Are Persons Low in Self-Control Rational and Deterrable?

This work addresses a question raised by Wright et al. (2004 Wright , Richard T. and Scott H. Decker. 1994 . Burglars on the Job: Street life and Residential Breakins . Boston : Northeastern University Press . [Google Scholar]) pertaining to the rationality and deterrability of individuals with low self-control. According to some, all persons are presumed to be equally rational; according others, individuals who possess little self-control, who are impulsive and present-oriented are less likely to be influenced by a perceived risks and costs of punishment; and according to a third group of scholars, those who do possess such self-control/restraint are either not motivated toward offending or are inhibited by moral constraints and are, thus, unresponsive to sanction threats. These rival predictions are examined with the use of self-report survey data on academic dishonesty from a sample of undergraduate college students. Across a tremendous number of models employing a variety of functional forms for the effects of perceived sanction threats, we consistently observed that the effects of perceived sanction threats on college students' self-reported academic dishonesty did not vary by their level of offending propensity (self-control).     

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Louis L'Amour is one of the most prolific and popular writers of our time. He has published more than 85 novels, many of which have been made into movies for theatres or television. His first novel, Hondo, was published in 1953 and his latest in 1984, The Walking Drum.

Mr. L'Amour's interest and dedication to education, in the classical sense, is liberally evidenced through the characters of his novels. Beginning in his early books with characters who lamented the fact that they were uneducated or self-educated and growing toward the latest novel that has a genuine scholar as the main character. His latest book is not a western but takes place in medieval Europe.

It may be of value to introduce pre-adolescents and adolescents to Mr. L'Amour's works in the public school libraries. It may do more than introduce them to a gifted, action and adventure, storyteller. It could help to improve reading skills with the added possibility that they may become interested in some of the classical literature given reference in his novels. Another possibility is that they may be persuaded of the value of an education through the many references the subject in the novels.     

Escaping from Rama: Portraits of Indian women

This study examines visual, post-colonial portraits of the Indian women of the Sanskrit epics, in order to show the sociocultural, historical-ideological roots of this aesthetic. After independence, Hindu movements found in the epics a female archetype, who stands for the Hindu community. Post-colonial visual representations maintained this idealistic characterisation within a binary system, according to which women can be angelic guarantors of the social order or devilish, sexually uncontrolled creatures. This ambiguity derives from the double nature of the female principle of the world, shakti, and the visual storytelling tradition or chitrakatha. Using the same Indian storytelling tradition, female points of view have begun to criticise this nationalistic, ‘male gaze’. In the graphic novel Sita's Ramayana, Rama and male activities, particularly war, are secularised and criticised as selfish by female characters, foremost of whom is Sita, a model of the devoted and pure bride or pativrata.     

Unconscious Semantic Priming Influences Performance of Visuomotor Tasks Differently but the Effects are Similar in Young and Older Adults

We examined the effects of semantic priming of attention on two sequentially presented visuomotor tasks, traffic judgments and saccadic adaptation. Priming was accomplished with the scrambled sentence task: participants formed meaningful sentences from a list of words where a word denoting wide attention focus was involved. The results showed that semantic priming influenced positively saccade adaptation (its’ benefit increased) while it attenuated visuomotor performance in the traffic task (RT of hand movements increased). We found the effects of priming on both tasks’ performance to be comparable in young and older participants. It was suggested that semantic priming effect on visuomotor tasks depended on the cognitive resources which were needful as for the priming as for the primed task.     

Same kinematics but different objects during action observation: Detection times and motor evoked potentials

Motor resonance refers to the fact that an observed action is online subliminally reenacted. The aim of the present paper was to verify if, on equal terms of kinematics, the to-be-grasped object's intrinsic properties are influencing the observers' motor behaviour. A detection time and a single pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation experiment were performed to verify the effects of a change of object's intrinsic properties artificially made on a video showing a grasping action. In particular, the object substituting the original one was not graspable by the showed movement. Results indicated an influence of object's intrinsic properties: Detection times were delayed and motor evoked potentials were reduced when the movement shown was not suitable to grasp the object. These results are interpreted as an evidence that during grasping action observation the motor system of the observer is influenced not only by the seen movements but also by the to-be-grasped object.     

Representing young and older adult faces: Shared or age-specific prototypes?

ABSTRACT

Young adults recognize young adult faces more accurately than older adult faces and are more sensitive to how individual young faces deviate from a norm/prototype. Here we used an adaptation paradigm to examine whether young and older adult faces are represented by separable norms and the extent to which the coding dimensions for these two categories overlap. In Experiment 1, following adaptation to oppositely distorted young and older faces (e.g., expanded young and compressed older faces), adults’ normality judgments simultaneously shifted in opposite directions for the two face categories, providing evidence for separable norms. In Experiment 2, participants were adapted to distorted faces from a single age category (e.g., compressed young); aftereffects transferred across face age but were larger for the face age that matched adaptation. Collectively, these results provide evidence that young and older faces are processed with regard to separable norms that share some underlying coding dimensions.     

Working Memory Control Deficit in Kindergarten ADHD Children

The present study tests the hypothesis that a working memory deficit is also found in children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms as young as 5 and is related to the control of interfering information. One group of 23 kindergarten children identified by the presence of ADHD symptoms and one group of 23 children matched for gender, age, and socioeconomic status were administered a visuospatial working memory task that required the selective recall of information. Children with ADHD symptoms performed more poorly than controls and were affected to a particularly high extent by intrusion errors (i.e., recalling of information initially encoded but that needed to be consequently suppressed during the task).     

Cross‐cultural evidence of value structures and priorities in childhood

We broaden the developmental focus of the theory of universals in basic human values (Schwartz, 1992, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology) by presenting supportive evidence on children's values from six countries: Germany, Italy, Poland, Bulgaria, the United States, and New Zealand. 3,088 7–11‐year‐old children completed the Picture‐Based Value Survey for Children (PBVS‐C, Döring et al., 2010, J. Pers. Assess., 92, 439). Grade 5 children also completed the Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ, Schwartz, 2003, A proposal for measuring value orientations across nations. Chapter 7 in the Questionnaire Development Package of the European Social Survey). Findings reveal that the broad value structures, sex differences in value priorities and pan‐cultural value hierarchies typical of adults have already taken form at this early age. We discuss the conceptual implications of these findings for the new field of children's basic values by embedding them in the recent developmental literature.     

Exploration and learning in capuchin monkeys (Sapajus spp.): the role of action–outcome contingencies

Animals have a strong propensity to explore the environment. Spontaneous exploration has a great biological significance since it allows animals to discover and learn the relation between specific behaviours and their consequences. The role of the contingency between action and outcome for learning has been mainly investigated in instrumental learning settings and much less in free exploration contexts. We tested 16 capuchin monkeys (Sapajus spp.) with a mechatronic platform that allowed complex modules to be manipulated and to produce different outcomes. Experimental subjects could manipulate the modules and discover the contingencies between their own specific actions and the outcomes produced (i.e., the opening and lighting of a box). By contrast, Control subjects could operate on the modules, but the outcomes experienced were those performed by their paired Experimental subjects (“yoked-control” paradigm). In the exploration phase, in which no food reward was present, Experimental subjects spent more time on the board and manipulated the modules more than Yoked subjects. Experimental subjects outperformed Yoked subjects in the following test phase, where success required recalling the effective action so to open the box, now baited with food. These findings demonstrate that the opportunity to experience action–outcome contingencies in the absence of extrinsic rewards promotes capuchins’ exploration and facilitates learning processes. Thus, this intrinsically motivated learning represents a powerful mechanism allowing the acquisition of skills and cognitive competence that the individual can later exploit for adaptive purposes.     

Does the character-based dimension of stories impact narrative processing? An event-related potentials (ERPs) study

Cognitive Processing - This event-related potentials (ERPs) study investigated online processes of integration of information relating to characters in narrative comprehension. The final sample...