There is No Such Thing as a Ceteris Paribus Law

In this paper I criticize the commonly accepted idea that the generalizations of the special sciences should be construed as ceteris paribus laws. This idea rests on mistaken assumptions about the role of laws in explanation and their relation to causal claims. Moreover, the major proposals in the literature for the analysis of ceteris paribus laws are, on their own terms, complete failures. I sketch a more adequate alternative account of the content of causal generalizations in the special sciences which I argue should replace the ceteris paribus conception. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

New perspectives on the effects of action on perceptual and cognitive development

This special section was motivated by a resurgence in the view that it is impossible to investigate perceptual and cognitive development without considering how it is affected by, and intertwined with, infants' and children's action in the world. This view has long been foundational to the field, yet contemporary investigations of the effects of acting on cognition and perception have been limited. The research showcased in this section indicates that this trend is changing as researchers consider anew the ways in which cognition derives structure from action. The work presented here illustrates the breadth of these potential effects across ages and domains of development, and it highlights the breadth of methods that can be recruited to investigate them. This new research focus provides insight for the mechanisms by which action affects perception and cognition and at the same time reveals that much remains to be learned.     

Metaplasticity rendered visible in paint: How matter ‘matters’ in the lifeworld of Human action.

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - Recent theoretical and philosophical movements within the study of material culture are more carefully attending to the variety of ways in which human...     

Remembering what one intended to forget: the lack of directed forgetting effects in implicit memory

The results of previous studies on directed forgetting effects in implicit memory have led to the conclusion that the underlying mechanism for such effects is an inhibition of retrieval or an encoding difficulty. Differences in procedure and stimuli may contribute to these different conclusions. In 2 studies we standardized the procedure while varying the stimuli. As in previous research, directed forgetting results were obtained for direct memory tasks. However, the magnitude of the directed forgetting effect varied with the stimuli. In Experiments 1 and 2, medium- and low-frequency to-be-remembered (R) and to-be-forgotten (F) words appeared to be equally accessible using the indirect task. In Experiment 3, we devised a procedure in which a single stem could lead to an R-word or F-word, but space was provided for only one word. In that way, we could examine the relative accessibility of R- and F-words. Results are discussed in light of Mandler's (1980) conceptualization of the contributions of identification and familiarity to memory retrieval processes.     

The contribution of metamemory deficits to schizophrenia

A number of recent studies have demonstrated that individuals with schizophrenia display knowledge corruption; that is, they hold false information with strong conviction. This aberration in metamemory is thought to stem from poor memory accuracy in conjunction with impaired discrimination of correct and incorrect judgments in terms of confidence. Thirty-one participants with schizophrenia, along with 61 healthy control participants and 48 control participants with other psychiatric conditions, participated in a computerized source memory task. Whereas no differences in memory accuracy were observed between the group with schizophrenia and the group with other psychiatric diagnoses, knowledge corruption was specifically impaired in those with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia participants showed a significantly decreased confidence gap: They were more confident in errors and less confident in correct responses relative to those in the control groups. Knowledge corruption is theorized to be a potential risk factor for the emergence of delusions.     

Assessing positive and negative changes in the aftermath of adversity: psychometric evaluation of the changes in outlook questionnaire

The Changes in Outlook Questionnaire (CiOQ; S. Joseph, R. Williams, & W. Yule, 1993) is a 26-item self-report measure that was designed to assess positive and negative changes in the aftermath of adversity. This article had 3 aims: 1st, to investigate the factor structure of the CiOQ; 2nd, to test for internal consistency reliability and convergent and discriminant validity; and, 3rd, to investigate the association between positive and negative changes in outlook, posttraumatic stress, and psychological distress. Three studies are reported. Study 1 provides evidence that positive and negative changes are statistically separable and that the 2-factor model is a better fit than the 1-factor model. Studies 2 and 3 provide evidence for internal consistency reliability, convergent and discriminant validity of the CiOQ, and its associations with posttraumatic stress and psychological distress. In conclusion, the CiOQ has much promise for research on responses to stressful and traumatic events.     

Hope against the cold: individual differences in trait hope and acute pain tolerance on the cold pressor task

Hope theory (see Snyder, 1994) is presented as a useful framework for understanding reactions to pain. In Study 1, persons scoring higher on the trait Hope Scale (Snyder, Harris et al., 1991) kept their hands in the freezing water (of a cold pressor task) for significantly longer. In Study 2, the higher-hope males, and not females, as measured by both trait and state hope (Snyder, Sympson et al., 1996), recognized the onset of the pain threshold significantly later. Moreover, in Study 2, results showed that individual differences measures of optimism, self-efficacy, depression, and positive and negative affects did not relate to the pain onset and tolerance variables. The implications of hope as related to the pain process and related research are discussed.