Psychometric Properties of the Childhood Anxiety Sensitivity Index in A sample of Catalan School Children

This study tested the utility of assessing anxiety sensitivity (AS) in children by investigating the long term stability and psychometric properties of a Catalan version of the Childhood Anxiety Childhood Anxiety Sensitivity Index (CASI, Silverman et al ., 1991, Journal of Clinical Child Psychology , 20 , 162-168) in a sample of 291 elementary-school children. The Catalan CASI demonstrated acceptable internal consistency and convergent validity estimates, similar to previous research with the English version. The measure also showed incremental validity in relation to other measures of anxiety and test-retest analyses suggested considerable three month and one-year stability in children's level of AS. Finally, a principal component analysis of the Catalan CASI yielded five lower-order factors grouped on a unique higher-order factor. The similarity of the findings to previous research on the CASI and on AS in English speaking children and adults is discussed and some suggestions for future investigations are presented.     

Over-estimation in numerosity estimation tasks: More than an attentional bias?

Over- and under-estimation have been observed in numerosity estimation and approximate arithmetic tasks. Two different models have been proposed to account for these reverse patterns of performance: 1) the bi-directional mapping account (Crollen, Castronovo, & Seron, 2011); 2) the operational momentum hypothesis (McCrink, Dehaene, & Dehaene-Lambertz, 2007). Our study was designed to examine whether the operational momentum could account for the over-estimation found in numerosity estimation tasks. To this aim, a series of 3 experiments involving a symbolic to non-symbolic numerical mapping and a rightward or leftward displacement along the mental number line were designed. Over-estimation was observed in these three tasks irrespective of the direction and size of the displacement to be done on the mental number line. These results thus clearly demonstrated that overestimation was not merely due to an attentional bias, but rather relied on the cognitive operation of mapping two differently scaled numerical representations.     

Two dimensional Standard Deontic Logic [including a detailed analysis of the 1985 Jones–P?rn deontic logic system]

This paper offers a two dimensional variation of Standard Deontic Logic SDL, which we call 2SDL. Using 2SDL we can show that we can overcome many of the difficulties that SDL has in representing linguistic sets of Contrary-to-Duties (known as paradoxes) including the Chisholm, Ross, Good Samaritan and Forrester paradoxes. We note that many dimensional logics have been around since 1947, and so 2SDL could have been presented already in the 1970s. Better late than never! As a detailed case study illustrating the power of 2SDL, we examine the system DL of Deontic Logic of Andrew Jones and Ingmar P?rn offered in 1985 to solve the Chisholm paradox of Contrary to Duties. The critical examination is done using logics and methods available in 1985 and solutions are proposed using what was available in 1985.     

Pellegrino,MacIntyre, and the internal morality of clinical medicine

Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - There has been significant debate about whether the moral norms of medical practice arise from some feature or set of features internal to the discipline of...     

Human biological and nonbiological point-light movements: Creation and validation of the dataset

Human action perception is so powerful that people can identify movement efficiently in the absence of pictorial information, such as in point-light displays. Interest is growing in this type of stimulus for research in neuroscience. This interest stems from the advantage of separating the component of pure human action kinematics from other pictorial information, such as facial expression and muscle contraction. Although several groups have previously developed datasets of human point-light actions, due to the lack of datasets composed of daily actions with short durations, we developed 20 biological and 40 control (scrambled) point-light movements by using the technique of recording people wearing reflector patches. The videos are about 1 s long. Subsequently, we performed a judgment task in which 100 participants (50 male and 50 female) evaluated each video according to three categories: human action resemblance, performed action, and gender of actor. We present the mean scores of each evaluation for each video, and further propose a selection of the most suitable videos to be used as human point-light action displays and scrambled point-light displays for control. Finally, we discuss our findings on the gender attributions of the point-light displays.