Punishing for your own good: the case of reputation-based cooperation

Contrary to Guala, I claim that several mechanisms can explain punishment in humans. Here I focus on reputation-based cooperation--and I explore how it can lead to punishment under situations that may or may not be perceived as being anonymous. Additionally, no particular mechanism stands out in predicting an excess of punishment under constrained lab conditions.     

Trading Truth for Justice?

In this article I pursue two aims. First I advance an internal critique of hard-core retribution as it is usually advanced by victims of human rights violations. The focus of this penal approach on submitting all the military personnel guilty of human rights violations to harsh punishments risks jeopardizing the (clearly retributive) demand of punishing all those involved in the abuses. Particularly when extensive time has elapsed after the misdeeds, the most rational policy seems to be a negotiation model that offers gross human rights abusers punishment reductions in exchange for valuable information about the facts. Defending such a penal negotiation model constitutes the second aim of this article. I conclude that in order to satisfy the (hard-core) retributive demand of punishing all those (both military and civilian) guilty of human rights abuses, it is required not to submit all military personal indicted to retributive punishments.     

Evidence for a double dissociation between spatial-simultaneous and spatial-sequential working memory in visuospatial (nonverbal) learning disabled children

The paper describes the performance of three children with specific visuospatial working memory (VSWM) impairments (Study 1) and three children with visuospatial (nonverbal) learning disabilities (Study 2) assessed with a battery of working memory (WM) tests and with a number of school achievement tasks. Overall, performance on WM tests provides evidence of a double dissociation between spatial-simultaneous processes, underpinning the memorization item positioning in a spatial configuration, and spatial-sequential processes, which allow memorization of the presentation order. In both groups of children of the two studies, a selective impairment either on spatial-sequential or on spatial-simultaneous working memory tasks was observed. These data support the existence of -simultaneous and -sequential modality-dependent processes in visuospatial working memory and confirm the importance of distinguishing between different subtypes of visuospatial (nonverbal) learning-disabled children.     

Personalities of politicians and voters: unique and synergistic relationships

A rare collection of personality assessments from 103 Italian politicians revealed predictable patterns of contrasts and similarities with personality dimensions from a large normative sample (N = 4,578). Three modal personality characteristics distinguished politicians, with their significantly higher levels of Energy, Agreeableness, and Social Desirability, from the general public. Comparability between politicians and the public existed on dimensions of Emotional Stability, Conscientiousness, and Openness (Big Five Questionnaire assessment). Politicians from rival coalitions differed on several dimensions; center-right was higher than center-left in Energy and Conscientiousness. Congruencies emerged between politicians and voters for their coalition on all personality dimensions, except that center-left politicians were higher in Energy than center-left voters, and center-right politicians were higher than voters in both Energy and Agreeableness.     

Relationships between demographic variables and immigrant parents’ perceptions of assimilative adolescent behaviours

This research examined relationships between parental age, education, family size, length of residence in Canada, dyad type (same-sex parent-adolescent dyad versus opposite-sex parent-adolescent dyad) and immigrant parents’ perceptions of assimilative behaviours that adolescents are likely to display as a result of their involvement in the Canadian school system. An ethnically mixed sample of 36 parents and their adolescents responded to a questionnaire that solicited ratings of the degree of acceptability of prototypical assimilative adolescent behaviours. Analysis of Variance indicated that the match or mismatch between the sex of the parent and adolescent did not affect behavior ratings. Multiple Regression Analyses revealed that parental education was the only variable that significantly predicted parental approval or disapproval of adolescents’ behavioral shifts towards Western norms.     

A pragmatic interpretation of intuitionistic propositional logic

We construct an extension ^P of the standard language of classical propositional logic by adjoining to the alphabet of a new category of logical-pragmatic signs. The well formed formulas of are calledradical formulas (rfs) of ^P;rfs preceded by theassertion sign constituteelementary assertive formulas of ^P, which can be connected together by means of thepragmatic connectives N, K, A, C, E, so as to obtain the set of all theassertive formulas (afs). Everyrf of ^P is endowed with atruth value defined classically, and everyaf is endowed with ajustification value, defined in terms of the intuitive notion of proof and depending on the truth values of its radical subformulas. In this framework, we define the notion ofpragmatic validity in ^P and yield a list of criteria of pragmatic validity which hold under the assumption that only classical metalinguistic procedures of proof be accepted. We translate the classical propositional calculus (CPC) and the intuitionistic propositional calculus (IPC) into the assertive part of ^P and show that this translation allows us to interpret Intuitionistic Logic as an axiomatic theory of the constructive proof concept rather than an alternative to Classical Logic. Finally, we show that our framework provides a suitable background for discussing classical problems in the philosophy of logic.This paper is an enlarged and entirely revised version of the paper by Dalla Pozza (1991) worked out in the framework of C.N.R. project n. 89.02281.08, and published in Italian. The basic ideas in it have been propounded since 1986 by Dalla Pozza in a series of seminars given at the University of Lecce and in other Italian Universities. C. Garola collected the scattered parts of the work, helped in solving some conceptual difficulties and refining the formalism, yielded the proofs of some propositions (in particular, in Section 3) and provided physical examples (see in particular Remark 2.3.1).     

Pre-training to find a hidden platform in the Morris water maze can compensate for a deficit to find a cued platform in a rat model of Parkinson's disease

The bilateral intranigral infusion of 1 micromol 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine (MPTP) in adult male Wistar rats caused a specific and partial loss of substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc) dopamine neurons, a partial depletion of striatal dopamine, and a deficit to learn the intra-maze cued version of the Morris water maze. Pre-training the SNc rats in the spatial version of the water maze or simply maintaining the animals on the water maze platform reversed this deficit. This improvement was even observed when the order of the extra-maze cues presented to the rats during pre-training of the spatial version was changed during training of the intra-maze cued version. However, this deficit was not reversed either by maintaining the animals on the platform if the spatial cues were surrounded and covered with a curtain or by swimming sessions in the maze without the escape platform and the curtain. These findings suggest that none of the following elements alone, learned during the spatial task pre-training, could help SNc rats learn the intra-maze cued task: improvement of swimming skills or knowledge of the existence of the escape platform; distance between the platform and the border of the pool; location of a particular extra-maze cue; relations among extra-maze cues. However, the simultaneous presence of the escape platform and extra-maze cues (irrespective of their relational configuration) during the pre-training sessions proved to be necessary for this improving effect to occur.     

Pathways to competence: parental adversity and the roles of parenting quality and social support

The authors studied a representative Canadian cohort from the National Longitudinal Study of Children and Youth at 3 points in time, when the participants were aged 10-11 years (n = 2,147), 12-13 years (n = 1,976), and 14-15 years (n = 1,762). The presence of parent-related adversity appeared detrimental to young people's emotional and behavioral competence. Parents' self-reports of adversity predicted children's self-reports of their own behavioral functioning 2 years later. The authors identified parenting quality and social support as independent resource variables for young people's competence, rather than protective variables in the face of parent-related adversity. Latent variable path analyses suggested the increasing value of both resource variables over time for all young people.     

Truth versus testability in Quantum Logic

We forward an epistemological perspective regarding non-classical logics which restores the universality of logic in accordance with the thesis of global pluralism. In this perspective every non-classical truth-theory is actually a theory of some metalinguistic concept which does not coincide with the concept of truth (described by Tarski's truth theory). We intend to apply this point of view to Quantum Logic (QL) in order to prove that its structure properties derive from properties of the metalinguistic concept of testability in Quantum Physics. To this end we construct a classical language L _cand endow it with a classical effective interpretation which is partially inspired by the Ludwig approach to the foundations of Quantum Mechanics. Then we select two subsets of formulas in L _cwhich can be considered testable because of their interpretation and we show that these subsets have the structure properties of Quantum Logics because of Quantum Mechanical axioms, as desired. Finally we comment on some relevant consequences of our approach (in particular, the fact that no non-classical logic is strictly needed in Quantum Physics).