Social Research in the Advancement of Children's Rights

This article argues that investigators doing developmental and social research with children have, for the most part, failed to acknowledge the inherent implications of their work for children's rights. The impact of these studies upon children's rights occurs at every stage; from hypothesis formulation to hypothesis testing to dissemination of findings. This paper addresses the issue in the context of developmental research on children's ability to report experienced events accurately. This particular research area has generated data that has been extrapolated to legal contexts and created a foundation for assumptions about the credibility of child witnesses. This in turn has had profound effects on children's right to be heard and the weight given to their testimony. The argument is made that there is a need for social scientists to explicitly articulate how their work may impact upon children's rights and what is in fact the social agenda in this regard underlying their research.     

Positive emotion impedes emotional but not cognitive conflict processing

Cognitive control enables successful goal-directed behavior by resolving a conflict between opposing action tendencies, while emotional control arises as a consequence of emotional conflict processing such as in irony. While negative emotion facilitates both cognitive and emotional conflict processing, it is unclear how emotional conflict processing is affected by positive emotion (e.g., humor). In 2 EEG experiments, we investigated the role of positive audiovisual target stimuli in cognitive and emotional conflict processing. Participants categorized either spoken vowels (cognitive task) or their emotional valence (emotional task) and ignored the visual stimulus dimension. Behaviorally, a positive target showed no influence on cognitive conflict processing, but impeded emotional conflict processing. In the emotional task, response time conflict costs were higher for positive than for neutral targets. In the EEG, we observed an interaction of emotion by congruence in the P200 and N200 ERP components in emotional but not in cognitive conflict processing. In the emotional conflict task, the P200 and N200 conflict effect was larger for emotional than neutral targets. Thus, our results show that emotion affects conflict processing differently as a function of conflict type and emotional valence. This suggests that there are conflict- and valence-specific mechanisms modulating executive control.     

A model for the treatment of eating disorders of adolescents in a specialized centre in The Netherlands

Treatment of adolescent patients with eating disorders has to take into account that these patients differ in age, their stage of development, and the constellation and functioning of their family life. Our treatment model takes these factors into account and is family and cognitive behaviourally orientated. The work has developed and changed in recent years, based on our experiences over the past ten years, as well as in combination with ideas we picked up from the experiences of colleagues elsewhere, be they via oral reports or written papers. Our approach is flexible; yet it also offers a structured containment for the patient, both by the treatment team and the parents. We aim, as much as possible, to let the family members carry out the treatment, providing them with the environment and the tools they need. Including the family members actively in the treatment of their ill daughter and teaching the parents how to help their child at home is the core of our philosophy, and we believe that this prevents prolonged inpatient stays or readmissions. This paper describes the different ways and settings in which we try to carry out our work.     

A longitudinal experimental study comparing the effectiveness of happiness-enhancing strategies in Anglo Americans and Asian Americans

Growing evidence suggests that well-being interventions can be effective. However, it is unclear whether happiness-increasing practices are equally effective for individuals from different cultural backgrounds. To investigate this question, Anglo Americans and predominantly foreign-born Asian Americans were randomly assigned to express optimism, convey gratitude, or list their past experiences (control group). Multilevel analyses indicated that participants in the optimism and gratitude conditions reported enhanced life satisfaction relative to those in the control condition. However, Anglo Americans in the treatment conditions demonstrated larger increases in life satisfaction relative to Asian Americans, while both cultural groups in the control condition showed the least improvement. These results are consistent with the idea that the value individualist cultures place on self-improvement and personal agency bolsters the efforts of Anglo Americans to become more satisfied, whereas collectivist cultures' de-emphasis of self-focus and individual goals interferes with the efforts of Asian Americans to pursue enhanced well-being.     

Truth-Tracking by Belief Revision

Studia Logica - We study the learning power of iterated belief revision methods. Successful learning is understood as convergence to correct, i.e., true, beliefs. We focus on the issue of...     

Maximizing versus satisficing: happiness is a matter of choice

Can people feel worse off as the options they face increase? The present studies suggest that some people--maximizers--can. Study 1 reported a Maximization Scale, which measures individual differences in desire to maximize. Seven samples revealed negative correlations between maximization and happiness, optimism, self-esteem, and life satisfaction, and positive correlations between maximization and depression, perfectionism, and regret. Study 2 found maximizers less satisfied than nonmaximizers (satisficers) with consumer decisions, and more likely to engage in social comparison. Study 3 found maximizers more adversely affected by upward social comparison. Study 4 found maximizers more sensitive to regret and less satisfied in an ultimatum bargaining game. The interaction between maximizing and choice is discussed in terms of regret, adaptation, and self-blame.     

Psycholinguistic evidence for the underspecification of morphosyntactic features

This paper investigates the paradigmatic relations between inflected word forms (or their affixes) and the feature specifications of these elements. In two sentence-matching experiments German speakers had to decide whether sentence pairs involving inflected adjectives or determiners were identical or not. In both experiments, there was a delay when an inflected form contained positive feature specifications for grammatical features that did not match the feature specifications of the grammatical context in which it appeared. No delay, however, occurred when an incorrectly inflected form had mismatching negative specifications, whereas its positively specified features matched the respective positive features of the context. This result provides evidence for a different status of positively and negatively specified morphosyntactic features. It supports the idea of radical underspecification according to which only positive feature specifications are part of the representations of morphologically complex forms or affixes, whereas negative feature specifications are assigned on the basis of paradigmatic contrasts.     

Right-left discrimination: effects of handedness and educational background

The present study investigated right left discrimination, with a paper-and-pen test with cartoon figures. The test consisted of line drawings of a person with no, one, or both arms crossing the vertical axis of the body in the figure. The subjects' task was to mark with a pencil, as fast as possible, which was the right or left hand in the figure. The line drawings were viewed from the back, from the front, or randomly alternating between the back and front views. Two studies were conducted. The first consisted of 393 adults: 153 males and 240 females; 338 right-handers and 55 left-handers. The results showed that the males performed better than the females. The left-handers and the right-handers performed equally well. However, the left-handed males performed better than the right-handed males. There was no difference in performance between the right-handed and the left-handed females. The second study consisted of 175 right-handed college students: 63 psychology students. 54 medical students, and 58 law students. The main finding was that the medical students performed better than the psychology students for all figure orientation subtests and for all arm positions. In comparison with the law students, the medical students performed at the same level on the back view subtest, but they performed better on the front view subtest and on two out of three arm positions on the alternating view subtest.     

The Psychological Dimension of Informed Consent: Dissonance Processes in Genetic Testing

This paper discusses the issue of the psychological dimension of informed consent. In this paper, the author proposes that informed consent is a continuous variable rather than a dichotomous one. When clients better understand their motives and actual, rather than just perceived degree of choice in pursuing a particular option in a medical setting, their level of informed consent is greater. Findings from existing literature in the field of genetic testing are examined in terms of dissonance theory. These findings suggest that testing candidates sometimes overestimate their coping skills and minimize the threat to psychological integrity that a particular genetic result may pose. Counseling directed towards realistic appraisal of degree of choice in pursuing testing is examined as an aspect of supporting informed consent and possibly reducing the potential for adverse psychological outcome in the longer term.