Observational Context of Mother-Child Interaction: Impact of a stress Context on Emotional Availability

Previous studies have found that a stressful observational context challenges the mother-child relationship, thus highlighting negative interactive behavior. However, the impact of observational context has only been investigated in infants and preschoolers without specifically using the Emotional Availability Scales. Nor have they explored whether the association of mother-child interaction with children’s emotional or behavioral problems depends on the observational context. We observed 140 mothers and their five to 12-year-old children in non-stressful free play and in a stressful task context. In general, dyads showed higher emotional availability in the task context compared to the free play. Specifically, mothers showed higher levels of Sensitivity, Structuring and Nonhostility, but lower levels of Nonintrusiveness during the task compared to the free play context; children showed higher levels of Responsiveness during the task than during free play. After controlling for dyadic stress, contextual effects decreased for all dimensions of emotional availability. The association of mother-child interaction with child problem behavior depended on the observational context. Specifically, we found maternal emotional availability during free play to be more strongly associated with child problem behavior than during the stressful task; however, emotional availability of the child was more strongly associated with problem behavior when obtained during the task. We conclude that context impacts on mother-child interactive behavior and also on the association of mother-child-interaction and child behavior. Stress is a relevant contextual factor influencing mother-child interactive behavior.     

What Was the Syntax‐Semantics Debate in the Philosophy of Science About?

The debate between critics of syntactic and semantic approaches to the formalization of scientific theories has been going on for over 50 years. I structure the debate in light of a recent exchange between Hans Halvorson, Clark Glymour, and Bas van Fraassen and argue that the only remaining disagreement concerns the alleged difference in the dependence of syntactic and semantic approaches on languages of predicate logic. This difference turns out to be illusory.     

Why are conservatives happier than liberals? Comparing different explanations based on system justification,multiple group membership,and positive adjustment

This study examined the relation between conservatism and life satisfaction. Analyses based on data from a representative German survey (ALLBUS 2010) revealed a positive relation between conservatism and self‐reported life satisfaction, thus supporting prior claims of this link. Different accounts have been proposed for this relationship, suggesting system justification, positive adjustment, or multiple group membership as potential mediators. Going beyond prior research, this study allowed for a comparison between these different mechanisms. Analyses revealed that system justification and one of the three examined constructs related to positive adjustment (i.e., religiosity) were significant mediators of the positive relationship between political conservatism and life satisfaction. Comparable results were obtained after controlling for a number of sociodemographic variables. The present findings indicate (i) that conservatives report to be more satisfied with their lives than liberals and (ii) that this difference is in part due to conservatives' system justification and religiosity.     

More than words (and faces): evidence for a Stroop effect of prosody in emotion word processing

Humans typically combine linguistic and nonlinguistic information to comprehend emotions. We adopted an emotion identification Stroop task to investigate how different channels interact in emotion communication. In experiment 1, synonyms of “happy” and “sad” were spoken with happy and sad prosody. Participants had more difficulty ignoring prosody than ignoring verbal content. In experiment 2, synonyms of “happy” and “sad” were spoken with happy and sad prosody, while happy or sad faces were displayed. Accuracy was lower when two channels expressed an emotion that was incongruent with the channel participants had to focus on, compared with the cross-channel congruence condition. When participants were required to focus on verbal content, accuracy was significantly lower also when prosody was incongruent with verbal content and face. This suggests that prosody biases emotional verbal content processing, even when conflicting with verbal content and face simultaneously. Implications for multimodal communication and language evolution studies are discussed.     

Contraction in Interrogative Belief Revision

In the paper “On the role of the research agenda in epistemic change”, Olsson and Westlund have suggested that the notion of epistemic state employed in the standard framework of belief revision (Alchourrón et al. 1985; G?rdenfors 1988) should be extended to include a representation of the agent’s research agenda (Olsson and Westlund 2006). The resulting framework will here be referred to as interrogative belief revision. In this paper, I attempt to deal with the problem of how research agendas should change in contraction, a problem largely left open by Olsson and Westlund. Two desiderata of an appropriate solution are suggested: one is a principle of continuity, stating that changes in the research agenda should somehow reflect that certain long term research interests are kept fixed. The other desideratum, which is based on part of Olsson and Westlund’s motivation for adding research agendas to the epistemic states, is that we should be able to account for how contraction may serve to open up new, fruitful hypotheses for investigation. In order to achieve these desiderata, I base my solution on a revised version of Olsson and Westlund’s notion of epistemic state.     

Auditory space perception in left- and right-handers

Several studies have shown that handedness has an impact on visual spatial abilities. Here we investigated the effect of laterality on auditory space perception. Participants (33 right-handers, 20 left-handers) completed two tasks of sound localization. In a dark, anechoic, and sound-proof room, sound stimuli (broadband noise) were presented via 21 loudspeakers mounted horizontally (from 80° on the left to 80° on the right). Participants had to localize the target either by using a swivel hand-pointer or by head-pointing. Individual lateral preferences of eye, ear, hand, and foot were obtained using a questionnaire. With both pointing methods, participants showed a bias in sound localization that was to the side contralateral to the preferred hand, an effect that was unrelated to their overall precision. This partially parallels findings in the visual modality as left-handers typically have a more rightward bias in visual line bisection compared with right-handers. Despite the differences in neural processing of auditory and visual spatial information these findings show similar effects of lateral preference on auditory and visual spatial perception. This suggests that supramodal neural processes are involved in the mechanisms generating laterality in space perception.     

Sex differences in parking are affected by biological and social factors

The stereotype of women’s limited parking skills is deeply anchored in modern culture. Although laboratory tests prove men’s average superiority in visuospatial tasks and parking requires complex, spatial skills, underlying mechanisms remain unexplored. Here, we investigated performance of beginners (nine women, eight men) and more experienced drivers (21 women, 27 men) at different parking manoeuvres. Furthermore, subjects conducted the mental rotation test and self-assessed their parking skills. We show that men park more accurately and especially faster than women. Performance is related to mental rotation skills and self-assessment in beginners, but only to self-assessment in more experienced drivers. We assume that, due to differential feedback, self-assessment incrementally replaces the controlling influence of mental rotation, as parking is trained with increasing experience. Results suggest that sex differences in spatial cognition persist in real-life situations, but that socio-psychological factors modulate the biological causes of sex differences.     

Parents' education and children's achievement: The role of personality

The reasons for the positive association between families' background variables, such as parents' education, and children's academic achievement have not fully been clarified yet. The present study investigates children's intelligence and personality as potential mediators. A sample of 580 German high school students (mean age: M = 17.0; SD = 0.7) indicated the highest education of their parents and completed measures assessing their own personality and intelligence. Children's academic achievement was operationalized by grade point average. Children's intelligence, openness to experience and, marginally, conscientiousness partially mediated the association between parents' education and children's academic achievement. Even after controlling for children's intelligence, the mediating effects of those personality traits held. Results are discussed with regard to potential underlying processes. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mission: Impossible? On Empirical-Normative Collaboration in Ethical Reasoning

During the 1980s, empirical social sciences and normative theory seemingly converged within ethical debates. This tendency kindled new debates about the limits and possibilities of empirical-normative collaboration. The article asks for adequate ways of collaboration by taking a closer look at the philosophy of science of empirical social sciences as well as normative theory development and its logical groundings. As a result, three possible modes of cooperation are characterized: first, the empirical assessment of conditions that actually necessitate the translation of normatively derived basic principles into practice rules; second, the empirical assessment of conditions for application of a moral norm which are formulated by bridging principles; third, the empirical assessment of social practice which allows (a) to measure whether adopted norms actually are implemented in practice or not and (b) to encounter new moral problems which are in need of ethical guidance. Finally, the article defends a symbiotic position in Weaver’s and Trevino's triad of possible approaches to empirical-normative collaboration in ethics.     

The complexity of satisfiability for fragments of hybrid logic—Part I

The satisfiability problem of hybrid logics with the downarrow binder is known to be undecidable. This initiated a research program on decidable and tractable fragments.In this paper, we investigate the effect of restricting the propositional part of the language on decidability and on the complexity of the satisfiability problem over arbitrary, transitive, total frames, and frames based on equivalence relations. We also consider different sets of modal and hybrid operators. We trace the border of decidability and give the precise complexity of most fragments, in particular for all fragments including negation. For the monotone fragments, we are able to distinguish the easy from the hard cases, depending on the allowed set of operators.