The timing effect in public good games

In public good situations, expectations concerning other persons’ moves are important and subtle cues can affect these expectations. In Experiment 1, participants in a public good game who moved simultaneously made high contributions and expected their opponents to make high contributions. However, participants who moved pseudo-sequentially (one after the other, but without knowledge of the other’s decision) expected their opponents to make medium-sized contributions, but made almost no contribution themselves. In Experiment 2, we manipulated expectations experimentally. Participants who moved simultaneously reciprocated what they expected their partners to do. Participants who moved pseudo-sequentially defected, regardless of what they expected from their opponents. Furthermore, we found that simultaneous movers were more likely than pseudo-sequential movers to conceptualize themselves and the other player as a group. This sense of groupness seemed to account partly for their inclination to reciprocate anticipated behavior.     

Videotherapie bei postpartalen Störungen

Video recording is currently part of in- and out-patient therapy programs for parents with infants. The observation and analysis of video sequences allow the patient to gain an extraordinary insight with respect to its own experience and behaviour. Video Microanalytical Therapy (VMT) looks for the mother’s positive qualities in her relationship to the child and employs these qualities in order to support successful interactions. VMT is well-suited to the treatment of mothers with postpartal affective or psychotic disorders, because the typical cognitive distortions and reduced perception shown by these mothers can be avoided to a large extent through the use of pictures. In this study, a video microanalytical therapy concept will be presented, that was developed for the treatment of postpartally disordered mothers at the Psychiatric Centre Nordbaden in Wiesloch, Germany.     

Respect as Esteem: The Case of Counselling

To claim that respect is one of the cornerstones of professional ethics is uncontroversial. However, it has become commonplace in the philosophical literature to distinguish between different kinds of respect. This paper considers the distinction between ‘recognition respect,’ said to be owed to persons as such, and ‘appraisal respect,’ said to be owed to those persons whom merit it, in the context of the professional–client relationship. Using the practice of counselling as an example, it is argued that both kinds of respect have a place in the professional–client relationship, which is in turn articulated as a relationship between equally fallible moral agents.     

On preferences and doing the right thing: Satisfaction with advantageous inequity when cognitive processing is limited

We examine outcome satisfaction in situations in which people receive better outcomes than comparable other persons. Building on classical and modern social psychological theories, we argue that when reacting to these arrangements of advantageous inequity, judging the advantage is quick and easy as preferences are primary. We further propose that adjusting this appraisal requires cognitive resources as it entails integrating fairness concerns with the initial preference appraisal. Extending the literature on cognitive busyness, we therefore predict that people should be more satisfied with advantageous inequity when cognitive processing is strongly—as opposed to weakly—limited. Findings across several different experimental paradigms support our predictions. Taken together, our findings shed light on the psychological processes underlying the intriguing interplay between egoism- and fairness-based considerations when evaluating outcomes, as well as on more general preference and adjustment processes.     

Astonishment: A study of an ethically valorised emotion in Buddhist narrative literature

This essay explores the role that Buddhist narrative literature plays in fostering the cultivation of ethically valorised emotions. The essay focuses on astonishment, as it figures in ārya ?ūra's Jātakamālā, a collection of Sanskrit narratives. The essay examines how and why ārya ?ūra valorises astonishment and what this valorisation reveals about the significance of emotions in Buddhist ethical life. The key distinction implicit in ārya ?ūra's work between natural and cultivated emotions is worked out.     

The malleability of executive function in early childhood: Effects of schooling and targeted training

Executive function (EF), its importance for scholastic achievement and the question of whether or not EF is malleable, have become a topic of intense interest. Education or schooling is often seen as effective approaches to enhance EF due to the specific school‐related requirements as compared to kindergarten or pre‐school. However, no study to date has investigated whether targeted training focusing on those domains might be comparable with regular schooling in improving EF and fluid intelligence (Gf). The aim of the present study was to replicate and extend the previously demonstrated schooling effects on EF by using a school‐cutoff design, and to further investigate whether a theoretically motivated intervention targeting specific EF, i.e., working memory (WM) or inhibitory control (IC), could achieve comparable effects with schooling in both, WM and IC, as well as Gf. 91 6‐year‐old kindergarteners and first‐graders with similar chronological age participated the study. We compared the performance of a first‐grade schooling group with that of two kindergarten training groups as well as a business‐as‐usual kindergarten control group. Participants were assessed in WM, IC and Gf at baseline, immediately after the intervention (posttest), as well as 3 months after training completion (follow‐up). The results showed that the schooling group indeed outperformed the kindergarten groups at baseline in several cognitive tasks. Furthermore, both the WM and IC training showed pronounced gains in the trained tasks, as well as varying degrees of improvement in non‐trained outcome measures. Most importantly, both training groups achieved comparable performance with the schooling group, which was especially apparent in Gf at follow‐up. Our findings provide further evidence for the malleability of EF demonstrating that both, long‐term and short‐term interventions can facilitate the acquisition of those important skills, and as such, our work has important implications for educational practice.     

Do epistemic reasons bear on the ought simpliciter?

Are epistemic reasons normative in the same sense as, for instance, moral reasons? In this paper I examine and defend the claim that epistemic reasons are normative only relative to an epistemic standard. Unlike moral reasons they are not substantially normative, because they fail to make an independent contribution to obligations or permissions simpliciter. After presenting what I take to be the main argument for this view, I illustrate that the argument has often been defended by examples which controversially presuppose strong epistemic obligations or pragmatic reasons for belief. Opponents of the argument often deny the existence of obligations and reasons of these kinds. I therefore examine whether the argument can withstand that line of critique by employing new examples.