Assessing different aspects of pretend play within a play setting: Towards a standardized assessment of pretend play in young children

The present study suggests a method with which to assess the interrelations between different types of pretend play. In contrast to standard methods in this area, the various types of pretend play were measured within an interactive play scenario. The pretend play tasks were included in a semi‐structured play sequence and presented to young children between 24 and 30 months of age (N=30). Self‐ and doll‐directed pretence, object substitution, pretence with realistic objects, and self‐initiated pretend play, as well as the understanding that an object had been given two identities was tested. The capacity for dual representation was assessed by asking for the real and pretend identity of an object. Age differences were found in the overall score for elicited pretence but not for all items separately. Individual items also differed in difficulty and thus are of potential use for assessing intraindividual differences in pretend play. Findings are discussed in the context of current theories and methods concerning the development and assessment of pretend play.     

Catching up with wonderful women: The women‐are‐wonderful effect is smaller in more gender egalitarian societies

Inequalities between men and women are common and well‐documented. Objective indexes show that men are better positioned than women in societal hierarchies—there is no single country in the world without a gender gap. In contrast, researchers have found that the women‐are‐wonderful effect—that women are evaluated more positively than men overall—is also common. Cross‐cultural studies on gender equality reveal that the more gender egalitarian the society is, the less prevalent explicit gender stereotypes are. Yet, because self‐reported gender stereotypes may differ from implicit attitudes towards each gender, we reanalysed data collected across 44 cultures, and (a) confirmed that societal gender egalitarianism reduces the women‐are‐wonderful effect when it is measured more implicitly (i.e. rating the personality of men and women presented in images) and (b) documented that the social perception of men benefits more from gender egalitarianism than that of women.     

Subjunctive Conditional Probability

There seem to be two ways of supposing a proposition: supposing “indicatively” that Shakespeare didn’t write Hamlet, it is likely that someone else did; supposing “subjunctively” that Shakespeare hadn’t written Hamlet, it is likely that nobody would have written the play. Let P(B//A) be the probability of B on the subjunctive supposition that A. Is P(B//A) equal to the probability of the corresponding counterfactual, A □→B? I review recent triviality arguments against this hypothesis and argue that they do not succeed. On the other hand, I argue that even if we can equate P(B//A) with P(A □→B), we still need an account of how subjunctive conditional probabilities are related to unconditional probabilities. The triviality arguments reveal that the connection is not as straightforward as one might have hoped.     

The Structure Group of a Generalized Orthomodular Lattice

Orthomodular lattices with a two-valued Jauch–Piron state split into a generalized orthomodular lattice (GOML) and its dual. GOMLs are characterized as a class of L-algebras, a quantum structure which arises in the theory of Garside groups, algebraic logic, and in connections with solutions of the quantum Yang–Baxter equation. It is proved that every GOML X embeds into a group G(X) with a lattice structure such that the right multiplications in G(X) are lattice automorphisms. Up to isomorphism, X is uniquely determined by G(X), and the embedding \(X\hookrightarrow G(X)\) is a universal group-valued measure on X.