Feeding the Beast: Nourishing Nativist Appeals in Sweden and in Denmark

Sweden and Denmark share a similar socio-political structure, yet these two countries demonstrate two distinct discourses on immigration. This article focuses on the tone of the debate in Denmark and Sweden concerning immigration and national identity. If the tone of debate is shaped by a language of fear, we argue, this predisposes people to vote for anti-immigration parties. Our analysis highlights the position of anti-immigration parties; hence, the Sweden Democrats (SD) in Sweden and the Danish People’s Party (DPP) in Denmark. We use frame analysis to detect recurrent frames in the media debate concerning the SD and the DPP in the political competition over votes. Our material concentrates on the run-up to the European Parliamentary (EP) elections of 2004 and 2009, in total 573 articles in ten major Danish and Swedish newspapers. We show that the harsh tone of the debate and the negative dialogue risks leading to the construction of beasts that are impossible to negotiate with. In the Swedish political debate, the SD is highly stigmatized as the beast (the extreme other) in Swedish politics and this stigma is used by the SD in the mobilization of votes. In Denmark the religion of Islam as such plays a similar role and provides the DPP with an identity. We conclude that we are confronted with a two-faced beast that feeds on perceptions of the people as ultimately afraid of what are not recognized as native goods.     

Testing attention: Comparing the ANT with TVA-based assessment

Posner’s attention network model and Bundesen’s theory of visual attention (TVA) are two influential accounts of attention. Each model has led to the development of a test method: the attention network test (ANT) and TVA-based assessment, respectively. Both tests have been widely used to investigate attentional function in normal and clinical populations. Here we report on the first direct comparison of the ANT to TVA-based assessment. A group of 68 young healthy participants were tested in three consecutive sessions that each contained standard versions of the two tests. The parameters derived from TVA-based assessment had better internal reliability and retest reliability than did those of the standard version of the ANT, where only the executive network score reached comparable levels. However, when corrected for differences in test length, the retest reliability of the orienting network score equaled the least reliable TVA parameters. Both tests were susceptible to practice effects, which improved performance for some parameters while leaving others constant. All pairwise correlations between the eight attention parameters measured by the two tests were small and nonsignificant, with one exception: A strong correlation (r?=?0.72) was found between two parameters of TVA-based assessment, visual processing speed and the capacity of visual short-term memory. We conclude that TVA-based assessment and the ANT measure complementary aspects of attention, but the scores derived from TVA-based assessment are more reliable.     

Eliciting Intelligence Using the Scharff‐Technique: Closing in on the Confirmation/Disconfirmation‐Tactic

The current study examined interview techniques aimed at eliciting intelligence from human sources. We compared two versions of the Scharff‐technique to the Direct Approach (a combination of open and direct questions). The Scharff conditions, conceptualised into four tactics, differed only with respect to the ‘confirmation/disconfirmation‐tactic’. The participants (N = 90) received background information and took the role as a source in a phone interview. They were instructed to strike a balance between not revealing too little and too much information. As predicted, the Scharff‐technique resulted in more new information than the Direct Approach. Importantly, the sources interviewed by the Scharff‐technique perceived that they had revealed less new information than they objectively did, whereas the sources interviewed by the Direct Approach perceived that they had revealed more new information than they objectively did. Furthermore, the interviewer's information objectives were better masked with the confirmation‐tactic than with the disconfirmation‐tactic. The results highlight the Scharff‐technique as a promising human intelligence gathering technique. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mental health in Swedish children living in joint physical custody and their parents' life satisfaction: A cross‐sectional study

This study compared the psychological symptoms of 129 children in joint physical custody with children in single care and nuclear families, using a nationally representative 2011 survey of 1,297 Swedish children aged between four and 18 years. The outcome measure was the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) and its association with three dimensions of parental life satisfaction was investigated. Linear regression analyses showed higher SDQ‐scores for children in joint physical custody (B = 1.4, p < 0.001) and single care (B = 2.2, p < 0.001) than in nuclear families, after adjustment for socio‐demographic variables. The estimates decreased to 1.1 and 1.3, respectively, after being adjusted for parental life satisfaction ( p < 0.01). Our findings confirm previous research that showed lower symptom scores for children in nuclear families than children in single care and joint physical custody. Parental life satisfaction should be investigated further as a possible explanation of differences in symptom load between children in different living arrangements.     

The aim of Russell’s early logicism: a reinterpretation

I argue that three main interpretations of the aim of Russell’s early logicism in The Principles of Mathematics (1903) are mistaken, and propose a new interpretation. According to this new interpretation, the aim of Russell’s logicism is to show, in opposition to Kant, that mathematical propositions have a certain sort of complete generality which entails that their truth is independent of space and time. I argue that on this interpretation two often-heard objections to Russell’s logicism, deriving from Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and from the non-logical character of some of the axioms of Principia Mathematica respectively, can be seen to be inconclusive. I then proceed to identify two challenges that Russell’s logicism, as presently construed, faces, but argue that these challenges do not appear unanswerable.     

What is Said?

It is sometimes argued that certain sentences of natural language fail to express truth conditional contents. Standard examples include e.g. Tipper is ready and Steel is strong enough. In this paper, we provide a novel analysis of truth conditional meaning (what is said) using the notion of a question under discussion. This account (i) explains why these types of sentences are not, in fact, semantically underdetermined (yet seem truth conditionally incomplete), (ii) provides a principled analysis of the process by which natural language sentences (in general) can come to have enriched meanings in context, and (iii) shows why various alternative views, e.g. so‐called Radical Contextualism, Moderate Contextualism, and Semantic Minimalism, are partially right in their respective analyses of the problem, but also all ultimately wrong. Our analysis achieves this result using a standard truth conditional and compositional semantics and without making any assumptions about enriched logical forms, i.e. logical forms containing phonologically null expressions.     

Parental socioeconomic status and child intellectual functioning in a Norwegian sample

Socioeconomic status (SES) in childhood has been linked to cognitive function and future academic and occupational success in studies from several countries. However, previous Nordic studies have shown inconsistent results regarding the strength of this link. We therefore investigated the association between SES and cognitive functioning in a sample of 255 Norwegian children, including 151 typically developing children and 104 children with a psychiatric diagnosis. The third edition of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC‐III) to assess cognitive function was used. SES was defined from maternal and paternal education and family income of typically developing children and of a subsample of children with a psychiatric diagnosis. Multiple adjusted regression analyses were used to investigate the relation between SES and cognitive functioning. The analyses showed that SES explained a significant part of the variance of the full‐scale WISC‐III score and two WISC‐III indices (Verbal Comprehension and Freedom from Distractibility). Overall, the strength of the relations was weaker than expected from reports from other non‐Nordic countries. Parental education was the only significant individual predictor, suggesting that income was of minor importance as a predictor of cognitive functioning. Further studies should investigate how diverse political and socioeconomic contexts influence the relation between SES and cognitive functioning.     

Mechanisms underlying skilled anticipation and recognition in a dynamic and temporally constrained domain

We examined the mechanisms underlying skilled anticipation and recognition in a dynamic, interactive, and temporally constrained domain. Skilled and less-skilled participants viewed dynamic film stimuli, anticipated event outcome, and provided immediate retrospective verbal reports. Previously viewed and novel sequences were then presented in film or point-light display format. Participants made recognition judgements and again gave retrospective verbal reports on their thought processes. Skilled participants demonstrated superior anticipation accuracy and were more sensitive in distinguishing previously seen from novel stimuli than less-skilled participants. Skilled participants utilised more complex memory representations than less-skilled individuals, as indicated by references in their retrospective reports to more evaluation and prediction statements. The representations activated during anticipation were more complex than those for recognition judgements in both groups. Findings are discussed with reference to long-term working memory theory.