Mind the gap: evolutionary psychological perspectives on human thriving

The amount of psychological literature focusing on human thriving and flourishing has grown in recent years, but this topic is currently subject to much conceptual ambiguity. Evolutionary psychology, though often not included in discussions on optimal human development, provides a framework that benefits considerations of human thriving. Humans exhibit a high degree of niche construction by which they alter their environment, in turn affecting their offspring. Such niche construction is enabled by unique human capacities, but these same capacities are then required to ‘mind the gap’ between human nature and the altered environmental niche. As such, thriving may in part be understood as the ability of the individual to navigate difficulties resulting from a mismatch between their nature and niche. Three unique features of the human species that are used to both create and navigate this gap are considered as they relate to the existing literature on human thriving.     

Truth,Lies, and Self‐Presentation: How Gender and Anticipated Future Interaction Relate to Deceptive Behavior1

The present study hypothesized that gender and expectation of future interaction affects the frequency and nature of lying. Male and female participants (208 undergraduates) were randomly assigned to same‐ or opposite‐gender partners and given the expectation they either would not meet again or would meet 3 additional times. Participants engaged in a 10‐min conversation that was videotaped covertly. Later, target participants evaluated the videotape identifying lies they told. During the conversation, 78% of participants lied, with females lying significantly more than males. Females, but not males, lied more when expecting future interaction than when expecting no future interaction. The nature of lies also varied between women and men. Findings suggest women and men differentially use deception as a self‐presentational tactic.     

Guilty,free, and wise: Determinism and psychopathy diminish learning from negative emotions

Emotional experiences can bring about personal growth. For instance, feeling guilty may prompt one to learn from a mistake, and this learning can bring about different and better future behavior. Three studies found that belief in free will facilitated learning from emotional experiences, as inducing participants to disbelieve in free will was associated with reduced learning. Emotional responsiveness, as defined by low psychopathy scores, also facilitated learning from emotional experiences (Studies 2 and 3). The degree of learning associated with emotional experiences was measured by self-rating (Study 1), independent evaluations of lessons learned (Study 2), and whether participants joined a campus recycling program (after being made to feel guilty about an environmental transgression; Study 3).     

Nature and Freedom: Repetition as Supplement in the Late Schelling

F.W.J. von Schelling’s positive philosophy of mythology and revelation questions how one can move from the natural (the negative or mythology) to freedom (the positive or revelation), i.e. from the natural to the supernatural. The move from nature to freedom surpasses the traditional metaphysics of presence. Being is not simply the presencing of nature but the result of a decisive deed surpassing and supplementing nature. Nature can do nothing other than presence. Freedom, however, could also not be. It could remain in concealment and must not necessarily presence as nature does. The origin is a supplement because an unnecessary excess extraneous to nature. In other words, origins always supplement the natural, i.e. they are supernatural and revelatory. Origins bring something novel, i.e. something original, into being but origins themselves remain in non-being and consequently remain un-revealed. The origin cannot exist, i.e. cannot become present, because it is always qualitatively Past. The origin never was but always already has been. Primal repetition was freedom’s subjection of nature to the Past and a deferral of this deed’s consequences to the indefinite Future.     

Testing the limits of statistical learning for word segmentation

Past research has demonstrated that infants can rapidly extract syllable distribution information from an artificial language and use this knowledge to infer likely word boundaries in speech. However, artificial languages are extremely simplified with respect to natural language. In this study, we ask whether infants’ ability to track transitional probabilities between syllables in an artificial language can scale up to the challenge of natural language. We do so by testing both 5.5‐ and 8‐month‐olds’ ability to segment an artificial language containing four words of uniform length (all CVCV) or four words of varying length (two CVCV, two CVCVCV). The transitional probability cues to word boundaries were held equal across the two languages. Both age groups segmented the language containing words of uniform length, demonstrating that even 5.5‐month‐olds are extremely sensitive to the conditional probabilities in their environment. However, neither age group succeeded in segmenting the language containing words of varying length, despite the fact that the transitional probability cues defining word boundaries were equally strong in the two languages. We conclude that infants’ statistical learning abilities may not be as robust as earlier studies have suggested.     

The Underlying Architecture of the Creative Worlds of Children: Young Persons from the UK and China Unwittingly Generate More Concepts that Violate Ontological Category Structure Than Do Older Adults During an Exemplar‐Generation Task

Is our cognition the underlying architecture of the recurrent and pan‐cultural imaginative ideas of children and adolescents? Recent cross‐cultural studies show that children and adolescents recall proportionally more creative, counterintuitive concepts than older adults. One outstanding concern is that cultural transmission is also constrained by how concepts emerge into culture. Hence, a broad sample of age demographics in UK and China (10–58 years; N = 90) participated in an exemplar‐generation task where participants assembled statements exemplifying conceptual categories of positive and negative emotion, imagery, humor, and inferential potential. Multiple regression analysis considering counterintuitiveness and age revealed young persons generated significantly more imaginative, counterintuitive ideas than older adults, in both UK and China groups. This cross‐cultural support for an underlying cognitive architecture of human creativity builds on Ward's (1994) research on structured imagination.     

Examining interrelationships between the Cigarette Purchase Task and delay discounting among pregnant women

Two common behavioral economic simulation tasks used to study cigarette smoking are the Cigarette Purchase Task, a measure of cigarette demand, and delay discounting, a measure of the subjective value of rewards as a function of delays to delivery. Few studies have evaluated whether combining these tasks enhances understanding of smoking beyond either alone. The current study represents an initial evaluation of the intersection between cigarette demand indices and delay discounting among pregnant smokers by examining associations between these measures and whether a woman makes antepartum quit attempts before entering prenatal care (a reliable predictor of eventual quitting). Participants were 159 pregnant women enrolled in a smoking‐cessation trial. Low O _max and shallow discounting were each associated with antepartum quit attempts. Participants were next categorized into four subgroups (low O _max, shallow discounting; low O _max, steep discounting; high O _max, shallow discounting; high O _max, steep discounting) using median splits. Those with shallow discounting and low O _max were more likely to have made quit attempts than each of the other three subgroups. That is, steep discounting appears to undermine the association of low O _max and efforts to quit smoking during pregnancy while high O _max overshadows any protective influence associated with shallow discounting.     

Contingency tracking during unsignaled delayed reinforcement: Effects of delay duration and d‐amphetamine

In two experiments, the role of the response–reinforcer relation in maintaining low‐rate responding under unsignaled delay conditions was investigated. In both experiments pecking by pigeons on one response key, denoted the relevant key, was reinforced under an unsignaled delay‐of‐reinforcement procedure (defined as tandem variable‐interval (VI) differential‐reinforcement‐of‐other behavior [DRO] schedule). Responding on a second key, denoted the irrelevant key, had no programmed consequences. Between sessions, the location of the relevant key varied (after one, two, or three sessions) pseudorandomly. In Experiment 1, the delay (DRO) duration was manipulated parametrically. Overall, proportional relevant‐key response rates (relevant‐key response rates / [relevant‐key response rates + irrelevant key response rates]) increased across 3‐session sequences in which the relevant key remained in the same location and decreased as the DRO duration was changed systematically (2, 5, and 10 s). In Experiment 2, acute administration of d‐amphetamine increased proportional relevant‐key response rates during 1‐day sequences for only the DRO 5‐s duration, and results over 3‐day sequences, once a discrimination had already been established, were inconsistent. Results support that the response–reinforcer relation is the primary determinant of responding, and such discriminations are relatively resistant to disruption or potentiation by behaviorally active doses of d‐amphetamine.     

Perception2

The article is an overview of some central philosophical problems associated with perception. It discusses what distinguishes perception from other sensory capacities and from conception. It discusses anti‐individualism, a view according to which the nature of a perceptual state is dependent not just causally but for its identity or ‘essence’ on relations to a normal environment in which systems containing that state were formed. It discusses different views about epistemic warrant. By emphasising the deep ways in which human and animal perceptual systems, especially visual systems, are similar, it criticises a dominant view of the last century, in both philosophy and large parts of psychology, according to which a range of sophisticated supplementary abilities have to be learned before a child can perceive objective features of the physical world.