From Radical to Banal Evil: Hannah Arendt against the Justification of the Unjustifiable

Two central strands in Arendt's thought are the reflection on the evil of Auschwitz and the rethinking in terms of politics of Heidegger's critique of metaphysics. Given Heidegger's taciturnity regarding Auschwitz and Arendt's own taciturnity regarding the philosophical implications of Heidegger's political engagement in 1933, to set out how these strands interrelate is to examine the coherence of Arendt's thought and its potential for a critique of Heidegger. By refusing to countenance a theological conception of the evil of Auschwitz, Arendt consolidates the break with theology that Heidegger attempts through his analysis of the essential finitude of Dasein. In the light of Arendt's account of evil, it is possible to see the theological vestiges in Heidegger's ontology. Heidegger's resumption of the question concerning the categorical interconnections of the ways of Being entails an abandonment of finitude: he accommodates and tacitly justifies that which can have no human justification.     

The role of decision influence and team performance in member self-efficacy, withdrawal, satisfaction with the leader, and willingness to return

This study examines team performance as a moderator of the relationship between decision influence and outcomes relevant to team effectiveness in hierarchical teams with distributed ex pertise. In this type of team staff members have unique roles and make recommendations to the team leader, who ultimately makes the team's final decisions. It is suggested that the positive rela tionship between decision influence and favorable outcomes (e.g., satisfaction) consistently described in the literature is dependent on team performance in this type of team. Specifically, team effec tiveness outcomes are proposed to be consistently more favorable in higher performing than in lower performing teams. Decision influence is proposed to relate positively to member satisfaction with the leader, willingness to return, and self-efficacy and to relate negatively to withdrawal in higher performing teams. The opposite pattern of relationships is expected in lower performing teams. A laboratory study was conducted with 228 undergradu ates performing a computer task as subordinates in 76 four-person teams with a confederate leader. The results generally support the hypotheses and illustrate a dilemma for leaders attempting to manage team effectiveness.     

Parental Influence on Children during Educational Television Viewing in Immigrant Families

It has been suggested by researchers that educational television programmes may support the language and literacy development for children, especially those in immigrant families. In an immigrant family, many family characteristics appear to be related to educational television programme viewing of children at home, for example, parental acculturation (the process of adapting to the new culture) and parental mediation (supervision and guidance) of television viewing. In the present work, the parental influence on children during educational television viewing was studied quantitatively, based on a sample (n = 171) of immigrant families with children aged 3–6 years collected across the U.S. The results have revealed that significant differences existed between Asian and Hispanic groups in coviewing mediation and in their children's educational television viewing. Furthermore, language in parental acculturation significantly predicted instructive and restrictive parental mediation, and parental occupation significantly predicted language in parental acculturation. This study initiates the attention to the topic of educational television viewing in immigrant families, which warrants further investigations in the future as the Asian and Hispanic immigrant population increases rapidly in the U.S. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Emotion-cognition interaction in people at familial high risk for schizophrenia: the impact of sex differences

Cognitive deficits are fundamental to schizophrenia, and research suggests that negative emotion abnormally interferes with certain cognitive processes in those with the illness. To a lesser extent, cognitive impairment is found in persons at risk for schizophrenia, but there is limited research on the impact of emotion on cognitive processing in at-risk groups. It is unknown whether interference of negative emotion precedes illness and contributes to vulnerability for the disorder. We studied the extent to which negative emotional information interferes with working memory in 21 adolescent and young adult first-degree relatives of people with schizophrenia and 22 community controls. Groups were comparable in age, sex, education, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. Primary measures were n-back tasks varying in cognitive load (1-back, 2-back, 3-back) with emotional faces (neutral, happy, fearful) as stimuli. The control group's response times (RTs) and the women's RTs, regardless of group, differed depending on the emotion condition. In contrast, the RTs of the relatives and of the men, regardless of group, did not differ by emotion. This study is the first to examine emotion-cognition interactions in relatives of individuals with schizophrenia. Reduced efficiency in processing emotional information may contribute to a greater vulnerability for schizophrenia that may be heightened in men. Additional research with larger samples of men and women is needed to test these preliminary findings.     

The paradox of moral focus

When we evaluate moral agents, we consider many factors, including whether the agent acted freely, or under duress or coercion. In turn, moral evaluations have been shown to influence our (non-moral) evaluations of these same factors. For example, when we judge an agent to have acted immorally, we are subsequently more likely to judge the agent to have acted freely, not under force. Here, we investigate the cognitive signatures of this effect in interpersonal situations, in which one agent (“forcer”) forces another agent (“forcee”) to act either immorally or morally. The structure of this relationship allowed us to ask questions about both the “forcer” and the “forcee.” Paradoxically, participants judged that the “forcer” forced the “forcee” to act immorally (i.e. X forced Y), but that the “forcee” was not forced to act immorally (i.e. Y was not forced by X). This pattern obtained only for human agents who acted intentionally. Directly changing participants’ focus from one agent to another (forcer versus forcee) also changed the target of moral evaluation and therefore force attributions. The full pattern of judgments may provide a window into motivated moral reasoning and focusing bias more generally; participants may have been motivated to attribute greater force to the immoral forcer and greater freedom to the immoral forcee.     

Does audiovisual speech offer a fountain of youth for old ears? An event-related brain potential study of age differences in audiovisual speech perception

The current study addressed the question whether audiovisual (AV) speech can improve speech perception in older and younger adults in a noisy environment. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to investigate age-related differences in the processes underlying AV speech perception. Participants performed an object categorization task in three conditions, namely auditory-only (A), visual-only (V), and AVspeech. Both age groups revealed an equivalent behavioral AVspeech benefit over unisensory trials. ERP analyses revealed an amplitude reduction of the auditory P1 and N1 on AVspeech trials relative to the summed unisensory (A + V) response in both age groups. These amplitude reductions are interpreted as an indication of multisensory efficiency as fewer neural resources were recruited to achieve better performance. Of interest, the observed P1 amplitude reduction was larger in older adults. Younger and older adults also showed an earlier auditory N1 in AVspeech relative to A and A + V trials, an effect that was again greater in the older adults. The degree of multisensory latency shift was predicted by basic auditory functioning (i.e., higher hearing thresholds were associated with larger latency shifts) in both age groups. Together, the results show that AV speech processing is not only intact in older adults, but that the facilitation of neural responses occurs earlier in and to a greater extent than in younger adults. Thus, older adults appear to benefit more from additional visual speech cues than younger adults, possibly to compensate for more impoverished unisensory inputs because of sensory aging.     

The underestimation of egocentric distance: evidence from frontal matching tasks

There is controversy over the existence, nature, and cause of error in egocentric distance judgments. One proposal is that the systematic biases often found in explicit judgments of egocentric distance along the ground may be related to recently observed biases in the perceived declination of gaze (Durgin & Li, Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, in press), To measure perceived egocentric distance nonverbally, observers in a field were asked to position themselves so that their distance from one of two experimenters was equal to the frontal distance between the experimenters. Observers placed themselves too far away, consistent with egocentric distance underestimation. A similar experiment was conducted with vertical frontal extents. Both experiments were replicated in panoramic virtual reality. Perceived egocentric distance was quantitatively consistent with angular bias in perceived gaze declination (1.5 gain). Finally, an exocentric distance-matching task was contrasted with a variant of the egocentric matching task. The egocentric matching data approximate a constant compression of perceived egocentric distance with a power function exponent of nearly 1; exocentric matches had an exponent of about 0.67. The divergent pattern between egocentric and exocentric matches suggests that they depend on different visual cues.     

A cultural mismatch: Independent cultural norms produce greater increases in cortisol and more negative emotions among first-generation college students

American universities increasingly admit first-generation students—students whose parents do not have four-year degrees. Once admitted, these students experience greater challenges adjusting to universities compared to continuing-generation students—students who have at least one parent with a four-year degree. This additional adversity is typically explained in terms of first-generation students' relative lack of economic (e.g., money) or academic (e.g., preparation) resources. We propose that this adversity also stems from a cultural mismatch between the mostly middle-class, independent norms institutionalized in American universities and the relatively interdependent norms that first-generation students are socialized with in working-class contexts before college. As predicted, an experiment revealed that framing the university culture in terms of independent norms (cultural mismatch) led first-generation students to show greater increases in cortisol and less positive/more negative emotions than continuing-generation students while giving a speech. However, reframing the university culture to include interdependent norms (cultural match) eliminated this gap.     

Anticipation from biological motion: the goalkeeper problem

People can often anticipate the outcome of another person's actions based on visual information available in the movements of the other person's body. We investigated this problem by studying how goalkeepers anticipate the direction of a penalty kick in soccer. The specific aim was to determine whether the information used to anticipate kick direction is best characterized as local to a particular body segment or distributed across multiple segments. In Experiment 1, we recorded the movements of soccer players as they kicked balls into a net. Using a novel method for analyzing motion capture data, we identified sources of local and distributed information that were reliable indicators of kick direction. In Experiments 2 and 3, subjects were presented with animations of kickers' movements prior to foot-to-ball contact and instructed to judge kick direction. Judgments were consistent with the use of distributed information, with a possible small contribution of local information.