The effect of controllability and causality on counterfactual thinking

Previous research on counterfactual thoughts about prevention suggests that people tend to focus on enabling rather than causing events and controllable rather than uncontrollable events. Two experiments explore whether counterfactual thinking about enablers is distinct from counterfactual thinking about controllable events. We presented participants with scenarios in which a cause and an enabler contributed to a negative outcome. We systematically manipulated the controllability of the cause and the enabler and asked participants to generate counterfactuals. The results indicate that when only the cause or the enabler is controllable participants undid the controllable event more often. However, when the cause and enabler are matched in controllability participants undid the enabler slightly more often. The findings are discussed in the context of the mental model, functional and judgement dissociation theories as well as previous research on counterfactual thinking. The importance of controllability and possible reasons for the special role of enablers are considered.     

Transitivity for height versus speed: To what extent do the under-7s really have a transitive capacity?

Transitive inference underpins many human reasoning competencies. The dominant task (the “extensive training paradigm”) employs many items and large amounts of training, instilling an ordered series in the reasoner's mind. But findings from an alternative “three-term paradigm” suggest transitivity is not present until 7 + years. Interestingly, a second alternative paradigm (the “spatial task”), using simultaneously displayed height relationships to form premise pairs, can uphold the 4-year estimate. However, this paradigm risks cueing children and hence is problematic. We investigated whether a height-task variant might correspond to a more ecologically valid three-term task. A total of 222 4–6-year-olds either completed a modified height task, including an increased familiarisation phase, or a computer-animated task about cartoon characters running a race in pairs. Findings confirmed that both tasks were functionally identical. Crucially, 4-year-olds were at chance on both, whereas 6-year-olds performed competently. These findings contrast with estimates from all three paradigms considered. A theoretical evaluation of our tasks and procedures against previous ones, leads us to two conclusions. First, our estimate slightly amends the 7-year estimate offered by the three-term paradigm, with the difference explained in terms of its greater relevance to child experiences. Second, our estimate can coexist alongside the 4-year estimate from the extensive training paradigm. This is because, applying a recently developed “dual-process” conception of reasoning, anticipates that extensive training benefits a species-general associative system, while the spatial paradigm and three-term paradigm can potentially index a genuinely deductive system, which has always been the target of transitive research.     

Gone to the Spirits: A Transgender Prophet on the Columbia Plateau

This article examines the life of Kaúxuma núpika, an indigenous transgender prophet living on the Columbia Plateau in the early nineteenth century. As a Ktunaxa woman, she crossed cultural boundaries to marry a Euroamerican. When she left her husband, insisting on her independence and autonomy, she crossed another frontier. When Kaúxuma núpika declared herself no longer a woman, but a man, and secured himself a wife, he crossed further boundaries of gender and sexuality. As a warrior and a prophet, Kaúxuma núpika crossed the boundaries to the world of the spirit, returning with warnings, guidance, and hope for the tribal people of the Columbia River valley. In this project, I reflect upon the historical record in light of indigenous prophet traditions on the Columbia Plateau and current scholarship on gender and power among Native communities of the region, to consider notions of power, identity, and the religio-cultural dynamics of gender and sexual identity among indigenous communities on the Columbia Plateau.     

Age-Related Changes in Children's and Adults’ Explanations of Interpersonal Actions

We investigated the content of children's and adults’ explanations of interpersonal actions. Participants were 5-, 7-, and 9-year-old children, as well as adults, who were presented with 8 stories containing either prosocial or antisocial target actions, and asked to explain why each actor performed that action. In half of the stories, an interpersonal event preceded the action. Children and adults provided situational and mental-state explanations, but mental-state explanations were especially common for antisocial actions not preceded by an interpersonal event. With increasing age, participants explained prosocial actions by referring to the actor's goals, but referred to the actor's emotions and beliefs to explain antisocial actions. Finally, adults were most likely to mention psychological goals. These results suggest that (a) elementary school children provide a variety of explanations for interpersonal events; (b) children use different types of explanations flexibly, depending on the context and nature of the target action; (c) the frequency of different types of explanations for interpersonal actions changes during childhood; and (d) between middle childhood and adulthood, the recognition of psychological goals increases greatly.     

Longitudinal Predictors of Alcohol‐Related Harms During the Transition to Adulthood

While a range of factors have been found to increase the likelihood of alcohol‐related harms among young people, little is known about their relative importance. This article aimed to identify the risks for alcohol‐related harms at an age when alcohol use and problems tend to peak in Australia (19–20 years). A wide range of concurrent and antecedent factors from multiple domains were examined using path analysis, including individual characteristics, family environment, and externalising and internalising problems. The sample comprised of 941 individuals from the Australian Temperament Project, a large longitudinal community‐based study. The path model controlled for current risky drinking and revealed a number of variables that were significant longitudinal predictors of alcohol‐related harms within each of the domains, including adolescent antisocial behaviour and drinking behaviour, low agreeableness, impulsivity, and paternal drinking levels. The potential for developmental prevention approaches to reduce alcohol‐related harms by targeting externalising behaviour problems, interpersonal influences, and individual characteristics is discussed.     

The meaning of tears: Which sex seems emotional depends on the social context

The media coverage sometimes given to crying women points to the importance of understanding whether gender affects interpretations of crying. This article reports two studies that examined whether observers infer different emotions or dispositions from crying men and women. Study 1 showed that, in the absence of information about the social context of crying, participants inferred gender‐stereotypical traits and emotions. Study 2's manipulation of the social context of crying (relationship versus employment) affected participants' interpretations of crying by men and women. In employment contexts, participants perceived crying men as more emotional and sad than crying women as well as less competent. The emotionality inferences mediated the judgments of differing male and female competence. In relationship contexts, interpretations of crying women and men did not differ. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Predicting language: MEG evidence for lexical preactivation

It is widely assumed that prediction plays a substantial role in language processing. However, despite numerous studies demonstrating that contextual information facilitates both syntactic and lexical–semantic processing, there exists no direct evidence pertaining to the neural correlates of the prediction process itself. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), this study found that brain activity was modulated by whether or not a specific noun could be predicted, given a picture prime. Specifically, before the noun was presented, predictive contexts triggered enhanced activation in left mid-temporal cortex (implicated in lexical access), ventro-medial prefrontal cortex (previously associated with top-down processing), and visual cortex (hypothesized to index the preactivation of predicted form features), successively. This finding suggests that predictive language processing recruits a top-down network where predicted words are activated at different levels of representation, from more ‘abstract’ lexical–semantic representations in temporal cortex, all the way down to visual word form features. The same brain regions that exhibited enhanced activation for predictive contexts before the onset of the noun showed effects of congruence during the target word. To our knowledge, this study is one of the first to directly investigate the anticipatory stage of predictive language processing.     

Cultural differences in self‐recognition: the early development of autonomous and related selves?

Fifteen‐ to 18‐month‐old infants from three nationalities were observed interacting with their mothers and during two self‐recognition tasks. Scottish interactions were characterized by distal contact, Zambian interactions by proximal contact, and Turkish interactions by a mixture of contact strategies. These culturally distinct experiences may scaffold different perspectives on self. In support, Scottish infants performed best in a task requiring recognition of the self in an individualistic context (mirror self‐recognition), whereas Zambian infants performed best in a task requiring recognition of the self in a less individualistic context (body‐as‐obstacle task). Turkish infants performed similarly to Zambian infants on the body‐as‐obstacle task, but outperformed Zambians on the mirror self‐recognition task. Verbal contact (a distal strategy) was positively related to mirror self‐recognition and negatively related to passing the body‐as‐obstacle task. Directive action and speech (proximal strategies) were negatively related to mirror self‐recognition. Self‐awareness performance was best predicted by cultural context; autonomous settings predicted success in mirror self‐recognition, and related settings predicted success in the body‐as‐obstacle task. These novel data substantiate the idea that cultural factors may play a role in the early expression of self‐awareness. More broadly, the results highlight the importance of moving beyond the mark test, and designing culturally sensitive tests of self‐awareness.     

Pubertal development shapes perception of complex facial expressions

We previously hypothesized that pubertal development shapes the emergence of new components of face processing (Scherf et al., 2012; Garcia & Scherf, 2015). Here, we evaluate this hypothesis by investigating emerging perceptual sensitivity to complex versus basic facial expressions across pubertal development. We tested pre‐pubescent children (6–8 years), age‐ and sex‐matched adolescents in early and later stages of pubertal development (11–14 years), and sexually mature adults (18–24 years). Using a perceptual staircase procedure, participants made visual discriminations of both socially complex expressions (sexual interest, contempt) that are arguably relevant to emerging peer‐oriented relationships of adolescence, and basic (happy, anger) expressions that are important even in early infancy. Only sensitivity to detect complex expressions improved as a function of pubertal development. The ability to perceive these expressions is adult‐like by late puberty when adolescents become sexually mature. This pattern of results provides the first evidence that pubertal development specifically influences emerging affective components of face perception in adolescence.