Melancholy and happiness

This paper explores an under-theorised phenomenon – the experience of melancholy as an enhancer of happiness. Drawing from philosophy and literature, I define melancholy as an experience that combines the pleasure of feeling sad with sober self-reflection. Despite expectations to the contrary, two potentially positive outcomes of melancholy are identified – insightful pensiveness, and emotional connectedness with loss and pain. These outcomes can enhance happiness as understood in key texts of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy, and, consistent with findings in psychology, also have important implications for wider debates in social policy and welfare practice. First, the pensiveness associated with melancholy can make unique contributions to personal insights, and help develop and fulfill ‘authentic happiness’ and ‘informed desires’. These contributions oppose hedonist accounts of happiness, but are conducive to enhancing happiness properly understood. Second, melancholy can also provide a psychologically safe arena for experiencing loss and pain, where a person can more positively accept the limits of the human condition. This acceptance enhances her happiness, as she is better able to live ‘in the moment’ and so derive satisfaction from her presently-orientated activities and commitments.     

Quantitative Standards for Absolute Linguistic Universals

Absolute linguistic universals are often justified by cross‐linguistic analysis: If all observed languages exhibit a property, the property is taken to be a likely universal, perhaps specified in the cognitive or linguistic systems of language learners and users. In many cases, these patterns are then taken to motivate linguistic theory. Here, we show that cross‐linguistic analysis will very rarely be able to statistically justify absolute, inviolable patterns in language. We formalize two statistical methods—frequentist and Bayesian—and show that in both it is possible to find strict linguistic universals, but that the numbers of independent languages necessary to do so is generally unachievable. This suggests that methods other than typological statistics are necessary to establish absolute properties of human language, and thus that many of the purported universals in linguistics have not received sufficient empirical justification.     

The bias in the bias: Comparative optimism as a function of event social undesirability

We present a new event-level predictor of comparative optimism: comparative optimism is larger for more socially undesirable events. A meta-analysis shows that event social undesirability predicts comparative optimism effect sizes reported in the literature, over and above the effects of other known predictors. Four experiments corroborate this finding and demonstrate the key role played by respondents’ impression management motives. The effect of social undesirability decreases with stronger than usual anonymity assurances, increases with greater impression management tendencies, and reverses when people want to make a negative impression. Because social undesirability is correlated to other known predictors of comparative optimism (e.g., controllability, severity), it is important to take its effects into account when assessing the effect of other event characteristics. The current research adds to, and bridges, the literatures on event-level predictors and impression management in comparative optimism.     

Differentiation of Self and Social Justice Commitment Mediated by Hope

This study tested a theoretical model of hope mediating the relationship between differentiation of self and social justice commitment among graduate students (N = 202) in the helping professions. The theory was based primarily on the social justice philosophies of Martin Luther King Jr., Cornel West, and Paulo Freire using a cultural psychology approach. Results generally supported the theoretical model. Implications are considered for both training and future research on social justice.     

MIRACLES AND TWO ACCOUNTS OF SCIENTIFIC LAWS

Since early modernity, it has often been assumed that miracles are incompatible with the existence of the natural laws utilized in the sciences. This paper argues that this assumption is largely an artifact of empiricist accounts of laws that should be rejected for reasons internal to philosophy of science, and that no such incompatibility arises on the most important alternative interpretations, which treat laws as expressions of forces, dispositions, or causal powers.     

Common and specific cognitive deficits in schizophrenia: relationships to function

The goals of the present study were to assess the interrelationships among tasks from the MATRICS and CNTRACS batteries, to determine the degree to which tasks from each battery capture unique variance in cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia, and to determine the ability of tasks from each battery to predict functional outcome. Subjects were 104 schizophrenia patients and 132 healthy control subjects recruited as part of the CNTRACS initiative. All subjects completed four CNTRACS tasks and two tasks from the MATRICS battery: Brief Assessment of Cognition in Schizophrenia Symbol Coding and the Hopkins Verbal Learning Test. Functional outcome was also assessed in the schizophrenia subjects. In both the patient and control groups, we found significant intercorrelations between all higher order cognitive tasks (episodic memory, goal maintenance, processing speed, verbal learning) but minimal relationships with the visual task. For almost all tasks, scores were significantly related to measures of functional outcome, with higher associations between CNTRACS tasks and performance-based measures of function and between one of the MATRICS tasks and self-reported functioning, relative to the other functioning measures. After regressing out variance shared by other tasks, we continued to observe group differences in performance among task residuals, particularly for measures of episodic memory from both batteries, although these residuals did not correlate as robustly with functional outcome as raw test scores. These findings suggest that there exists both shared and specific variance across cognitive tasks related to cognitive and functional impairments in schizophrenia and that measures derived from cognitive neuroscience can predict functional capacity and status in schizophrenia.     

Persistent and stable biases in spatial learning mechanisms predict navigational style

A wealth of evidence in rodents and humans supports the central roles of two learning systems—hippocampal place learning and striatal response learning—in the formation of spatial representations to support navigation. Individual differences in the ways that these mechanisms are engaged during initial encoding and subsequent navigation may provide a powerful framework for explaining the wide range of variability found in the strategies and solutions that make up human navigational styles. Previous work has revealed that activation in the hippocampal and striatal networks during learning could predict navigational style. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the relative activations in these systems during both initial encoding and the act of dynamic navigation in a learned environment. Participants learned a virtual environment and were tested on subsequent navigation to targets within the environment. We observed that a given individual had a consistent balance of memory system engagement across both initial encoding and subsequent navigation, a balance that successfully predicted the participants’ tendencies to use novel shortcuts versus familiar paths during dynamic navigation. This was further supported by the observation that the activation during subsequent retrieval was not dependent on the type of solution used on a given trial. Taken together, our results suggest a model in which the place- and response-learning systems are present in parallel to support a variety of navigational behaviors, but stable biases in the engagement of these systems influence what solutions might be available for any given individual.