the concerns of some psychologists, there was no evidence that the children were being "hurried" out of childhood or "hot-housed" to develop academic or other excellence. The children's time was largely spent in enjoyable, self-chosen, and nonacademic activities, most often play or television viewing.     

Lying words: predicting deception from linguistic styles

Telling lies often requires creating a story about an experience or attitude that does not exist. As a result, false stories may be qualitatively different from true stories. The current project investigated the features of linguistic style that distinguish between true and false stories. In an analysis of five independent samples, a computer-based text analysis program correctly classified liars and truth-tellers at a rate of 67% when the topic was constant and a rate of 61% overall. Compared to truth-tellers, liars showed lower cognitive complexity, used fewer self-references and other-references, and used more negative emotion words.     

The perils of partialling: cautionary tales from aggression and psychopathy

Although a powerful technique, the partialling of independent variables from one another in the context of multiple regression analysis poses certain perils. The present article argues that the most important and underappreciated peril is the difficulty in knowing what construct an independent variable represents once the variance shared with other independent variables is removed. The present article presents illustrative analyses in a large sample of inmates (n=696) using three measures from the psychopathy and aggression fields. Results indicate that in terms of relations among items on a single scale and relations between scales, the raw and residualized scores bore little resemblance to one another. It is argued that researchers must decide to which construct-the one represented by the original scale or the one represented by the residualized scale-conclusions are meant to apply. Difficulties in applying the conclusions to the residualized scale are highlighted and best practices suggested.