Do situational expectations produce situational inferenes? The role of future expectations in directing inferential goals

Little is known about the conditions that lead observers to adopt different inferential goals in the context of their everyday lives. Four studies examined whether future expectations created situational inferential goals. In 2 quasiexperimental studies, students made more situational inferences for targets in their expected future careers. In 2 experiments, situational expectations were manipulated, and participants made more situational inferences when they expected to be in the same situation as the target. This tendency was stronger when observers devoted minimal cognitive effort to their inferences, suggesting that when observers have situational expectations, making situational inferences is less effortful than making dispositional inferences.     

The isomorphic mapping hypothesis: evidence from Korean

This paper evaluates the relative merits of the trace deletion hypothesis, which attributes agrammatic comprehension difficulties to the loss of traces, and the isomorphic mapping hypothesis, which proposes that agrammatics have difficulty understanding sentences in which there is a nonisomorphic mapping between the syntactic representation and the corresponding event in the real world. (The two are isomorphic if the order of NPs reflects the place of entities in the event's 'action chain.' Since agents act on themes and transmit them to goals, the agent-theme-goal order is isomorphic with the corresponding event but the agent-goal-theme order is not.) The two hypotheses contrast in the predictions they make concerning goal-theme and theme-goal patterns in Korean: the TDH predicts degraded performance on the theme-goal structure (which is derived from the goal-theme structure); the IMH predicts difficulties on the goal theme structure, since it is nonisomorphic. Results of a comprehension study involving four Korean Broca's aphasics provide strong support for the IMH over the TDH.     

Suboptimality in human categorization and identification

Categorization and identification decision processes were examined and compared in 4 separate experiments. In all tasks, the critical stimulus component was a line that varied across trials in length and orientation, and the optimal decision rules were always complex piecewise quadratic functions. Evidence was found that identification is mediated by separate explicit and implicit systems. In addition, a common type of suboptimality was found in both categorization and identification. In particular, observers apparently approximated the piecewise quadratic functions of the optimal decision rules with simpler piecewise linear functions. A computational model, which was motivated by a recent neuropsychological theory of category learning, successfully accounted for this suboptimal performance in both categorization and identification. The model assigns a key role to the striatum and assumes the observed suboptimality was largely due to massive convergence of visual cortical cells onto single striatal units.     

Moore's Paradox And Self-Ascribed Belief

Moore's paradox arises from the logicaloddity of sentences of the form`P and I do not believe that P'or `P and I believe that not-P'. Thiskind of sentence is logically peculiarbecause it is absurd to assert it, although it isnot a logical contradiction. In this paperI offer a new proposal. I argue that Moore's paradox arises because there is a defaultprocedure for evaluating a self-ascribed belief sentence and one is presumptivelyjustified in believing that one believes a sentence when one sincerely assents to it.     

Transversal-Universals in Discourse Ethics: Towards a Reconcilable Ethics Between Universalism and Communitarianism

This paper discusses the possibility of an ethics of difference. It begins with an introduction to current poststructural and critical theories in order to show their significance for transcultural politics and ethics. Its theme is formulated in terms of the debate between the affirmation of ethical cognitivism cast in the form of universalism and the advocacy of moral skepticism in the mode of communitarianism. Distancing itself from the idea of universal morality, this paper attempts to respond to the challenge of both communitarians and deconstructionists in contemporary French poststructuralism. In the end, it argues for transversality in place of universality.     

The Factor Structure of the Beavers Interactional Scales Revisited

The present study addressed limitations of a recent confirmatory factor analytic study challenging the hypothesized factor structure of the Beavers Interactional Scales. That dataset (n = 97) was reanalyzed and two additional datasets (n = 95, n = 91) were explored. With all three samples, taken separately and together, the Beavers Systems Model, when operationalized in the BIS, was not supported. A body of evidence is accumulating which suggests that clinicians and researchers should be wary of the BIS.     

Inspection time and the relationship among elementary cognitive tasks, general intelligence, and specific cognitive abilities

The relationship between inspection time (IT) and paper-and-pencil tests of cognitive ability is well documented. However, the extent to which IT relates to cognitive ability through general intelligence or through group factors such as performance has not been fully addressed. Another unresolved issue is whether IT relates to psychometric intelligence independent from other elementary cognitive tasks. The current study examined these issues in a sample of 6–13-year-old twins drawn from the Western Reserve Twin Project (WRTP) (n=568 participants). Analyses suggest that IT and other elementary tasks predict general intelligence. IT also predicts Performance ability while other elementary tasks do not. Furthermore, IT contributes variance to cognitive ability independent from other elementary tasks. These suggest that multiple indices of elementary cognitive ability are necessary to fully understand their relationship with complex psychometric measures.     

Predicting Prejudice from Religious Fundamentalism and Right‐Wing Authoritarianism: A Multiple‐Regression Approach

In a study designed to investigate the respective roles of religious fundamentalism and right‐wing authoritarianism as predictors of prejudice against racial minorities and homosexuals, participants (47 males, 91 females) responded to a series of questionnaire measures of these constructs. Data were analyzed using multiple regression. Consistent with previous research, authoritarianism was a significant and strong positive predictor of both forms of prejudice. With authoritarianism statistically controlled, however, fundamentalism emerged as a significant negative predictor of racial prejudice but a positive predictor of homosexual prejudice. In a second study, we conducted parallel multiple regressions using the correlations from two previously published studies. The Study 1 results were replicated exactly, except that fundamentalism was a nonsignificant predictor of homosexual prejudice. We interpret the results as evidence that Christian fundamentalism consists of a second major component other than authoritarianism—related to Christian belief content—that is inversely related to some forms of prejudice (including racial prejudice) but not others (e.g., homosexual prejudice).     

THE EFFECT OF THE ANALYST'S GENDER AND OTHER FACTORS ONPOST-TERMNATION PATIENT-ANALYST CONTACT: CONFIRMATIONBY A QUESTIONNAIRE STUDY

This questionnaire study was designed to confirm and further explore an earlier finding of a gender difference in post-termination patient-analyst contact, as well as to assess whether practices regarding post-termination contact have changed in the five-year interval since the first study. The hypothesis that women analysts are more likely to have post-termination contact with their analysands than men analysts was confirmed by the present study. Analysts who report thinking frequently about their most significant analyst are contacted by a much larger proportion of prior patients than those who rarely think about their analyst. Further, women analysts are more likely to feel they benefited from the analysis they consider their most significant analysis, and to feel positively about that analyst. In 1994, analysts were much more accepting of and more likely to propose post-termination contact than in 1989. What the analyst reports he/she says to the patient is associated with the likelihood of such contact.     

The Empathy‐Prospect Model and the Choice to Help1

This paper presents a model of the cognitive processes that precede decisions to help another person. The empathy‐prospect model predicts that potential helpers make decisions in much the same way as decision makers in other contexts do (i.e., they evaluate prospects) and that perceptions of need and the empathic reactions and intentions to help that they generate will be stronger for people observing losses rather than gains. The model also predicts that intentions to help should increase when (a) the predicament is serious, (b) money is not involved, or (c) help entails few costs for the potential altruist. The results from 2 experiments provide clear support for these predictions. The findings suggest that (a) the gains or losses of another person contribute to perceptions of that person's needs and feelings of empathy, (b) empathy is the primary proximal determinant of prosocial motivations, and (c) potential losses that are serious accentuate altruistic reactions.