The Life Attitudes Schedule Short Form: An Abbreviated Measure of Life-Enhancing and Life-Threatening Behaviors in Adolescents

An abbreviated version of the Life Attitudes Schedule (LAS) was developed, consisting of 24 items, each representing one cell of the original LAS theoretical matrix (4 content categories × 2 behavior types × 2 valence). Items were retained on the basis of high correlations with LAS total score and low correlations with gender. Psychometric properties of the LAS Short Form were robust and the Short Form total score correlated .93 with the original LAS total score. As with the original LAS, boys reported more injury-related behaviors than girls. Future research and clinical directions are suggested.     

Closed Structure

Journal of Philosophical Logic - According to the structured theory of propositions, if two sentences express the same proposition, then they have the same syntactic structure, with corresponding...     

“This one’s on me!”: Differential well-being effects of self-centered and recipient-centered motives for spending money on others

Motivation and Emotion - Past research reliably shows that spending money on others (termed prosocial spending) makes people happier than spending money on oneself. The present research tested...     

Doxing Racists

The Journal of Value Inquiry -     

Reply to critics

Philosophical Studies - I reply to commentaries by Justin Bruner, Robert Sugden and Gerald Gaus. My response to Bruner focuses on conventions of bargaining problems and arguments for characterizing...     

A Parsons Tale: Tractarian Reflections on a Semantical Paradox

According to Charles Parsons, a liar sentence does not express a proposition at the level of its primary use but does at the level where it is subjected to semantic interpretation. Thus, richer ontological resources unavailable at the level of primary use are available at the level of interpretation. In response to the objection that the correct semantic interpretation of a liar sentence is thereby distorted, I explain how Wittgenstein’s repudiation of “logical objects” and the Tractarian notion of an intrinsically iterative operation show that the liar sentence’s primary use anticipates but does not presuppose the richer interpretive ontology.     

Adults' difficulties in identifying concealment among children interviewed with the putative confession instructions

The putative confession (PC) instructions (“[suspect] told me everything that happened and wants you to tell the truth”) increases children's honesty. However, research has shown that children who maintain secrecy despite the PC are more convincing. We examined whether (a) the PC undermines adults' deception detection abilities or (b) children who conceal despite the PC are better deceivers. Adults evaluated truthful and deceptive children interviewed with the PC where the PC portion of the interview was either present or absent. Adults' deception detection was no worse when the PC was present; in fact, it was slightly better. Rather than negatively affecting adults' ability to detect deception, the PC selects an unusually convincing group of concealers.