Semantic categorical flexibility and aging: effect of semantic relations on maintenance and switching

The authors studied the effects of aging on the flexible use of categorization rules based on thematic and taxonomic relations. Two components of flexibility were distinguished: maintenance of a categorical relation, and switching between two relations. Results showed that age affects these two components. In older adults, an effect of the nature of the categorical relations to be used was revealed. Older adults demonstrated a specific difficulty in the flexible use of taxonomic relations. Moreover, all adults, independent of their age, showed better performance in maintaining the use of a categorical relation than in switching between two categorical relations.     

From acting to communicating: The analysis of a boy with a pathological organization1

The author presents the analysis of an 8 year‐old boy prematurely born after a high‐risk pregnancy, then hospitalized for two weeks. He was never breastfed and presented vomiting, intense activity and inadequate behaviour as symptoms. His highly dysfunctional family is composed of a non‐productive father and a homely, though aggressive, mother. The patient displayed a rigid defensive structure with perverse aspects and a cruel superego. His constant interest in magical characters frequently disguises an avoidance of reality. By means of transference interpretations, a trustworthy link with the analyst now allows him his own mental space, where hidden psychotic states come to light. In the clinical material, this boy's skills for insight mingle with oscillations from severely defensive states to integration and vice versa. The analytic relationship in this often hostile scenario has become strong. The analysis is hampered by constant demands from family and school‐both expect the analyst to prevent his frequent acting out. Whereas some perverse polymorphism is part of childhood and may persist throughout life, it is likely that the patient's pathological organization may yield to reality and facilitate reparation, relinquishing the world of make‐believe as well as the intense projective mental functioning.     

A Categorical Equivalence for Stonean Residuated Lattices

We follow the ideas given by Chen and Grätzer to represent Stone algebras and adapt them for the case of Stonean residuated lattices. Given a Stonean residuated lattice, we consider the triple formed by its Boolean skeleton, its algebra of dense elements and a connecting map. We define a category whose objects are these triples and suitably defined morphisms, and prove that we have a categorical equivalence between this category and that of Stonean residuated lattices. We compare our results with other works and show some applications of the equivalence.

     

The Finality and Instrumentality of Value in a Way

Philosophia - Final value accrues to objects that are good for their own sakes, while instrumental value accrues to objects that are good for the sake of their effects. The following paper aims to...     

Procedural Fairness,the Economy,and Support for Political Authorities

A vast literature in social and organizational psychology suggests that support for authorities is driven both by the outcomes they deliver to people and by the extent to which they employ fair decision making processes. Furthermore, some of that literature describes a process‐outcome interaction, through which the effect of outcome favorability is reduced as process fairness increases. However, very few studies have been conducted to determine whether such interaction is also present in the explanation of support for political authorities. Here, we start by analyzing whether individual perceptions of the political system’s procedural fairness moderate the well‐known individual‐level relationship between perceived economic performance and government approval. Then, we explore the implications of such process‐outcome interaction to the phenomenon of “economic voting,” testing whether impartiality in governance moderates the effect of objective economic performance on aggregate incumbent parties’ support. In both cases, we show that the interaction between processes and outcomes seems to extend beyond the organizational contexts where it has been previously observed, with important implications for the study of political support.     

Les gestes en autoconfrontation croisée : enjeux et pratiques

This article aims to show how the relationship between gestures and speech can help understand mechanisms of activity's development. In situation of self-confrontation work analysis between two workers, we study more precisely the repetition of a sweep gesture made by one of the two professionals and repeated by the other one. We argue that this type of repetition highlights development of activities mechanisms. From two extracts from a cross self-confrontation, we analyze the coordination between speech and gestures. We finally show that mismatches between gestures and speech make possible to understand development of activity of these professionals in this particular context. As a conclusion, the hypothesis that this development may be one of the origins of the transformation of action in ordinary work situations is advanced.     

Manipulating social cues in baboon gesture learning: what does it tell us about the evolution of communication?

Animal Cognition - Reading the attentional state of an audience is crucial for effective intentional communication. This study investigates how individual learning experience affects subsequent...     

Parenting practices and adolescent social anxiety: A direct or indirect relationship?

Background/ObjectivesAccording to existing evidence, parental educational practices and social anxiety are to some degree connected. However, the possibility that this relationship is an indirect one and is mediated by individual factors such as self-esteem or emotional regulation has not yet been explored. The aim of this study was therefore to explore the relationship between maternal and paternal educational practices and social anxiety, and test both the direct and the indirect pathways. Method: The representative sample consisted of 2,060 Andalusian students (47.7% girls, M_age = 14.34) who filled in various self-reports. Results: The structural equation models confirmed that a direct relationship, with a low effect size, exists between parental educational practices and social anxiety and that there is also an indirect relationship, mediated by negative self-esteem and emotional suppression (the emotional regulation strategy), which accounted here for 49.1% of the variance in social anxiety. Conclusions: Parental education practices seem to act as a family asset which either promotes or hinders the development of basic attitudes and competencies such as self-esteem or emotional regulation and, by doing this, either encourages or prevents the emergence of problems such as social anxiety.