My Child Is Better Than Average: The Extension and Restriction of Unrealistic Optimism1

The purpose of the current study was to determine whether parents make unrealistic evaluations of children and what factors predict these evaluations. Parents of 5‐ and 6‐year‐olds rated their child's risk for various positive and negative outcomes, temperament, and health and behavior problems. Parents also completed an adult attachment measure. Parents appeared to give relatively little consideration to realistic constraints when predicting their child's future. Parents scoring higher on attachment avoidance were less optimistic that their child would attain positive outcomes and avoid negative outcomes, consistent with the view that optimism is a motivated phenomenon. Greater child internalizing behaviors also were associated with less parental optimism for positive outcomes. Findings have implications for the delivery of health messages to parents.     

Narcissism Predicts Heightened Cortisol Reactivity to a Psychosocial Stressor in Men

Narcissists' sensitivity to social evaluation should increase their physiological reactivity to evaluative stressors. However, very few studies have assessed the physiological correlates of narcissism. In this study, participants completed an evaluative laboratory stressor or a non-evaluative control task. Cortisol reactivity-a marker of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis stress response-and negative affect (NA) were higher in the stress versus control condition. However, men showed larger cortisol responses and, among men, higher narcissism scores predicted greater cortisol reactivity and larger increases in NA. Narcissism was unrelated to cortisol reactivity and NA among women and in the control condition. These findings highlight the influence of defensive personality traits on HPA reactivity and suggest a pathway through which narcissistic traits might influence long-term health outcomes.     

The ‘Passes-For’ Fallacy and the Future of Critical Thinking

In this paper, I characterize Susan Haack’s so called “passes-for” fallacy, analyze both what makes this inference compelling and why it is illegitimate, and finally explain why reflecting on the passes-for fallacy—and others like it—should become part of critical thinking pedagogy for humanities students. The analysis proceeds by examining a case of the passes-for fallacy identified by Haack in the work of Ruth Bleier. A charitable reconstruction of Bleier’s reasoning shows that it is enlightening to regard the passes-for fallacy as an abuse of the application conditions of the concept of bias, rather than as an egregious case of Hasty Generalization.     

Introduction to the Special Issue: Toward an Explicit Technology for Generalizing Academic Behavior

This special issue of the Journal of Behavioral Education was designed to call attention to a much needed area of academic intervention research: generalization programming. Although the occurrence of generalized responding across items, settings, tasks, and time is clearly recognized as a goal of intervention, less research has been devoted to the technology through which such generalization may occur. This introductory article revisits the concept of generalization and the methods that may be used to facilitate generalization.