The role of emotion expectancies in adolescents' moral decision making

This study investigated the impact of emotion expectancies on adolescents’ moral decision making in hypothetical situations. The sample consisted of 160 participants from three different grade levels (mean age = 15.79 years, SD = 2.96). Participants were confronted with a set of scenarios that described various emotional outcomes of (im)moral actions and needed to decide what they would do if they were in the protagonist’s shoes. Findings demonstrate that emotion expectancies differentially influenced adolescents’ hypothetical decision making in antisocial versus prosocial behavioral contexts. Whereas negatively charged self-evaluative emotions over failing to act morally (e.g., guilt) were the strongest predictor for moral choice in antisocial behavioral contexts, positively charged self-evaluative emotions over acting morally (e.g., pride) most strongly predicted moral choice in prosocial contexts. Older adolescents paid greater attention to outcome-oriented emotions that make the decision to act morally less attractive (e.g., regret). Overall, the study suggests that emotion expectancies influence moral decision making in unique and meaningful ways.     

The integration of spatial information across different viewpoints

The integration of spatial information perceived from different viewpoints is a frequent, yet largely unexplored, cognitive ability. In two experiments, participants saw two presentations, each consisting of three targets—that is, illuminated tiles on the floor—before walking the shortest possible path across all targets. In Experiment 1, participants viewed the targets either from the same viewpoint or from different viewpoints. Errors in recalling targets increased if participants changed their viewpoints between presentations, suggesting that memory acquired from different viewpoints had to be aligned for integration. Furthermore, the error pattern indicates that memory for the first presentation was transformed into the reference frame of the second presentation. In Experiment 2, we examined whether this transformation occurred because new information was integrated already during encoding or because memorized information was integrated when required. Results suggest that the latter is the case. This might serve as a strategy for avoiding additional alignments.     

Denying humanness to others: a newly discovered mechanism by which violent video games increase aggressive behavior

Past research has provided abundant evidence that playing violent video games increases aggressive behavior. So far, these effects have been explained mainly as the result of priming existing knowledge structures. The research reported here examined the role of denying humanness to other people in accounting for the effect that playing a violent video game has on aggressive behavior. In two experiments, we found that playing violent video games increased dehumanization, which in turn evoked aggressive behavior. Thus, it appears that video-game-induced aggressive behavior is triggered when victimizers perceive the victim to be less human.     

Interobjectivity and Interactivity: Material Objects and Discourse in Class

In classroom teaching, material objects like the blackboard play an important role. Yet qualitative research on education has largely ignored this material dimension of education and focused on interaction and discourse. Both dimensions are, however, closely related to each other. Material objects are embedded in classroom discourse and are transformed into knowledge objects by speech acts, and in turn structure discussions and constitute a point of reference for school lessons. Drawing on ethnographic research on classroom lessons in mathematics and science classes in German high schools, we propose a perspective that recognizes both the materiality of teaching and its interactive dimension.     

Prospects of enactivist approaches to intentionality and cognition

We discuss various implications of some radical anti-representationalist views of cognition and what they have to offer with regard to the naturalization of intentionality and the explanation of cognitive phenomena. Our focus is on recent arguments from proponents of enactive views of cognition to the effect that basic cognition is intentional but not representational and that cognition is co-extensive with life. We focus on lower rather than higher forms of cognition, namely the question regarding the intentional and representational nature of cognition found in organisms simpler than human beings, because enactivists do not deny that more sophisticated cognitive phenomena are representational and involve content. After introducing the debate on the naturalization of intentionality (Sect. 2), we briefly review different varieties of enactivism and introduce their central claims (Sect. 3). In Sect. 4 we turn to radical enactivism in order to focus on the arguments for a thoroughly non-representational, enactive account of perception and basic cognition. In particular, we discuss three major issues: First, what is supposed to replace the representational analysis of perception in a radical-enactive explanation of perception? How does the enactive explanation of perception compare to the best scientific work on the neuroscience of perception? Second, what is—on an enactive account—the function of neural processing in the brain for the generation of perception if not to produce representations? This question is especially pressing since one implication of autopoietic enactivism (accepted by radical enactivists) is that even the simplest organisms, i.e. single-celled organisms, have cognitive capacities (Sect. 5). Since they lack brains and nervous systems, enactivists must specify the (possibly) unique contribution of the brain and nervous system in those animals who have them. In Sect. 5, we evaluate the advantages of an autopoietic–enactive approach to the naturalization of intentionality and end with a suggestion how cognition may relate to intentionality and representation.

     

Many Meats and Many Milks? The Ontological Politics of a Proposed Post-animal Revolution

Today plant-based alternatives to animal-agricultural products are made available or developed alongside ‘cultured’ meat, and products utilising genetic modification. To proponents, this signifies the emergence of ‘cellular agriculture’ as a food-production field or the possibility of a ‘post-animal bioeconomy’: a way to safely and sustainably produce animal products without animals. Drawing on previous work on ontological politics enables acknowledging how these novel objects unsettle animal products’ ontological stability, thereby offering a practical case of how the world is multiply produced. An important emphasis within this tradition is the situated nature of reality-making practices. Consequently our analysis, focusing on different practices, sites and objects compared to influential studies of ontological politics, necessitates bringing in hitherto relatively unexplored political-economic relations and legal processes. As global processes and problem formulations, laboratories, and national or regional regulations come together to remake realities the ontological-political dynamics determining the fate of cellular agriculture or a post-animal bioeconomy becomes shaped by a combination of conflicts and budding collaborations between proponents of new technologies and established livestock interests. Understanding these dynamics requires tracing both how post-animal products reshape the world they are introduced into, and acknowledging the friction evident as reality-carrying objects leave their laboratories.     

Getting connected: Intergroup contact on Facebook

One correlational study examined whether virtual contact via Facebook is positively related to intergroup relations. The followers of two online campaigns from Iran and Israel—whose countries have been in a politically hostile relationship since the 1980s—indicated the amount of direct and indirect virtual (Facebook) and real-life outgroup contact they have had, a number of quality and affective judgments about that contact, and completed an affective prejudice measure about the respective outgroup. Overall, contact was negatively associated with affective prejudice, providing support for the contact hypothesis in a specific and exclusively virtual setting with citizens of hostile nations. Previously experienced real-life contact did not moderate the results, suggesting that virtual contact has an independent link to positive outgroup attitudes.     

Disentangling the course of epistemic development: parsing knowledge by epistemic content

Over the past three decades, research into the developmental course by means of which persons come to an increasingly mature conception of the knowing process has yielded an highly defracted picture. Despite some concert of opinion about the general bill of particulars, what remains deeply problematic is the increasingly radical disagreement that has arisen regarding the ages at which major milestones in the course of epistemic development are said to be reached. As a way of making some sense of these competing claims, it is argued that the emerging insight that knowledge is ineluctably shaped by those doing the knowing (i.e., that there is an unavoidable “world-to-mind direction of fit” (J.R. Searle, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983) between things in the world and the manner of their understanding) does not arrive in a single piece. Instead, as the data presented here help to illustrate, an appreciation of the constructed character of knowledge more commonly arrives piecemeal and at different ontogenetic moments, the times of which are governed by the place that different objects of knowledge occupy along an envisioned continuum of diverse epistemic contents. On this account, not all “facts of the matter” are ordinarily seen to occupy the same epistemic footing. Rather, some so-called facts are commonly understood to be of an “institutional” sort, where “representational” diversity is early expected and widely tolerated. By contrast, other objects of knowledge are imagined to be more like “brute” facts that, on some less mature readings, fully escape the clutches of subjective opinion. Viewed against the backcloth of this proposed continuum, a developmental sequence hypothesized according to which growing persons first come to view “institutional” facts as humanly constructed before subsequently coming to a similar view about presumptively “brute” facts. To test this hypothesis, 242 young persons were administered a paper and pencil measure of epistemic reasoning (the EDQ). Results strongly support the hypothesis that respondents understood the interpretive nature of beliefs about “institutional” facts at an earlier age than so-called “brute” facts.     

Asymmetrical attributions for approach versus avoidance behavior

Five studies examined responsibility inferences and/or person and situation attributions in positively versus negatively valenced motivational contexts. In Experiment 1, participants received information about a teaching assistant who was promised a reward or threatened with a punishment when asked for compliance with a requested transgression. The teaching assistant was perceived as more responsible for complying given the positive than the negative incentive. This finding was replicated in Experiment 2 using different vignettes and incentives. Experiment 3 revealed that the effect of incentive valence on perceived responsibility for compliance remains significant when statistically controlling for perceived compliance rates. Experiment 4 then demonstrated that there are not only greater responsibility judgments given a positive than a negative incentive but also greater dispositional attributions. Finally, Experiment 5 revealed that a similar incentive valence effect is found in other appetitive versus aversive motivational contexts. Theoretical explanations of this phenomenon are discussed.