Conditional Reasoning and Emotional Experience: A Review of the Development of Counterfactual Thinking

What do human beings use conditional reasoning for? A psychological consequence of counterfactual conditional reasoning is emotional experience, in particular, regret and relief. Adults’ thoughts about what might have been influence their evaluations of reality. We discuss recent psychological experiments that chart the relationship between children’s ability to engage in conditional reasoning and their experience of counterfactual emotions. Relative to conditional reasoning, counterfactual emotions are late developing. This suggests that children need not only competence in conditional reasoning, but also to engage in this thinking spontaneously. Developments in domain general cognitive processing (the executive functions) allow children to develop from conditional reasoning to reasoning with counterfactual content and, eventually, to experiencing counterfactual emotions.     

Parallels Between Action‐Object Mapping and Word‐Object Mapping in Young Children

Across a series of four experiments with 3‐ to 4‐year‐olds we demonstrate how cognitive mechanisms supporting noun learning extend to the mapping of actions to objects. In Experiment 1 (n = 61) the demonstration of a novel action led children to select a novel, rather than a familiar object. In Experiment 2 (n = 78) children exhibited long‐term retention of novel action‐object mappings and extended these actions to other category members. In Experiment 3 (n = 60) we showed that children formed an accurate sensorimotor record of the novel action. In Experiment 4 (n = 54) we demonstrate limits on the types of actions mapped to novel objects. Overall these data suggest that certain aspects of noun mapping share common processing with action mapping and support a domain‐general account of word learning.     

Narratives of Choice amongst white Australians who undertake Surrogacy Arrangements in India

This paper reports on a rhetorical analysis of interviews with fifteen white Australian citizens who had undertaken offshore commercial surrogacy in India. Extending previous research, the findings suggest that genetic relatedness was valorized, and surrogacy constructed as a less tenuous route to family formation. The paper concludes with a discussion of the need for further research on 1) how the contentious nature of offshore commercial surrogacy may prevent full consideration of its ethical implications, 2) the differing belief systems between India and Australia in terms of children as alienable objects, and 3) ongoing consideration of how and when genetic-relatedness is made to matter.     

Executive Cognitive Function as a Correlate and Predictor of Child Food Intake and Physical Activity

Investigated were relations among executive cognitive function (ECF), food intake, and physical activity in 184, fourth grade children. It was hypothesized that self-reported ECF proficiency would predict greater self-reported fruit/vegetable intake and physical activity, but less “snack food” intake. Structural models demonstrated that ECF was significantly correlated with less concurrent snack food intake and greater concurrent fruit/vegetable intake, but not physical activity. Baseline ECF also significantly predicted greater fruit/vegetable intake and physical activity four months later, but not snack food intake. One implication is to promote ECF as a correlate and predictor of food intake and physical activity in children by providing opportunities for youth to practice newly developing ECF capacities.     

Sources of self-esteem: From theory to measurement and back again

According to some conceptions, self-esteem possesses a moral dimension; according to others, it does not. According to some, the realism of the self-evaluation matters; according to others, it does not. For some investigators, narcissism is just high self-esteem; for others, narcissism involves internal conflicts within one's self-evaluation, which is strongly dependent on admiration extracted from other people. The best known procedure for measuring self-esteem has been a 10 question survey introduced by Rosenberg in 1965. Along with other insensitivities and biases, the Rosenberg scale fails to respond to the different high-level values or “sources” that are constitutive of self-esteem for different individuals. A person's self-esteem can be contingent on internal sources (such as independent thinking, productive projects, and moral commitments), or on external sources (such as fame, wealth, physical appearance, or the approval of peers). A study reported here investigated the relationships among global explicit self-esteem (as assessed with the Rosenberg scale), reliance on internal sources of self-esteem (measured with the Self-Esteem Sentence Completion Instrument), reliance on several external sources (via the External Sources of Self-Esteem scale), and narcissistic tendencies (as per the Narcissistic Personality Inventory). The participants were 97 undergraduate college students enrolled in psychology courses. Rosenberg and NPI scores displayed different patterns of correlation with various subscales of the ESOSES, raising the prospect that profiles of various external sources will enable us to differentiate between self-esteem and narcissism. Meanwhile, scores on the SESCI were not significantly related to any other variable, except for a mild negative correlation with the success recognition subscale of the ESOSES—an outcome that raises both theoretical and measurement questions about internal sources. Contrary to frequent assumptions of direct rivalry, reliance on internal sources of self-esteem may be largely independent of reliance on external sources. At the same time, however, more work obviously needs to be done on measuring internal sources of self-esteem, both explicit and implicit.     

IMPRESSIONS OF MOTHERS AND FATHERS ON THE PERIPHERY OF CHILD CARE

This study was designed to assess impressions of employed mothers and fathers who do not provide the primary child care in their familial context. Participants read a story about an employed mother or father who demonstrated very little direct involvement in the care of his or her child. As hypothesized, impressions of a mother who did not play a central role in caregiving were more affected by whether or not she had a clear situational reason for not providing care (i.e., she was out of town) than impressions of a father. These findings imply continuing differences in child care expectations for mothers and fathers.     

Immediate memory consequences of the effect of emotion on attention to pictures

Emotionally arousing stimuli are at once both highly attention grabbing and memorable. We examined whether emotional enhancement of memory (EEM) reflects an indirect effect of emotion on memory, mediated by enhanced attention to emotional items during encoding. We tested a critical prediction of the mediation hypothesis-that regions conjointly activated by emotion and attention would correlate with subsequent EEM. Participants were scanned with fMRI while they watched emotional or neutral pictures under instructions to attend to them a lot or a little, and were then given an immediate recognition test. A region in the left fusiform gyrus was activated by emotion, voluntary attention, and subsequent EEM. A functional network, different for each attention condition, connected this region and the amygdala, which was associated with emotion and EEM, but not with voluntary attention. These findings support an indirect cortical mediation account of immediate EEM that may complement a direct modulation model.     

Predictors of Anxiety and Depression in Emerging Adulthood

This study constructed a multifactorial model predicting depression and anxiety symptoms among emerging adults, incorporating broad constructs representing adult attachment style, perceived trauma, self-esteem, and irrational beliefs. In the final structural equation model, attachment avoidance and perceived trauma demonstrated direct and indirect effects, whereas attachment anxiety predicted depression only indirectly through low self-esteem or irrational beliefs, and chronic anxiety. Chronic anxiety played a crucial role in linking low self-esteem and irrational beliefs to depression. The theoretical and clinical implications of the findings are discussed.     

Two problems of easy credit

This paper defends the theory that knowledge is credit-worthy true belief against a family of objections, two instances of which were leveled against it in a recent paper by Jennifer Lackey. Lackey argues that both innate knowledge (if there is any) and testimonial knowledge are too easily come by for it to be plausible that the knower deserves credit for it. If this is correct, then knowledge would appear not to be a matter of credit for true belief. I will attempt to neutralize these objections by drawing a distinction between credit as praiseworthiness and credit as attributability.