Increasing interletter spacing facilitates encoding of words

Recent research has suggested that words presented with a slightly increased interletter spacing are identified faster than words presented with the default spacing settings (i.e.,      

Comparative Assessments of Justice, Political Feasibility, and Ideal Theory

What should our theorizing about social justice aim at? Many political philosophers think that a crucial goal is to identify a perfectly just society. Amartya Sen disagrees. In The Idea of Justice, he argues that the proper goal of an inquiry about justice is to undertake comparative assessments of feasible social scenarios in order to identify reforms that involve justice-enhancement, or injustice-reduction, even if the results fall short of perfect justice. Sen calls this the “comparative approach” to the theory of justice. He urges its adoption on the basis of a sustained critique of the former approach, which he calls “transcendental.” In this paper I pursue two tasks, one critical and the other constructive. First, I argue that Sen’s account of the contrast between the transcendental and the comparative approaches is not convincing, and second, I suggest what I take to be a broader and more plausible account of comparative assessments of justice. The core claim is that political philosophers should not shy away from the pursuit of ambitious theories of justice (including, for example, ideal theories of perfect justice), although they should engage in careful consideration of issues of political feasibility bearing on their practical implementation.     

Truthmaker Theory without Truthmakers

Truthmaking without truthmakers (TWT, for short) is the thesis that although every true proposition is made true by reality, there need not be particular entities (like facts, states of affairs, or tropes) that make these propositions true. The first substantial part of this paper (section 2) is devoted to developing a particular version of TWT and at the same time defending TWT in general from arguments against it that have been advanced by orthodox truthmaker theorists. In the second part of the paper (section 3) I argue that talk about truthmakers within the theory can be understood as metaphoric and as conveying valuable information about something other than the supposed truthmakers: about truthmaking. The aim of this paper is therefore twofold. On the one hand, I intend to present the view on truthmaking, a version of TWT, that I find most plausible in the light of the arguments for and against truthmaker theory. On the other hand, I argue that friends of TWT have good reason to adopt a figuralist approach to truthmaker theory, rather than rejecting it outright.     

The Effect of Authority on the Persuasiveness of Mathematical Arguments

Three experiments are reported that investigate the extent to which an authority figure influences the level of persuasion undergraduate students and research-active mathematicians invest in mathematical arguments. We demonstrate that, in some situations, both students and researchers rate arguments as being more persuasive when they are associated with an expert mathematician than when the author is anonymous. We develop a model that accounts for these data by suggesting that, for both students and researchers, an authority figure only plays a role when there is already some uncertainty about the argument's mathematical status. Implications for pedagogy, and for future research, are discussed.     

It's not that bad: Social challenges to emotional disclosure enhance adjustment to stress

Studies conducted in the United States (n=115) and Spain (n=146) examined how talking about an acute stressor in different social contexts influences cognitive, emotional, and physiological adjustment. In both studies, female college students viewed a video dramatizing a real-life, gang rape scene on two separate days. After the first viewing, participants were randomly assigned to one of four social conditions: no talk, talk alone about their reactions, talk to a validating confederate about their reactions, or talk to a challenging confederate about their reactions. Participants in the challenge condition showed the greatest emotional, cognitive, and physiological benefits across cultures, whereas participants in the validate and talk conditions evidenced only modest benefits. These findings suggest that the social context of disclosure has a strong influence on adjustment processes and that providing an alternative and more sanguine perspective can help individuals recover from acute stressors.     

Modelling serial position curves with temporal distinctiveness

We offer a critique of the temporal distinctiveness model of serial position effects (Nairne, Neath, Serra, & Byun, 1997). The temporal distinctiveness model combines a precise definition of stimulus distinctiveness with a memory perturbation process. The critique is empirically motivated—we show that with a more complete analysis, the temporal distinctiveness model does not adequately account for Nairne et al.' experimental data. To better account for the data, we independently modified two components of Nairne et al.' model: the mathematical form of the definition of temporal distinctiveness and the mathematical form of the mapping from distinctiveness to free-recall probabilities. Both of these modifications provided for better fits. Yet both Nairne et al.' definition and our modified definition are fairly arbitrary. We show that a significant challenge to this approach is to find theoretically motivated constraints of the temporal distinctiveness model while providing for adequate fits to data.     

Difficulties,skills and therapy strategies in interventions with court-ordered batterers in Spain

As a consequence of its coercive context, psychological interventions with men convicted of intimate partner violence in Spain involve a series of challenges in the design and development of the therapy program. This article reviews the main international contributions that have considered the difficulties produced by the context and analyzes the most important skills that the therapist can utilize in order to facilitate the therapeutic process. The difficulties have been grouped in accordance with origin: (a) difficulties derived from the context of the intervention; (b) the characteristics of the offender; (c) the therapist. The principal skills and strategies of the therapist seem to be related to the clear definition of the intervention context, the management of therapeutic relationship and the therapist's capacity for analysis and reflection. Finally, this work recognizes the need for research projects that focus on the therapist and aspects of the therapeutic process that could optimize the implementation of therapist training actions and improve treatment results.     

Towards a better use of psychoanalytic concepts: A model illustrated using the concept of enactment

It is well known that there is a lack of consensus about how to decide between competing and sometimes mutually contradictory theories, and how to integrate divergent concepts and theories. In view of this situation the IPA Project Committee on Conceptual Integration developed a method that allows comparison between different versions of concepts, their underlying theories and basic assumptions. Only when placed in a frame of reference can similarities and differences be seen in a methodically comprehensible and reproducible way. We used “enactment” to study the problems of comparing concepts systematically. Almost all psychoanalytic schools have developed a conceptualization of it. We made a sort of provisional canon of relevant papers we have chosen from the different schools. The five steps of our method for analyzing the concept of enactment will be presented. The first step is the history of the concept; the second the phenomenology; the third a methodological analysis of the construction of the concept. In order to compare different conceptualizations we must know the main dimensions of the meaning space of the concept, this is the fourth step. Finally, in step five we discuss if and to what extent an integration of the different versions of enactment is possible.