The disposition-situation debate and research on aggression

Person-situation interaction is considered in the light of a redefinition of the notions of consistency, stability, coherence, and specificity. A research program able to combine the study of individual differences with experimental research in a developmental perspective is recommended. Findings from research on aggression are presented to support this approach.     

Indicators of aggression: The dissipation-rumination scale

Discussion on results of recent studies on Irritability and Emotional Susceptibility scales introduces the presentation of a new scale to study individual differences related to aggressive behavior. The new Dissipation-Rumination Scale results from examining the influence of the interval of time between the instigation and the opportunity to aggress and is related to the inclination to overcome and abandon more or less rapidly feelings of distress and wishes of retaliation associated with the experience of insults suffered. While principal-components analysis confirms the unifactorial structure of the scale with respect to groups of Ss of different language and nationality, results of experimental studies clarify its construct validity.     

Mental representation and hypothetico-deductive reasoning: The case of the THOG problem

Summary This article reports three experiments that deal with the source of the difficulty of Wason's (1977) THOG problem. The solution of this problem demands both the postulation of hypotheses and a combinatorial analysis of their consequences. Experiment 1 showed that the generation of the hypotheses is not in itself sufficient to solve the problem. Experiment 2 showed that a version presenting a plausible context for separating the level of data from that of hypotheses produced a better performance than both the original abstract version and a thematic version lacking the plausible context separating the levels. Experiment 3 gave evidence that this context can produce facilitation even with the geometric material of the classic version. This experiment also showed that a pictorial presentation of data and a verbal presentation of hypotheses affect performance negatively. The results demonstrate the role of problem representation in problem solving, and, in particular, the role of homogeneity in representing data and hypotheses in hypothetico-deductive reasoning.     

Trait congruence in the study of the cognitive consequences of emotional arousal

This study investigated the possible influence of mood and emotional vulnerability on recall. Mood was induced by projecting highly emotionally laden slides. In the first experiment, 64 female subjects, rated low or high on emotional vulnerability, were tested on recall of mood-congruent, mood-incongruent and neutral words, under mood induction and non-mood induction conditions. Emotionally low-vulnerable subjects recalled more mood-congruent than mood-incongruent words in the mood induction condition, whereas the opposite was the case in the non-mood induction condition. Highly vulnerable subjects recalled more mood-congruent than mood-incongruent words in the non-mood induction condition and fewer mood-congruent words in the mood induction compared with non-mood induction condition. The results are discussed in terms of ‘mood congruence’ (to explain low-vulnerable (LV) subjects' performance) and in terms of ‘trait congruence’ (to explain highly-vulnerable (HV) subjects' performance). In a second experiment, which investigated LV and HV subjects' galvanic skin responses to highly- and low-emotionally laden slides, the highest values were those for HV subjects when exposed to emotional slides. The different activation of LV and HV subjects led us to reconsider previous reasoning regarding mood congruence and trait congruence in the light of the inverted U theory.     

Measuring parental and family efficacy beliefs of adolescents' parents: Cross‐cultural comparisons in Italy and Portugal

The goal of this study was to examine the psychometric properties of the Perceived Parental Self‐Efficacy (PPSE) and Perceived Family Collective Efficacy (PFCE) revised scales in the Portuguese and Italian contexts. To this aim two studies were conducted: the first reported the exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses with Portuguese samples, whereas the second addressed the cross‐cultural invariance of PPSE and PFCE (Portugal and Italy). Results of the first study showed the appropriate fit of the unifactorial model of both scales to Portuguese data. The invariance analyses performed in the second study attested to the PPSE and PFCE's configural, metric and scalar invariance in both countries. The correlations of PPSE and PFCE with communication, management of conflict and children's school achievement further attested to their construct and practical validity. Thus, PPSE and PFCE proved to be suitable to further use in research and psychological assessment fields.     

Hermeneutics and the Philosophy of Medicine: Hans-Georg Gadamer'sPlatonic Metaphor

Taking as our starting point Plato'smetaphor of the doctor as philosopher we reflect on some aspects of the epistemological status of medicine. The framework to this paper is the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer which shows the paradoxical nature of Western medicine in choosing the body-object as its investigative starting point, while in actual fact dealing with subjects. Gadamer proposes a model of medicine as the art of understanding and dialogue, which is capable of bringing together its various constituent parts, i.e. knowledge, knowing how to do and knowing how to be, in medical practice and in the physician'straining. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the dyadic figure of the physician as Platonic master of the living totality and wounded healer, capable of activating the patient'sself-healing capacity.     

Children's understanding of posterior probability

Do young children have a basic intuition of posterior probability? Do they update their decisions and judgments in the light of new evidence? We hypothesized that they can do so extensionally, by considering and counting the various ways in which an event may or may not occur. The results reported in this paper showed that from the age of five, children's decisions under uncertainty (Study 1) and judgments about random outcomes (Study 2) are correctly affected by posterior information. From the same age, children correctly revise their decisions in situations in which they face a single, uncertain event, produced by an intentional agent (Study 3). The finding that young children have some understanding of posterior probability supports the theory of naive extensional reasoning, and contravenes some pessimistic views of probabilistic reasoning, in particular the evolutionary claim that the human mind cannot deal with single-case probability.     

Assessing regulatory emotional self-efficacy in three countries

The Regulatory Emotional Self-Efficacy (RESE) scale was developed to assess perceived self-efficacy in managing negative (NEG) and in expressing positive (POS) affect (G. V. Caprara & M. Gerbino, 2001). In this study of young adults, the factorial structure of the RESE scale was found to be similar in Italy, the United States, and Bolivia. In addition to a factor for POS, NEG was represented by a second-order factor of 2 different negative affects: despondency-distress (DES) and anger-irritation (ANG). Overall, there was partial invariance at both metric and scalar levels across gender and countries. Discriminant and convergent validity of the RESE scale was further examined in the Italian sample. Stronger patterns of association of POS with prosocial behavior, of ANG with low aggressive behavior problems and irritability, and of DES with low anxiety/depressive problems and shyness and high self-esteem were found.     

Intellectual ability, learning style, personality, achievement motivation and academic success of psychology students in higher education

This study is directed towards an integration of intellectual ability, learning style, personality and achievement motivation as predictors of academic success in higher education. Correlational analyses partly confirmed and partly disconfirmed our expectations in a sample of 409 first-year psychology students. Consistent with the literature, intellectual ability and achievement motivation were associated positively with academic success. For the meaning directed, reproduction directed and application directed learning style, no positive association with academic success could be detected. The undirected learning style, however, appeared to be a consistent negative predictor. For the Big Five personality factors (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness to experience), a consistent, positive association for conscientiousness with academic success was found. The very first examination at the university came out as the most important predictor for academic success, even after two and three years of study. The implications of the results are discussed in relation to the literature and the policy of the Dutch Ministry of Education.     

Reciprocal Relations Among Self-Efficacy Beliefs and Prosociality Across Time

ABSTRACT The present study examined the longitudinal relations between individuals' prosociality and their self-efficacy beliefs in regard to emotional regulation and responding empathically to others' needs. The participants were 244 females and 222 males with a mean age of 17 years ( SD =1.5) at T1, 19 years ( SD =1.4) at T2, and 21 years ( SD =1.6) at T3. The findings corroborated the posited paths of relations assigning empathic self-efficacy a major role in predicting the level of individuals' prosociality. Empathic self-efficacy beliefs mediated the relations of regulative emotional self-efficacy beliefs to prosocial tendencies such as caring, sharing, helping, and empathic concern toward others. The posited conceptual model accounted for a significant portion of variance in prosociality and has implications for interventions designed to promote and sustain prosociality.