Personality and context-related factors of helping and helping-related affect during early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic

COVID-19 pandemic led to introduction of lockdown measures in many countries, while in Serbia the Government also introduced the curfew by which vulnerable groups of citizens were prohibited from leaving their homes at any time. In such a situation many citizens organized to voluntarily offer their help to those in isolation, which offered a unique opportunity to examine prosocial behavior in the natural setting of global crisis. This study examined the differences between non-helpers and helpers, as well as groups of helpers who provided their help to close or unknown others, in personality (prosocial tendencies, selfishness and communal narcissism) and context-related factors (situation specific empathy and fear) of prosocial behaviors. Additionally, the study also analyzed the helping-related affect among helpers, depending on the recipient of help and personality characteristics. Results revealed that groups of helpers with different recipients of help (close persons, unknown persons or both) were not different among each other, but they were different from non-helpers. Non-helpers were more selfish and had self-focused prosocial tendencies, and they showed less empathy towards people in isolation, compared to helper groups. However, the helping-related affect depended on the recipient of help and helper's personality traits. This study confirmed some previous findings and offered novel insights into factors related to helping in crises.     

Playing to their strengths: Can focusing on typical in-group strengths be detrimental to people of colour?

With increasing awareness about racism, portrayals of communities of colour are shifting away from negative representations. Emphasizing their strengths could counter negative stereotypes about who they are and low expectations for who they can be, but could also backfire. In two experiments centring adolescents (n = 198) and adults of colour (n = 321), the effect of reflecting on a typical strength was moderated by perceived misalignments between racial/ethnic and ideal future selves (i.e., ethnic–ideal self-discrepancy). For participants perceiving them as aligned, reflecting on a typical in-group strength reduced actual–ideal self-discrepancy. However, for participants perceiving them as misaligned, reflecting on a typical in-group strength increased actual–ideal self-discrepancy. Reflecting on a typical strength also indirectly influenced engagement, through actual–ideal self-discrepancy. Reflecting on an atypical in-group strength did not yield significant effects. Thus, emphasizing typical aspects of stigmatized communities, even when positive, sometimes impede identity and motivation.     

Sheldon Smith on Newton’s Derivative: Retrospective Assignation,Externalism and the History of Mathematics

To illustrate the view that a speaker can have a partial understanding of a concept, Burge uses the example of Leibniz’s and Newton’s understanding of the concept of derivative. In a recent article, Sheldon Smith criticizes this example and maintains that Newton’s and Leibniz’s use of their derivative symbols does not univocally determine their references. The present article aims at challenging Smith’s analysis. It first shows that Smith misconstrues Burge’s position. It second suggests that the philosophical lessons one should draw from the practice of the historians of philosophy are more ambivalent than what Smith thinks.

     

A review on equivalence-based procedures to teach food-portion estimation skills

This review involved a systematic analysis of equivalence-based instruction (EBI) that aimed to improve food-size interventions in diverse populations. Systematic searches identified seven studies published since 2010 that met inclusion criteria. These studies were analyzed according to their participants, design, setting, content taught, training structures, training protocol, testing format, treatment integrity, and outcomes. Results showed EBI procedures for teaching food estimation skills have been mostly implemented with adults. The type of content taught in the identified studies included carbohydrate ranges, portion size with food and non-food items, measuring cups and nutritional content of calories. Majority of included studies used one-to-many training structure and simultaneous protocols for teaching stimulus relations. Five studies completed a generalization probe and three studies reported treatment integrity data. Overall, all participants demonstrated skill acquisition of novel relations between food and portion measurement aides. Recommendations for future research and clinical applications of EBI in teaching food portion estimation are presented.     

Llamas use social information from conspecifics and humans to solve a spatial detour task

Animal Cognition - Learning by observing others (i.e. social learning) is an important mechanism to reduce the costs of individual learning. Social learning can occur between conspecifics but also...     

Eco-restrictive experiences forming extraordinary consumer experiences

This article contributes to different research traditions when proposes to reflect on theoretical fields, such as consumer culture and contemporary marketing. The study in a tourist and ecological conservation project revealed eco-restricted extraordinary experiences. We found a group of volunteers that build meanings and practices connected with new actions and habits that offer, not only ecological and sustainable benefits, but new value consumption relations. In contextualizing our findings, we highlight experiences and curiosities that are glossed over in academic and practical accounts that celebrate the extraordinary experience. It was observed, by analyzing data from various qualitative techniques, that the findings cross borders of mundane ingrained practices and bring an emerging domain, where both, consumption and anti-consumption experiences, offer insights into to a diversity of areas of knowledge.     

Transfer effects from language processing to visual attention dynamics: The impact of orthographic transparency

The consistency between letters and sounds varies across languages. These differences have been proposed to be associated with different reading mechanisms (lexical vs. phonological), processing grain sizes (coarse vs. fine) and attentional windows (whole words vs. individual letters). This study aimed to extend this idea to writing to dictation. For that purpose, we evaluated whether the use of different types of processing has a differential impact on local windowing attention: phonological (local) processing in a transparent language (Spanish) and lexical (global) processing of an opaque language (English). Spanish and English monolinguals (Experiment 1) and Spanish–English bilinguals (Experiment 2) performed a writing to dictation task followed by a global–local task. The first key performance showed a critical dissociation between languages: the response times (RTs) from the Spanish writing to dictation task was modulated by word length, whereas the RTs from the English writing to dictation task was modulated by word frequency and age of acquisition, as evidence that language transparency biases processing towards phonological or lexical strategies. In addition, after a Spanish task, participants more efficiently processed local information, which resulted in both the benefit of global congruent information and the reduced cost of incongruent global information. Additionally, the results showed that bilinguals adapt their attentional processing depending on the orthographic transparency.     

Thinking disposition,thinking style,and susceptibility to causal illusion predict fake news discriminability

Acceptance of fake news is probably modulated by an intricate interplay of social, cultural, and political factors. In this study, we investigated whether individual-level cognitive factors related to thinking and decision making could influence the tendency to accept fake news. A group of volunteers responded to a COVID19-related fake news discrimination scale as well as to questionnaires assessing their thinking style (reflective vs. intuitive) and thinking disposition (actively open-mindedness). Furthermore, they completed a computerized contingency learning task aimed at measuring their tendency to develop a causal illusion, a cognitive bias leading to perceive causal connections between non-contingent events. More actively open-minded and more reflective individuals presented higher fake news discrimination scores. In addition, those who developed weaker causal illusions in the contingency learning task were also more accurate at differentiating between fake and legitimate news. Actively open-minded thinking was the main contributor in a regression model predicting fake news discrimination.