Touching my face with my supernumerary hand: a cheeky illusion

A self-touch paradigm elicits a surprising illusion. With the participant's eyes closed, the examiner guides the participant's right index finger to administer strokes and taps to the right side of the participant's face. At the same time, the examiner strokes and taps the corresponding location on the left side of the participant's face. Although the participant administered touch to only the right side of the face, this paradigm elicited the illusion of self-touch to both sides of the face, and the illusion often implicated a third, disconnected or disembodied, hand. We propose an explanation, and draw parallels with the phenomenon of supernumerary phantom limb.     

Low-income mothers' patterns of partnership instability and adolescents' socioemotional well-being

The present study investigated the association of family structure and maternal partnership instability patterns with adolescents' behavioral and emotional well-being among urban low-income families. Analyses employed data from the Three-City Study to track maternal partnerships over the youth's life span, linking longitudinal family structure and transition patterns to adolescent well-being (N = 2305). Families were classified into nine mutually exclusive longitudinal partnership groups based on current status at wave 3 (single, married, or cohabiting) and the longevity of that status: always (since adolescent's birth with no transitions), stable (lasting two years or more, preceded by transitions), or new (transpiring in the past 2 years). Adolescents in the always married group displayed less delinquency and externalizing problems, according to both youth and mother reports, than peers in always single-parent or newly married households. In contrast, youth in always cohabiting households had higher maternal ratings of internalizing problems and youth with newly cohabiting mothers reported higher psychological distress than peers in similar stability groups with single or married mothers. Overall, several potential explanatory processes for the family structure and stability patterns surfaced: married parent families reported less economic hardship, more family routines and father involvement, and less maternal psychological distress and parenting stress than their single and cohabiting counterparts. Policy implications of these findings are discussed.     

Learning From Fantasy and Real Characters in Preschool and Kindergarten

In three experiments, 3½- to 6-year-old children were presented with analogical problems in which the protagonists were either real people or fantasy characters. Children were more likely to transfer solutions from the stories about real people rather than the stories about fantasy characters. These results suggest that the use of a fantasy character might not be an effective strategy for teaching children information that is meant to be applied to the real world.     

Insomniacs' perceived lack of control over sleep

Abstract

It is widely assumed that insomniacs have poor self-efficacy for sleep and it is known that successful treatment is usually accompanied by improved self-efficacy. However, there has been little detailed investigation of insomniacs perceived lack of control over sleep. Insomniacs' perceived control over sleep itself is affected more than their perceived control over pre-sleep mental activity or physical tension. It was hypothesised that insomniacs would diverge from controls more in their sense that sleep was out of their control than that sleep was under their control, though this was not supported by the data. Also, there was no clear support for the idea that insomniacs' dissatisfaction with their control over sleep was the product of excessive aspirations for control. One factor that seems likely to contribute to insomniacs' lack of perceived control over sleep is that they do not have as lawful a pattern of expectations of sleep, based on their recent pattern of sleep, as normal sleepers do. Insomniacs, like non-insomniacs, were most likely to attribute poor sleep to external stresses and an over-active mind. Insomniacs showed a wide range of heightened emotional reactions to poor sleep. The implications of the results for self-regulation approaches to the treatment of insomnia are discussed.     

Adult age differences in interference from a prospective-memory task: a diffusion model analysis

People often slow down their ongoing activities when they must remember an intended action, known as the cost or interference effect of prospective memory (PM). Only a few studies have examined adult age differences in PM interference, and the specific reasons underlying such differences are not well understood. The authors used a model-based approach to reveal processes underlying PM interference and age differences in these processes. Older and younger adults first performed a block of an ongoing lexical decision task alone. An embedded event-based PM task was added in a second block. Simultaneously accounting for the changes in response time distributions and error rates induced by the PM task, Ratcliff’s (Psychological Review 85:59–108, 1978) diffusion model was used to decompose the nonlinear combination of speed and accuracy into psychologically meaningful components. Remembering an intention not only reduced processing efficiency in both age groups, but also prolonged peripheral nondecision times and induced response cautiousness. Overall, the findings suggest that there are multiple, but qualitatively similar factors underlying PM task interference in both age groups.     

The trouble with halos: Invited commentary on Kim,S., & Harris,P. L. (2014). Children prefer to learn from mind‐readers. British Journal of Developmental Psychology

This commentary on Kim and Harris (2014) addresses the authors’ interpretation of the halo effect, in which 5‐ to 6‐year‐old children preferentially agreed with an informant who could read other people's minds, regardless of domain of knowledge.     

Correspondence in parents' and children's concepts of god: Investigating the role of parental values,religious practices and executive functioning

This study examined the extent to which children's concepts of God correspond with their parents' concepts of God. It also examined how parent-context factors and children's executive functioning relate to parent–child conceptual similarity. Parent–child dyads from varied religious and racial backgrounds participated. Dyads had the greatest conceptual similarity concerning God's mind-dependent functions. Though correspondence between parents and children was lowest concerning God's body-dependent functions, dyads were more similar about those functions when parents engaged in more frequent religious practices with their child and thought God was important. Children's concepts of God were unrelated to religious practices, and parent–child conceptual similarity was unrelated to children's age and executive functioning. Simply put, variation among parents' anthropomorphic concepts of God drove variation in parent–child conceptual similarity. Overall, these findings suggest that embodied concepts of God may be most sensitive to cultural input and that socialization practices provide greater insight into parents' anthropomorphic concepts.     

The Philosophical Personality

The authors adopt a critico‐sociological methodology to investigate the current state of the philosophical profession. According to them, the question concerning the status of philosophy (“What is philosophy?”) cannot be answered from within the precinct of philosophical reason alone, since philosophy—understood primarily as a profession—is marked by a constitutive type of self‐ignorance that prevents it from reflecting upon its own sociological conditions of actuality. This ignorance, which is both cause and effect of the organization and investment of philosophical desire, causes philosophers to lose themselves in an ideological myth (“the philosopher as idea(l)”) according to which philosophers are unaffected by the material conditions in which they exist. This myth prevents philosophers from noticing the extent to which their activity is influenced by extra‐philosophical determinants that shape, empirically, who becomes a professional philosopher (“the philosopher as imago”) and who doesn't. This article explores the relationship between philosophy's “idea(l)” and its “imago” as a way of shedding light on some of the mechanisms that make philosophy inhospitable for so many women, people of color, and economic minorities.     

Personal Autonomy,Social Identity,and Oppressive Social Contexts

Attempts to articulate the ways in which membership in socially subordinated social identities can impede one's autonomy have largely unfolded as part of the debate between different types of internalist theories in relation to the problem of internalized oppression. The different internalist positions, however, employ a damage model for understanding the role of social subordination in limiting autonomy. I argue that we need an externalist condition in order to capture the ways in which membership in a socially subordinated identity can constrain one's autonomy, even if one is undamaged in one's autonomy competencies and self‐reflexive attitudes. I argue that living among those practically empowered to harass, to engage in racial profiling, and to treat as expendable is incompatible with a freedom‐condition required for unconstrained global self‐determination.