Cultural Values and Volunteering: A Cross-cultural Comparison of Students�� Motivation to Volunteer in 13 Countries

Voluntary participation is connected to cultural, political, religious and social contexts. Social and societal factors can provide opportunities, expectations and requirements for voluntary activity, as well as influence the values and norms promoting this. These contexts are especially central in the case of voluntary participation among students as they are often responding to the societal demands for building a career and qualifying for future assignments and/or government requirements for completing community service. This article questions how cultural values affect attitudes towards volunteerism, using data from an empirical research project on student volunteering activity in 13 countries in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia Pacific region. The findings indicate that there are differences in motivation between countries which represent different cultural values. This article sets these findings in context by comparing structural and cultural factors which may influence volunteerism within each country.     

Raising argument strength using negative evidence: a constraint on models of induction

Both intuitively, and according to similarity-based theories of induction, relevant evidence raises argument strength when it is positive and lowers it when it is negative. In three experiments, we tested the hypothesis that argument strength can actually increase when negative evidence is introduced. Two kinds of argument were compared through forced choice or sequential evaluation: single positive arguments (e.g., “Shostakovich’s music causes alpha waves in the brain; therefore, Bach’s music causes alpha waves in the brain”) and double mixed arguments (e.g., “Shostakovich’s music causes alpha waves in the brain, X’s music DOES NOT; therefore, Bach’s music causes alpha waves in the brain”). Negative evidence in the second premise lowered credence when it applied to an item X from the same subcategory (e.g., Haydn) and raised it when it applied to a different subcategory (e.g., AC/DC). The results constitute a new constraint on models of induction.     

Order or disorder? Impaired Hebb learning in dyslexia

The present study offers an integrative account proposing that dyslexia and its various associated cognitive impairments reflect an underlying deficit in the long-term learning of serial-order information, here operationalized as Hebb repetition learning. In nondyslexic individuals, improved immediate serial recall is typically observed when one particular sequence of items is repeated across an experimental session, a phenomenon known as the Hebb repetition effect. Starting from the critical observation that individuals with dyslexia seem to be selectively impaired in cognitive tasks that involve processing of serial order, the present study is the first to test and confirm the hypothesis that the Hebb repetition effect is affected in dyslexia, even for nonverbal modalities. We present a theoretical framework in which the Hebb repetition effect is assumed to be a laboratory analogue of naturalistic word learning, on the basis of which we argue that dyslexia is characterized by an impairment of serial-order learning that affects language learning and processing.     

“You Shouldn’t Look at Us Strangely”: An Exploratory Study on Personal Perspectives on Quality of Life of Adolescents with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders in Residential Youth Care

Applied Research in Quality of Life - Adolescents with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders (EBD) have complex needs and experience challenges in various developmental areas and life domains. The...     

Often biased but rarely in doubt: How initial reactions to stigmatized applicants affect interviewer confidence

Building on a metacognitive framework of heuristic judgments, we investigate the effect of applicant stigma on interviewers’ overconfidence in their (biased) judgments. There were 193 experienced interviewers conducting a face-to-face interview with an applicant who was facially stigmatized or not, and who was visible (traditional interview) or not (partially blind interview), to the interviewer during the rapport-building stage. In traditional interviews, interview judgments of stigmatized applicants were negatively biased, and interviewers reported overconfidence in these judgments. This effect was partially mediated by the interviewer’s professional performance during rapport building. Interview procedure moderated both the direct and indirect effect (through professional performance) of applicant stigma on interviewer confidence. Results show that interviewer (over)confidence in biased judgments is driven by the initial effects of, and reactions to, the stigmatized applicant.     

Post‐merger identification as a function of pre‐merger identification,relative representation,and pre‐merger status

This experiment examined the impact of pre‐merger identification (low, high), pre‐merger group status (low, high) and relative representation (low, high) upon identification with a new merger group. In the first phase of the study, 156 university students were assigned to a pre‐merger team of ‘inductive’ thinkers. Pre‐merger identification was manipulated by giving the participants feedback about the extent to which they used the inductionist style. Pre‐merger status was manipulated by informing participants that their team had performed worse or better than a deductionist team on a decision‐making task. In the second phase, the two pre‐merger teams were combined into a merger team of analyst thinkers. Relative representation was manipulated by maintaining most or none of the features of the pre‐merger team in this new merger team. The results revealed that high pre‐merger identifiers identified more strongly with the merger group than did low pre‐merger identifiers, but only when the relative representation was high. Pre‐merger status did not influence post‐merger identification. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Measuring coherence

This paper aims to contribute to our understanding of the notion of coherence by explicating in probabilistic terms, step by step, what seem to be our most basic intuitions about that notion, to wit, that coherence is a matter of hanging or fitting together, and that coherence is a matter of degree. A qualitative theory of coherence will serve as a stepping stone to formulate a set of quantitative measures of coherence, each of which seems to capture well the aforementioned intuitions. Subsequently it will be argued that one of those measures does better than the others in light of some more specific intuitions about coherence. This measure will be defended against two seemingly obvious objections.     

A corrective to Bovens and Hartmann’s measure of coherence

Bovens and Hartmann (Bayesian Epistemology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) propose to analyze coherence as a confidence-boosting property. On the basis of this idea, they construct a new probabilistic theory of coherence. In this paper, I will attempt to show that the resulting measure of coherence clashes with some of the intuitions that motivate it. Also, I will try to show that this clash is not due to the view on coherence as a confidence-boosting property or to the general features of the model that Bovens and Hartmann use to analyze coherence. It will turn out that there is at least one other measure that is similarly based on the concept of a confidence-boosting property, but does not have the same counterintuitive results.     

Tactile perception of thermal diffusivity

The thermal diffusivity of an object is a parameter that controls the rate at which heat is extracted from the hand when it touches that object. It is an important feature for distinguishing materials by means of touch. In order to quantitatively describe the ability of human observers to discriminate between materials on the basis of heat extraction rate, we conducted an experiment in which this heat extraction was performed in a controlled way. In different conditions, subjects were repeatedly asked to select from two stimuli the one that cooled faster. The discrimination threshold was around 43% of the extraction rate. A rate that was twice as slow also yielded twice the absolute threshold. When we halved the temperature difference between the beginning and end of the stimulus, the threshold did not change as much. In separate experiments, we investigated the different cues that were available in the stimulus: initial cooling rate and end temperature. Both cues were used for discrimination, but cooling rate seemed to be the most important.