Talking about appearances: the roles of evaluation and experience in disagreement

Faultless disagreement and faultless retraction have been taken to motivate relativism for predicates of personal taste, like ‘tasty’. Less attention has been devoted to the question of what aspect of their meaning underlies this relativist behavior. This paper illustrates these same phenomena with a new category of expressions: appearance predicates, like ‘tastes vegan’ and ‘looks blue’. Appearance predicates and predicates of personal taste both fall into the broader category of experiential predicates. Approaching predicates of personal taste from this angle suggests that their relativist behavior is due to their experience-sensitivity, rather than their evaluative meaning. Furthermore, appearance predicates hold interest beyond what they can teach us about predicates of personal taste. Examination of a variety of uses of appearance predicates reveals that they give rise to relativist behavior for a variety of reasons—including some that apply also to other types of expressions, such as epistemic modals and comparative terms. This paper thus serves both to probe the source of relativist behavior in discourse about personal taste, as well as to map out this kind of behavior in the rich and under-explored discourse about appearances.

     

Stress Reactivity as a Pathway from Attentional Control Deficits in Everyday Life to Depressive Symptoms in Adolescent Girls

The goal of this research was to expand theoretical models of adolescent depression to determine whether individual differences in cognitive processing—specifically attentional control deficits—help to explain increased risk for depression during adolescence. We also examined whether this pathway was stronger in girls than in boys. A longitudinal design was used to examine whether poor attentional control in everyday life (i.e., difficulties shifting between ideas, tasks, and activities) contributes to depression over time by fostering higher levels of stress reactivity. Youth (298 boys, 338 girls) completed questionnaires assessing stress reactivity (6th and 7th grades) and depressive symptoms (6th, 7th and, 8th grades); teachers completed the shifting subscale of the Behavior Rating Scale of Executive Function (Gioia et al. 2000a) to assess attentional control (6th and 7th grades). Structural equation modeling analyses provided support for the predicted pathway in girls but not boys, yielding a significant indirect effect from 6th grade shifting deficits to 8th grade depressive symptoms via 7th grade stress reactivity. These results suggest that attentional control deficits in early adolescence heighten girls’ sensitivity to stress and consequent depressive symptoms, providing a critical direction for efforts to decrease adolescent girls’ risk for depression.     

Pathways From Depressive Symptoms to Low Social Status

This research examined two pathways through which depressive symptoms contribute to low social status (i.e., neglect and rejection) within the peer group over time: (a) depressive symptoms promote socially helpless behavior and consequent neglect by peers; and (b) depressive symptoms promote aggressive behavior and consequent rejection by peers. These pathways were investigated in independent samples of youth at two developmental stages: middle childhood (2nd–4th grade) and early adolescence (5th–7th grade). In both Study 1 (M age?=?7.97, SD?=?0.37; 338 girls, 298 boys) and Study 2 (M age?=?11.74, SD?=?0.68; 305 girls, 300 boys), youth and their teachers completed questionnaires at three waves. Multi-group comparison path analyses were conducted to examine sex differences in the models. Consistent with expectations, two pathways emerged through which depressive symptoms undermined subsequent social status. Support was not found for the reverse direction of effect nor for developmental or sex differences in the pathways with one exception: In early adolescence, neglect directly predicted depressive symptoms. These findings suggest specificity but also heterogeneity in the effects of depressive symptoms on social status, and identify behaviors that may be targeted for preventing the persistence of depression and its interpersonal consequences.     

Development of a career-enabler framework within a South African higher education institution

This study developed a preliminary career-enabler framework for use in a higher education setting. A quantitative survey was conducted with a sample of 1392 employees within a higher education institution in South Africa. Structural analysis was performed using exploratory factor analysis. The analysis yielded three enablers with acceptable psychometric properties, namely: self-transcendence, self-enhancement and self-conservation through work motives and needs. Interventions that focus on career-enablers within a higher education institution need to address these three factors.     

Airflow as a discriminative stimulus

In one experiment, pigeons were taught to discriminate airflow by having availability of reinforcement signalled by its presence and extinction signalled by its absence. After they reached criterion, some were trained on a discrimination reversal. Others were trained on an intradimensional discrimination with a low airflow velocity associated with reinforcement and a higher airflow velocity associated with extinction. All discriminations were learned rapidly, indicating that airflow velocity can function as a discriminative stimulus. In the second and third experiments, naive pigeons were trained to discriminate the presence of a compound stimulus (one of three tonal intensities paired with one of three airflow velocities) from its absence. These pigeons were subsequently given a component stimulus test during extinction on four stimulus values; the two training values, the tone alone, and the airflow alone. High or moderate velocity airflow controlled more responding than any of the three tone intensities. However, low velocity airflow controlled more responding only when a low intensity tone was employed.     

Evidence for the persistence of visual guidance information

An earlier study from our laboratory provided initial support for the hypothesis that information facilitating visual guidance persists in the absence of retinal stimulation. The present study supports and extends this hypothesis with three experiments in which visually occluded subjects positioned a point of light at the location of a previously viewed target and also walked in the direction of a previously viewed path. In both tasks, performance was possible following occlusion, and in all cases, performance slowly and significantly decreased with longer durations of occlusion. This decay in performance was gradual and had a “half-life” of greater than 15 sec. Absolute performance was correlated across tasks. The effect of occlusion on absolute error in the localization performance was relatively stable within individuals over a 3-week period. The biological utility of guidance information persistence is discussed along with implications for space constancy, illusions of motion, and problems of disorientation.     

Group Attachment and the Reduction of Value-Driven Ambivalence

This article analyzes the effects of value-driven ambivalence and group attachment on response variability in public attitudes toward campaign finance reform. The analysis demonstrates that group attachment, when activated by affective cues, moderates the effects of ambivalence on response variability. By tipping the balance of considerations in one direction or the other, group attachments make it easier for ambivalent respondents to make tradeoffs between competing values during policy choices and, as a result, dampen response variability. Methodologically, the results offer an important cautionary note about the use of linear ambivalence scales by calling into question the assumption that indifference is an intermediate state between preference and ambivalence.     

Perfectionism and Deficits in Cognitive Emotion Regulation

The current study investigated the general hypothesis that perfectionists have deficits in cognitive emotion regulation. A sample of 100 students completed the Perfectionism Cognitions Inventory, the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale, the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ), and a measure of depression. Correlational analyses revealed that frequent thoughts involving perfectionism were associated with maladaptive cognitive emotion regulation tendencies, including catastrophization, self-blame, rumination, and lack of positive reappraisal. Socially prescribed perfectionism was associated with the maladaptive cognitive emotion regulation strategies of self-blame, catastrophization, and rumination, and it was correlated negatively with the adaptive cognitive emotion regulation strategies of putting into perspective and positive reappraisal. Trait self-oriented perfectionism was linked with self-blame. As expected, higher levels of depression were associated with perfectionism cognitions, socially prescribed perfectionism and deficits in cognitive emotion regulation. Our findings suggest the need for interventions designed to bolster the cognitive coping skills of at-risk perfectionists. This research was supported by a major research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada. Gordon Flett was also supported by a Canada Research Chair in Personality and Health.     

Conceptions of Relationships in Children with Depressive and Aggressive Symptoms: Social-Cognitive Distortion or Reality?

This research tested skill-deficit and cognitive-distortion models of depression and aggression in 615 fifth- and sixth-grade children. Children completed a measure of their generalized conceptions of relationships in the peer domain and their level of depressive symptoms. Teachers completed measures of social competence, social status, and aggression. As anticipated, children with higher levels of depressive symptoms, either alone or in combination with aggression, demonstrated more negative conceptions of both self and peers than did nonsymptomatic children. Conceptions of relationships did not differentiate between aggressive and nonsymptomatic children. Children with depressive symptoms and children with aggressive symptoms displayed unique profiles of social competence deficits and problematic status in the peer group. Analysis of the accuracy of children's conceptions of relationships revealed support for both skill-deficit and cognitive-distortion models. Consistent with a skill-deficit model, children with depressive and depressive-aggressive symptoms were sensitive to actual differences in their social status. In contrast, aggressive children showed an insensitivity to social cues. Consistent with a cognitive-distortion model, children with depressive and depressive-aggressive symptoms had more negative conceptions than would be expected given their social status, whereas aggressive-unpopular children demonstrated a self-enhancement bias. These findings indicate the importance of integrated cognitive-interpersonal models of depression and aggression that incorporate multiple pathways among social-cognitive, interpersonal, and emotional functioning.