The Truthmaking Argument Against Dispositionalism

According to dispositionalism, de re modality is grounded in the intrinsic natures of dispositional properties. Those properties are able to serve as the ground of de re modal truths, it is said, because they bear a special relation to counterfactual conditionals, one of truthmaking. However, because dispositionalism purports to ground de re modality only on the intrinsic natures of dispositional properties, it had better be the case that they do not play that truthmaking role merely in virtue of their being embedded in some particular, extrinsic causal context. This paper examines a recent argument against dispositionalism that purports to show that the intrinsicality of that relation cannot be maintained, due to the ceteris paribus nature of the counterfactuals that dispositions make‐true. When two prominent responses are examined, both are found wanting: at best, they require unjustified special pleading, and at worst, they amount to little more than ad hoc conceptual trickery. 1     

Effects of personality and gender on self–other agreement in ratings of leadership

We explore the role of leader personality (i.e., the Big 5 traits: Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Openness, Extraversion, and Neuroticism) and gender in self–other (dis)agreement (SOA) in ratings of leadership. We contend that certain aspects of the leader's persona may be more or less related to self‐ or other‐ratings of the leader's behaviour if those aspects are (1) more or less observable by others, (2) more or less related to internal thoughts versus external behaviours, (3) more or less prone to self‐enhancement or self‐denigrating biases, or (4) more or less socially desirable. We utilize statistical methodologies that capture fully the effects of multiple independent variables on the congruence between two dependent variables (Edwards, 1995 , Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 64, 307), which previously have not been applied to this area of research. Our results support hypotheses predicting less SOA as leader Conscientiousness increases and greater SOA as Agreeableness and Neuroticism increase. Additionally, we found gender to be an important factor in SOA; female leaders exhibited greater SOA than did their male counterparts. We discuss the implications of these findings, limitations, and future research directions.

Practitioner points

• Popular practices such as 360‐degree feedback may reveal discrepancies between a person's self‐ratings and other's ratings.
• Although often attributed to a lack of self‐awareness, these discrepancies also may be explained by factors such as the personality and gender of the focal individual.

     

SOIL CARBON TRANSFORMATIONS

Climate change is a wicked problem with causes and consequences overlapping with other wicked problems and no single solution (Hulme 2015). For example, the frequent droughts associated with climate change exacerbate another major problem facing humanity as we enter the Anthropocene: how to produce adequate food to feed a growing population without increasing pollution or “more food with low pollution (MoFoLoPo)” (Davidson et al. 2015). Soils represent an intersection of these two wicked problems, because they are integral to food production through agriculture and also are an important component of global climate models. Recent focus in the field of soil carbon cycling has facilitated a transformation in our understanding of the processes that control this important resource. This understanding is critical to responding to both wicked problems.     

Brief inductions in episodic past or future thinking: effects on episodic detail and problem-solving

Cognitive Processing - Episodic specificity inductions, involving brief training in recollecting episodic details, have been shown to improve subsequent performance on tasks involving remembering...     

Have Phobias,Will Travel: Addressing One Barrier to the Delivery of an Evidence-Based Treatment

Although a host of evidence-based treatments exist for youth with anxiety disorders, less than 30% of youth and their families receive these treatments. One of the main barriers to receiving these treatments is the lack of access to care, due largely to the absence of mental health professionals who have expertise in the delivery of these treatments in certain geographic locales. The current study examined whether a brief intensive treatment for specific phobias (SPs), Augmented One-Session Treatment (OST-A), would result in comparable treatment gains for families who traveled a considerable distance to receive this treatment when compared to families who resided in our local community. Participants included 76 youth with a clinically confirmed diagnosis of SP (38 local families and an age- and sex-matched sample of 38 nonlocal families). Although SP severity at pretreatment was significantly greater for the nonlocal youth than the local youth, both nonlocal and local youth showed commensurate improvement and maintenance of treatment gains over a 6-month period across several clinical outcome measures. Findings from this study show that OST-A is effective when families choose to travel for treatment, addressing at least one of the barriers to use of this evidence-based treatment.     

A test of the functional avoidance hypothesis in the development of overgeneral autobiographical memory

Overgeneral memory (OGM) refers to the failure to recall memories of specific personally experienced events, which occurs in various psychiatric disorders. One pathway through which OGM is theorized to develop is the avoidance of thinking of negative experiences, whereby cumulative avoidance may maladaptively generalize to autobiographical memory (AM) more broadly. We tested this, predicting that negative experiences would interact with avoidance to predict AM specificity. In Study 1 (N = 281), negative life events (over six months) and daily hassles (over one month) were not related to AM specificity, nor was avoidance, and no interaction was found. In Study 2 (N = 318), we revised our measurements and used an increased timeframe of 12 months for both negative life events and daily hassles. The results showed no interaction effect for negative life events, but they did show an interaction for daily hassles, whereby increased hassles and higher avoidance of thinking about them were associated with reduced AM specificity, independent of general cognitive avoidance and depressive symptoms. No evidence was found that cognitive avoidance or AM specificity moderated the effect of negative experiences on depressive symptoms. Our findings suggest that life events over 6–12 months are not associated with AM specificity, but chronic daily hassles over 12 months predict reduced AM specificity when individuals avoid thinking about them. The findings provide evidence for the functional-avoidance hypothesis of OGM development and future directions for longitudinal studies.     

A Cost Analysis of a Validated Screening Tool for Pediatric Abusive Head Trauma

Doctors who treat young victims of trauma are required to make important decisions to launch or forgo child abuse evaluations in their acutely head-injured patients. To improve the accuracy of these decisions, Pediatric Brain Injury Research Network (PediBIRN) investigators derived and validated a 4-variable clinical prediction rule (CPR) that improves the detection of abusive head trauma (AHT) in pediatric intensive care units. Our objective was to estimate and compare medical costs from the health system perspective of AHT screening guided by the CPR vs. screening as usual (SAU). Cost estimates for child abuse evaluations, emergency department (ED)/pediatrician visits, and hospital admissions for AHT were combined with published data on service use and re-injury rates in children with missed or unrecognized AHT. Applying published estimates of the CPR’s potential screening performance, the cost per correctly identified child with AHT was calculated and compared for AHT screening guided by the CPR vs. SAU, and the potential medical cost savings associated with CPR application was estimated. Applied accurately and consistently, the CPR could reduce the cost per correctly identified child with AHT by 15.1%, and reduce health system costs resulting from missed AHT by 72.4%.     

Measuring motor speed through typing: a surrogate for the finger tapping test

Motor speed is an important indicator and predictor of both cognitive and physical function. One common assessment of motor speed is the finger-tapping test (FTT), which is typically administered as part of a neurological or neuropsychological assessment. However, the FTT suffers from several limitations, including infrequent in-person administration, the need for a trained assessor and dedicated equipment, and potential short-term sensory–motor fatigue. In this article, we propose an alternative method of measuring motor speed, with face validity to the FTT, that addresses these limitations by measuring the interkeystroke intervals (IKI) of familiar and repeated login data collected in the home during a subject’s regular computer use. We show significant correlations between the mean tapping speeds from the FTT and the median IKIs of the nondominant (r = .77) and dominant (r = .70) hands, respectively, in an elderly cohort of subjects living independently. Finally, we discuss how the proposed method for measuring motor speed fits well into the framework of unobtrusive and continuous in-home assessment.