Understanding Real and Fictional Persons: Narrative Negotiations Seen Through Cognitive Poetics

Narrative theories of personal identity have traditionally taken literary characters as models to better understand how our identities are constituted through the narratives of our lives. However, there have been several recent criticisms of these comparisons, showing that philosophers of personal identity paid no attention to the nature of literary characters, and consequently, these philosopher’s comparisons were under-motivated. In the present article, I rely on a cognitive framework to define literary characters. From that point of view, I assert that it is fruitful to compare ourselves with literary characters to understand the role that the narratives told by others about ourselves play in the constitution of our own personal identities.     

Reactive temperament traits and behavioural problems in children: the mediating role of effortful control across sex and age

This study examines the mediating role of effortful control between reactive temperament traits (negative affectivity and extraversion) and children’s internalizing and externalizing behavioural problems. The sample was composed of 424 non-clinical children from 3 to 6 years of age (60% male). Use of a structural equation model revealed effortful control-mediated relations between reactive temperament traits and behavioural problems. Nevertheless, uniquely and directly, negative affect predicted externalizing problems and extraversion predicted internalizing problems. Assessment of invariance by children’s sex showed that the mediating role of effortful control tends to be stronger for externalizing problems in boys than in girls. Results showed no significant age differences. According to these results, effortful control as a method of self-regulation seems to be an essential process through which reactive temperament traits affect a child’s psychological adjustment.     

When will is not the same as should: The role of modals in reasoning with legal conditionals

Naïve reasoners reject logically valid conclusions from conditional rules if they can think of exceptions in which the antecedent is true, but the consequent is not. However, when reasoning with legal conditionals (e.g., “If a person kills another human, then this person should be punished for manslaughter”) people hardly consider exceptions but evaluate conclusions depending on their own sense of justice. We show that participants’ reluctance to consider exceptions in legal reasoning depends on the modal auxiliary used. In two experiments we phrased legal conditionals either with the modal “should” (i.e., “ . . . then this person should be punished”), or with “will” (i.e., “ . . . then this person will be punished”) and presented them as modus ponens or modus tollens inferences. Participants had to decide whether the offender should or will be punished (modus ponens) or whether the offender indeed committed the offence (modus tollens). For modus ponens inferences phrased with “should” we replicate previous findings showing that participants select conclusions on the basis of their own sense of justice (Experiments 1 and 2). Yet, when the legal conditional is phrased with the modal “will” this effect is attenuated (Experiments 1 and 2), and exceptions are considered (Experiment 1). The modal auxiliary did not affect modus tollens inferences.     

The Impact of Family-Friendly Practices on Work–Family Balance in Spain

Not being able to combine work with family properly is negatively related to employees’ quality of life. Some firms are aware of this reality and provide their employees family-friendly practices, a set of practices designed to enable employees a work–family balance. Family-friendly practices are classified in three subsets: family support practices, flexible arrangement practices, and parental leave practices. Then, this paper analyzes the impact of different subsets of family-friendly practices on work–family balance for women and men subsamples, as well as to disentangle the mechanisms through with such effects occur. Based on a representative sample of 8,061 Spanish workers and using the Baron and Kenny procedure to test for mediation, the results show that the three subsets of family-friendly practices increase work–family balance for both genders, although some of them have different effects for women and men. In line with societal gender role expectation, family support practices better accommodate men’s need, increasing work–family balance almost for them, and parental leave practices women’s need, increasing work–family balance more for them. However, flexible arrangement practices increase work–family balance equally for both genders. Moreover, in all cases, the effect of family-friendly practices on work–family balance goes beyond the effect of time outside work and time at work, then this partial mediation indicates that time is an important mechanism in achieving work–family balance. In sum, offering employees family-friendly practices is a good starting point in order to increase people’s quality of life by helping them achieve work–family balance.     

Developmental changes associated with cross-language similarity in bilingual children

The main goal of the present study was to investigate how the degree of orthographic overlap between translation equivalents influences bilingual word recognition processes at different stages of reading development. Spanish–Basque bilingual children with ages ranging from 8 to 15 years were tested in an explicit translation recognition task with a large set of items. Critically, the degree of cross-language similarity (i.e. the cognate status) between the references and the correct targets was manipulated along a continuum in order to investigate how the reliance on cross-language orthographic overlap varies as a function of reading experience. Results showed that younger children were significantly more sensitive to the cognate status of words than older children while recognising translation equivalents, and that this difference did not depend on the speed of response of the participants. These results demonstrate that the influence of cross-language similarity progressively diminishes as a function of increased exposure to print together with the maturation of the mechanisms responsible for language interference suppression, as suggested by developmental models of bilingual lexical access.     

Is schooling of migrants’ children more like that of their parents, their cousins, or their neighbours?

A natural way to look for signs of assimilation in migrants children is to compare their educational attainment to that of natives of the same age cohort (neighbours). However, background counts in these matters, so we look at the educational attainment of the previous generation (parents) as well as their social status. Using data for Portuguese in both France and Portugal together with data on the French, we show that the educational attainment of the second generation in France is much closer to that of the French than to that of those who stayed in Portugal (cousins). In this sense we can speak of assimilation.