The link between school climate and violence in school: A meta-analytic review

There has been significant interest in whether and how school climate and violent behavior are meaningfully related. The present meta-analysis reviewed studies reporting a relationship between school climate and school violence in order to summarize the total effect and the direction of these research findings. Database consultation and literature hand searching yielded 145 articles which were reviewed by two experts. Studies were included if they reported a statistical effect size of the relationship between school climate and school violence. Exclusion criteria were unclear operationalization of the principal variables, research findings from multiple publications, studies using multi-level analysis and qualitative studies. The meta-analysis included 36 independent studies (N = 113,778) with correlations ranging from ? .02 to ? .53. Using a random-effects model a moderate mean effect size of r = ? .26, CI [? 30, ? 21] was found. Statistical findings indicated significant heterogeneity and a large range of variance between studies. Meta-regressions analyzed different potential moderators as relevant factors of heterogeneity, but none of these factors could be identified as a moderator. Due to the large variance between the studies, it remains difficult to draw final conclusions. Nevertheless, the moderate effect size underlines the role of environmental aspects for school violence intervention.     

Children's racial bias in perceptions of others' pain

Previous research indicates that American adults, both Black and White, assume a priori that Black people feel less pain than do White people (Trawalter, Hoffman, & Waytz, 2012, PLoS One, 7 [11], 1–8). The present work investigates when in development this bias emerges. Five‐, 7‐, and 10‐year‐olds first rated the amount of pain they themselves would feel in 10 situations such as biting their tongue or hitting their head. They then rated the amount of pain they believed two other children – a Black child and a White child, matched to the child's gender – would feel in response to the same events. We found that by age 7, children show a weak racial bias and that by age 10, they show a strong and reliable racial bias. Consistent with research on adults, this bias was not moderated by race‐related attitudes or interracial contact. This finding is important because knowing the age of emergence can inform the timing of interventions to prevent this bias.     

Improving comprehension of jury instructions with audio‐visual presentation

This study examined whether mock‐jurors' comprehension of judicial self‐defence instructions improved when an audio‐visual instructional format involving computer animations and a flow chart was used. In a mock‐juror paradigm, 90 law students (experts) and 90 legally untrained adults (novices) were randomly allocated to one of three instructional conditions (audio, audio‐elaborated, audio‐visual). Dependent measures of self‐defence comprehension included verdict delivery, multiple‐choice (recognition), paraphrasing (recall) and novel scenarios (transfer). Law students performed better on self‐defence comprehension tests than novices in the audio‐only conditions. The audio‐visual format significantly enhanced novices' comprehension, with their comprehension scores matching those of law students. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Defending Exclusivity

‘Exclusivity’ is the claim that when deliberating about whether to believe that p one can only be consciously motivated to reach one's conclusion by considerations one takes to pertain to the truth of p. The pragmatist tradition has long offered inspiration to those who doubt this claim. Recently, a neo‐pragmatist movement (Carl Ginet ( 2001 ), Keith Frankish ( 2007 ), and Conor McHugh ( 2012b )) has given rise to a serious challenge to exclusivity. In this article, I defend exclusivity in the face of this challenge. First, I dispute a crucial assumption underlying the challenge, namely, that one can have evidence sufficient to enable but not compel belief. Secondly, I examine several cases that McHugh in particular offers to call exclusivity into question and argue on independent grounds that these cases do not threaten exclusivity. Whether or not exclusivity holds, in addition to being of intrinsic interest, has a decisive consequence for the contemporary debate over Bernard Williams’ ( 1973 ) claim that “beliefs aim at truth”. If exclusivity is true, as David Owens ( 2003 ) has argued, the deliberator cannot be said to literally aim at truth. So, in defending exclusivity, I thereby show that the notion of ‘aiming’ fails to illuminate the nature of belief.     

The Objectivity of Ordinary Life

Metaethics tends to take for granted a bare Democritean world of atoms and the void, and then worry about how the human world that we all know can possibly be related to it or justified in its terms. I draw on Wittgenstein to show how completely upside-down this picture is, and make some moves towards turning it the right way up again. There may be a use for something like the bare-Democritean model in some of the sciences, but the picture has no standing as the basic objective truth about the world; if anything has that standing, it is ordinary life. I conclude with some thoughts about how the notion of bare, “thin” perception of non-evaluative reality feeds a number of philosophical pathologies, such as behaviourism, and show how a “thicker”, more value-laden, understanding of our perceptions of the world can be therapeutic against them.     

Pre‐frontal‐insular‐cerebellar modifications correlate with disgust feeling blunting after subthalamic stimulation: A positron emission tomography study in Parkinson's disease

Subthalamic nucleus (STN) deep brain stimulation (DBS) has recently advanced our understanding of the major role played by this basal ganglion in human emotion. Research indicates that STN DBS can induce modifications in all components of emotion, and neuroimaging studies have shown that the metabolic modifications correlated with these emotional disturbances following surgery are both task‐ and sensory input‐dependent. Nevertheless, to date, these modifications have not been confirmed for all emotional components, notably subjective emotional experience, or feelings. To identify the neural network underlying the modification of feelings following STN DBS, we assessed 16 patients with Parkinson's disease before and after surgery, using both subjective assessments of emotional experience and ¹⁸[F]fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (¹⁸FDG‐PET). The patients viewed six film excerpts intended to elicit happy, angry, fearful, sad, disgusted, and neutral feelings, and they self‐rated the intensity of these feelings. After DBS, there was a significant reduction in the intensity of the disgust feeling. Correlations were observed between decreased disgust experience and cerebral glucose metabolism (FDG uptake) in the bilateral pre‐frontal cortices (orbitofrontal, dorsolateral, and inferior frontal gyri), bilateral insula, and right cerebellum. We suggest that the STN contributes to the synchronization process underlying the emergence of feelings.     

Cognitive and emotional processes during dreaming: a neuroimaging view

Dream is a state of consciousness characterized by internally-generated sensory, cognitive and emotional experiences occurring during sleep. Dream reports tend to be particularly abundant, with complex, emotional, and perceptually vivid experiences after awakenings from rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. This is why our current knowledge of the cerebral correlates of dreaming, mainly derives from studies of REM sleep. Neuroimaging results show that REM sleep is characterized by a specific pattern of regional brain activity. We demonstrate that this heterogeneous distribution of brain activity during sleep explains many typical features in dreams. Reciprocally, specific dream characteristics suggest the activation of selective brain regions during sleep. Such an integration of neuroimaging data of human sleep, mental imagery, and the content of dreams is critical for current models of dreaming; it also provides neurobiological support for an implication of sleep and dreaming in some important functions such as emotional regulation.     

Bidirectional lexical-gustatory synesthesia

In developmental lexical–gustatory synesthesia, specific words (inducers) can trigger taste perceptions (concurrents) and these synesthetic associations are generally stable. We describe a case of multilingual lexical–gustatory synesthesia for whom some synesthesias were bidirectional as some tastes also triggered auditory word associations. Evoked concurrents could be gustatory but also tactile sensations. In addition to words and pseudowords, many voices were effective inducers, suggesting increased connections between cortical taste areas and both voice-selective and language-selective areas. Lasting changes in some evoked tastes occurred during childhood suggesting that some plasticity can be present after the initial learning of associations. Inducers were often linked to taste concurrents phonologically or semantically, but also through identifiable childhood episodes (persons or events). Several inducers were phonologically linked to episodic inducers suggesting a process of secondary acquisition for many inducers. Implications of these observations are discussed.     

Exploration of perceptual and motor inhibition in children with traumatic brain injury

Perceptual and motor inhibition were examined using conflict resolution tasks for 12 children with traumatic brain injury and 24 matched controls. Direct comparisons of inhibition performances between the two groups showed a specific and disproportionate impairment of motor inhibition (compared with perceptual inhibition) for the children with traumatic brain injury, which suggests that inhibition processes might be differentially impaired in children after traumatic brain injury.     

Regulatory focus and executive function after interracial interactions

Recent research finds that interracial interactions can negatively impact executive function. The present study examined whether regulatory focus may moderate this effect. Specifically, prior to an interracial interaction, 45 White female students were told either to try to have a positive interracial exchange (promotion focus), avoid prejudice (prevention focus), or given no instruction (control). After the interaction, participants completed the Stroop color-naming task, which assessed executive attentional task performance. Results revealed that participants in the prevention and the no instruction, control conditions performed worse on the Stroop than participants in the promotion condition. The findings suggest that promoting positive contact through active engagement rather than prejudice avoidance attenuates the previously documented negative effects of interracial contact on cognitive functioning.