Jan Patočka’s sacrifice: philosophy as dissent

This article attempts to bring together the life, situation, and philosophical work of the Czech phenomenologist Jan Pato?ka in order to present his conception of philosophy and sacrifice and to understand his action of dissent and his own sacrifice as spokesman for Charter 77 in light of these concepts. Pato?ka philosophized despite being barred from teaching under the German occupation and under the communist regime, even after he was forced to retire and banned from publication. He also refused the official philosophical categories of communism and, what is more, criticized the very manner in which its ideology allowed it to function. Against the destruction of moral and political life by communist and liberal regimes alike, he outlined the necessity of a “life in the idea” that would be responsive to the notion of sacrifice. Such a position of distance from the things of the world which remains anchored among them is meant to respond to dissatisfaction with the world as it is found and is the very movement of human freedom. Taken together, these three aspects of his philosophical practice made him a dissident, a role he took on more completely when, as part of the Charter 77 movement, he publicly opposed the state, in a course of action that led to his death.     

Birth Order Position and Prosocial Tendencies

This study investigated the relationship between psychological birth order position and different types and levels of prosocial tendencies. An ex postfacto, between-family research design was used. Data on prosocial tendencies were obtained from 888 college students (females = 80.4%, mean age = 20.94 yrs, SD = 2.83; males = 19.6%, mean age = 21.62 yrs, SD = 2.44). Participants completed a biographical questionnaire as well as the Prosocial Tendencies Measure (Carlo & Randall, 2002). Data were analysed to compare and contrast prosocial tendencies between demographics using parametric ANOVAs, t tests and the Mann-Whitney Test. Significant differences in prosocial tendency scores were only found between middle-borns and last-borns on altruism, with middle-borns scoring significantly higher in prosocial tendencies than last-borns. There is no evidence to suggest that a definitive link between prosocial tendencies and birth order exists in this study.     

Parental Attachment and Adolescents' Perception of School Alienation: The Mediation Role of Self-Esteem and Adjustment

The present study examined the relationship between adolescents' attachment to parents and their feelings of alienation in the school context by considering the mediating role of adjustment and self-esteem. It was proposed that the degree of attachment to one's parents was associated with adjustment and self-esteem, which in turn predicted possible school alienation. A total of 227 students completed self-report measures on parental attachment, adjustment, self-esteem, and alienation from school. Results were consistent with the attachment theory and related literature that posits that (a) secure attachment to parents was associated with adjustment and self-esteem, (b) secure attachment to parents was negatively associated with feelings of school alienation, and (c) adjustment and self-esteem were a crucial mediators between attachment to parents and school alienation. In addition to enhanced adjustment, the self-esteem of adolescents may be an additional factor in reducing alienation at school. The results also supported the mediator role of self-esteem in the relationship between attachment to parents and adjustment. Finally, the relationship between self-esteem and school alienation were shown to be fully mediated by adjustment. The results were discussed in the context of responsibilities of teachers and school counselors, which may provide both students and parents with the skills to improve social functioning in the school context.     

Cross‐cultural Generalizability of the Alternative Five‐factor Model Using the Zuckerman–Kuhlman–Aluja Personality Questionnaire

Several personality models are known for being replicable across cultures, such as the Five‐Factor Model (FFM) or Eysenck's Psychoticism–Extraversion–Neuroticism (PEN) model, and are for this reason considered universal. The aim of the current study was to evaluate the cross‐cultural replicability of the recently revised Alternative FFM (AFFM). A total of 15 048 participants from 23 cultures completed the Zuckerman–Kuhlman–Aluja Personality Questionnaire (ZKA‐PQ) aimed at assessing personality according to this revised AFFM. Internal consistencies, gender differences and correlations with age were similar across cultures for all five factors and facet scales. The AFFM structure was very similar across samples and can be considered as highly replicable with total congruence coefficients ranging from .94 to .99. Measurement invariance across cultures was assessed using multi‐group confirmatory factor analyses, and each higher‐order personality factor did reach configural and metric invariance. Scalar invariance was never reached, which implies that culture‐specific norms should be considered. The underlying structure of the ZKA‐PQ replicates well across cultures, suggesting that this questionnaire can be used in a large diversity of cultures and that the AFFM might be as universal as the FFM or the PEN model. This suggests that more research is needed to identify and define an integrative framework underlying these personality models. Copyright © 2016 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Collateral Reports and Cross-Informant Agreement about Adult Psychopathology in 14 Societies

To advance international mental health assessment, instruments that have been internationally validated are needed. To this end, we analyzed ratings from 14 societies on the Adult Behavior Checklist (ABCL), a collateral-report form parallel to the Adult Self-Report (ASR; Achenbach and Rescorla ref="#CR1">2003) for ages 18 to 59. Both the ABCL and the ASR assess problems, personal strengths, and adaptive functioning. For a sample of 8322 see note below collaterals, we found strong consistency across societies regarding which ABCL problem items tended to obtain relatively low, medium, or high ratings. Most societal effect sizes (ESs) for problem scale scores were small to medium (< 13.9 %), but the ES for the ABCL Personal Strengths scale was 25 %. For most of the same participants (N = 8,302), we analyzed cross-informant agreement between self-reports on the ASR and collateral reports on the ABCL. Cross-informant correlations for problem scale scores averaged .47, with considerable societal variation. Problem score means were higher on the ASR than the ABCL in every society, but the size of the difference varied across societies. Mean item ratings on the ABCL and ASR were highly correlated within every society (mean r = .92), but within-dyad item rating agreement varied widely in every society (mean r = .39). In all societies, non-corroboration of self-reported deviance and of collateral-reported deviance was common. Overall findings indicated considerable similarity but also some important differences in collateral-reported problems and adaptive functioning across 14 societies.     

Logically Incorrect Arguments

What do we learn when we find out that an argument is logically incorrect? If logically incorrect means the same as not logically correct, which in turn means not having a valid logical form, it seems that we do not learn anything too useful—an argument which is logically incorrect can still be conclusive. Thus, it seems that it makes sense to fix a stronger interpretation of the term under which a logically incorrect argument is guaranteed to be wrong (and is such for purely logical reasons). In this paper, we show that pinpointing this stronger sense is much trickier than one would expect; but eventually we reach an explication of the notion of (strong) logical incorrectness which we find non-trivial and viable.     

The spatiotopic representation of visual objects across time

Each eye movement introduces changes in the retinal location of objects. How a stable spatiotopic representation emerges from such variable input is an important question for the study of vision. Researchers have classically probed human observers' performance in a task requiring a location judgment about an object presented at different locations across a saccade. Correct performance on this task requires realigning or remapping retinal locations to compensate for the saccade. A recent study showed that performance improved with longer presaccadic viewing time, suggesting that accurate spatiotopic representations take time to build up. The first goal of the study was to replicate that finding. Two experiments, one an exact replication and the second a modified version, failed to replicate improved performance with longer presaccadic viewing time. The second goal of this study was to examine the role of attention in constructing spatiotopic representations, as theoretical and neurophysiological accounts of remapping have proposed that only attended targets are remapped. A third experiment thus manipulated attention with a spatial cueing paradigm and compared transsaccadic location performance of attended versus unattended targets. No difference in spatiotopic performance was found between attended and unattended targets. Although only negative results are reported, they might nevertheless suggest that spatiotopic representations are relatively stable over time.     

Tool use in left brain damage and Alzheimer's disease: What about function and manipulation knowledge?

Tool use disorders are usually associated with difficulties in retrieving function and manipulation knowledge. Here, we investigate tool use (Real Tool Use, RTU), function (Functional Association, FA) and manipulation knowledge (Gesture Recognition, GR) in 17 left‐brain‐damaged (LBD) patients and 14 AD patients (Alzheimer disease). LBD group exhibited predicted deficit on RTU but not on FA and GR while AD patients showed deficits on GR and FA with preserved tool use skills. These findings question the role played by function and manipulation knowledge in actual tool use.     

Contrast effects in judgmental forecasting when assessing the implications of worst and best case scenarios

Two experiments investigated whether individuals' forecasts of the demand for products and a stock market index assuming a best or worst case scenario depend on whether they have seen a single scenario in isolation or whether they have also seen a second scenario presenting an opposing view of the future. Normatively, scenarios should be regarded as belonging to different plausible future worlds so that the judged implications of one scenario should not be affected when other scenarios are available. However, the results provided evidence of contrast effects in that the presentation of a second “opposite” scenario led to more extreme forecasts consistent with the polarity of the original scenario. In addition, people were more confident about their forecasts based on a given scenario when two opposing scenarios were available. We examine the implications of our findings for the elicitation of point forecasts and judgmental prediction intervals and the biases that are often associated with them.