The Machines Take Over: A Comparison of Various Supervised Learning Approaches for Automated Scoring of Divergent Thinking Tasks

Traditionally, researchers employ human raters for scoring responses to creative thinking tasks. Apart from the associated costs this approach entails two potential risks. First, human raters can be subjective in their scoring behavior (inter-rater-variance). Second, individual raters are prone to inconsistent scoring patterns (intra-rater-variance). In light of these issues, we present an approach for automated scoring of Divergent Thinking (DT) Tasks. We implemented a pipeline aiming to generate accurate rating predictions for DT responses using text mining and machine learning methods. Based on two existing data sets from two different laboratories, we constructed several prediction models incorporating features representing meta information of the response or features engineered from the response’s word embeddings that were obtained using pre-trained GloVe and Word2Vec word vector spaces. Out of these features, word embeddings and features derived from them proved to be particularly effective. Overall, longer responses tended to achieve higher ratings as well as responses that were semantically distant from the stimulus object. In our comparison of three state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms, Random Forest and XGBoost tended to slightly outperform the Support Vector Regression.     

Hurt feelings and four letter words: Swearing alleviates the pain of social distress

Methods for alleviating physical pain are increasingly found to attenuate social pain. Recent evidence suggests that swearing may attenuate sensitivity to physical pain. This study examined whether swearing similarly attenuates two consequences of social distress: social pain and exclusion‐induced hyperalgesia. Sixty‐two people wrote about an autobiographical experience of exclusion or inclusion. Then they repeated a swear or neutral word for 2 minutes followed by measures of social and physical pain. Excluded non‐swearers reported feeling more social pain and greater sensitivity to physical pain compared with included non‐swearers. Excluded swearers reported less social pain than excluded non‐swearers and no heightened sensitivity to physical pain. The findings suggest that social and physical pain are functionally similar and that swearing attenuates social pain.     

A Motivational Model of Authoritarianism: Integrating Personal and Situational Determinants

We describe and test a collective security model of authoritarianism. This model sees Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) as directly caused by collective security motivation (CSM), which is in turn influenced jointly by personality (with its effects mediated through group identification and dangerous world beliefs) and social threat (with its effects mediated through dangerous world beliefs). Two studies tested this model using student samples—one was correlational ( N =  218), while the other included an experimental manipulation of threat using future scenarios ( N =  136). Structural equation analyses partially supported the model suggesting that CSM fully mediated the effects of threat and group identification on RWA, but only partially mediated the effect of personality, which also had important direct effects.     

Insular activity during passive viewing of aversive stimuli reflects individual differences in state negative affect

People differ with regard to how they perceive, experience, and express negative affect. While trait negative affect reflects a stable, sustained personality trait, state negative affect represents a stimulus limited and temporally acute emotion. So far, little is known about the neural systems mediating the relationship between negative affect and acute emotion processing. To address this issue we investigated in a healthy female sample how individual differences in state negative affect are reflected in changes in blood oxygen level-dependent responses during passive viewing of emotional stimuli. To assess autonomic arousal we simultaneously recorded changes in skin conductance level. At the psychophysiological level we found increased skin conductance level in response to aversive relative to neutral pictures. However, there was no association of state negative affect with skin conductance level. At the neural level we found that high state negative affect was associated with increased left insular activity during passive viewing of aversive stimuli. The insula has been implicated in interoceptive processes and in the integration of sensory, visceral, and affective information thus contributing to subjective emotional experience. Greater recruitment of the insula in response to aversive relative to neutral stimuli in subjects with high state negative affect may represent increased processing of salient aversive stimuli.     

On the nature and systematic role of evidence: Husserl as a proponent of mentalist evidentialism?

In this paper, I shall show that for Husserl, (a) evidence determines epistemic justification and (b) evidence is linked to originary givenness in the sense that one's ultimate evidence consists of one's originary presentive intuitions. This means that in contemporary analytic terminology, Husserl is a proponent of evidentialism and mentalism. Evidentialism and mentalism have been introduced into current debates by Earl Conee and Richard Feldman. Finally, I shall highlight that there is one significant difference between Husserl and Earl Conee and Richard Feldman. Although Conee and Feldman argue that the fundamental principles of epistemology are principles of best explanation, Husserl opts for phenomenological principles as the most fundamental epistemic principles. The main difference is that for Husserl, experiences gain their justificatory force by virtue of their phenomenal character, namely, their originary givenness.     

SSL: a theory of how people learn to select strategies

The assumption that people possess a repertoire of strategies to solve the inference problems they face has been raised repeatedly. However, a computational model specifying how people select strategies from their repertoire is still lacking. The proposed strategy selection learning (SSL) theory predicts a strategy selection process on the basis of reinforcement learning. The theory assumes that individuals develop subjective expectations for the strategies they have and select strategies proportional to their expectations, which are then updated on the basis of subsequent experience. The learning assumption was supported in 4 experimental studies. Participants substantially improved their inferences through feedback. In all 4 studies, the best-performing strategy from the participants' repertoires most accurately predicted the inferences after sufficient learning opportunities. When testing SSL against 3 models representing extensions of SSL and against an exemplar model assuming a memory-based inference process, the authors found that SSL predicted the inferences most accurately.     

Students' complex problem-solving abilities: Their structure and relations to reasoning ability and educational success

Complex Problem Solving (CPS) is considered to be a promising candidate for capturing higher order thinking skills that are emphasized in new educational curricula but are not adequately measured by traditional intelligence tests. However, little is known about its psychometric structure and its exact relation to intelligence and educational success—especially in student populations. This study is among the first to use a large and representative sample of secondary school students (N = 563) to examine different measurement models of CPS—that conceptualize the construct as either faceted or hierarchical—and their implications for the construct's validity. Results showed that no matter which way it was conceptualized, CPS was substantially related to reasoning and to different indicators of educational success. Controlling for reasoning within a joint hierarchical measurement model, however, revealed that the impressive external validity was largely attributable to the variance that CPS shares with reasoning, suggesting that CPS has only negligible incremental validity over and above traditional intelligence scales. On the basis of these results, the value of assessing CPS within the educational context is discussed.