Differences between girls and boys in emerging language skills: Evidence from 10 language communities

The present study explored gender differences in emerging language skills in 13,783 European children from 10 non‐English language communities. It was based on a synthesis of published data assessed with adapted versions of the MacArthur‐Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) from age 0.08 to 2.06. The results showed that girls are slightly ahead of boys in early communicative gestures, in productive vocabulary, and in combining words. The difference increased with age. Boys were not found to be more variable than girls. Despite extensive variation in language skills between language communities, the difference between girls and boys remained. This suggests that the difference is caused by robust factors that do not change between language communities.     

Twin study of laboratory-induced aggression

The aim of this study was to explore genetic and environmental contributions to laboratory-induced aggressive behavior. On a sample of 478 adult twins (316 monozygotic), the Competitive Reaction Time Task was used for aggression induction. The results showed that the initial, basic level of aggression could be explained by both shared (45%) and nonshared environmental factors (55%), while only nonshared environmental factors (100%) had a significant influence on changes in aggression as provocation increased. Genetic factors had no influence on laboratory-induced aggression. The results highlight the importance of environmental factors in shaping situation-specific aggressive responses to provocation.     

A Pilot Study of Emotion Regulation Strategies in a Psychodrama Group of Psychiatric Patients

The researcher analyzed two emotion regulation strategies in a group of adults attending psychodrama psychotherapeutic group at an outpatient psychiatric clinic. The subjects, nine men and 15 women between the ages of 19 and 63 (with 14 subjects in young and 10 in middle adulthood) self-assessed their use of reappraisal and suppression using the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire at the beginning of their treatment and at its end. They use reappraisal rarely to sometimes, regardless of their age, gender, and diagnosis. In the first assessment, the participants in middle adulthood and men reported using suppression more than young adults and women. During treatment, middle-aged adults and men succeeded to decrease their use of suppression significantly more than the young adults and women.     

Saying no (to a story): personal identity and negativity

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - The concept of narrativity and narrative identity has two birth certificates: it is linked to the phenomenological tradition—beginning with...     

A Relevant Logic of Questions

Journal of Philosophical Logic - This paper introduces the inquisitive extension of R, denoted as InqR, which is a relevant logic of questions based on the logic R as the background logic of...     

Eternity’s Death in Modernity: A Case of Murder? Of Resurrection?

ABSTRACT

The death of God and the death of eternity stand at the portals of modernity. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which Kojève called the modern counterpart to the Bible, concludes with the death of God. Despite Hegel having shown that everything, even God, has a time nucleus, at the level of ‘Absolute Knowing’, he takes eternity back into play, conceiving it as a structure of time, rather than a realm outside time. Thus, he wrenches a concept of eternity from time itself. Even though Hegel and Nietzsche are philosophical antipodes in many senses, we notice an ambivalent relation in Nietzsche’s works towards eternity as well. Nietzsche, the author of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the other ‘anti-Bible’ of modernity, proclaims eternity to be dead, while at the same time conceiving of an eternal recurrence, that of a dynamic eternity. First, it is argued that for both, eternity is essentially related to action and deed. Second, both highlight the importance of the past in reaching an adequate understanding of time and with it of eternity. Consequently, it is argued that modernity does not offer a vision of the future but a vibrant and often painful consciousness of the past.