Animal groups and social ontology: an argument from the phenomenology of behavior

Through a critical engagement with Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the concepts of nature, life, and behavior, and with contemporary accounts of animal groups, this article argues that animal groups exhibit sociality and that sociality is a fundamental ontological condition. I situate my account in relation to the ss="EmphasisTypeItalic ">superorganism and ss="EmphasisTypeItalic ">selfish individual accounts of animal groups in recent biology and zoology. I argue that both accounts are inadequate. I propose an alternative account of animal groups and animal sociality through a Merleau-Pontian inspired definition of behavior. I criticize Merleau-Ponty’s individualistic prejudice, but show that his philosophy contains the resources necessary to overcome this bias. I define behavior as a ss="EmphasisTypeItalic ">holistic, ss="EmphasisTypeItalic ">ongoing, ss="EmphasisTypeItalic ">meaningful and Umwelt-ss="EmphasisTypeItalic ">oriented intrinsically configured expression of living forms of existence. By looking at cases of animal groups drawn from contemporary studies in zoology and behavioral ecology, I show that animal groups, in the fact that they behave, manifest themselves to be a fundamental form of existence, namely, the social form of existence.     

A Study of the Ethical Dilemmas Experienced by School Psychologists in Portugal

This study examines the ethical dilemmas and difficulties encountered by Portuguese school psychologists. As part of a larger survey, participants were asked about ethical issues faced in daily practice and asked to describe ethical incidents. Of the 477 respondents, 274 reported 441 ethically troubling or challenging situations. Responses were coded into a six-category system based on the code of ethics of Portuguese psychologists. Most of the reported dilemmas concerned privacy and confidentiality principles (53%). Results are discussed in light of relevant literature and international findings. Implications for the development of the profession and future research are provided.     

Reproductive Endocrinologists’ Utilization of Genetic Counselors for Oncofertility and Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD) Treatment of <Emphasis Type="Italic">BRCA1/2</Emphasis> Mutation Carriers

Genetic counselors believe fertility preservation and preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) discussions to be a part of their role when counseling ss="EmphasisTypeItalic ">BRCA1/2 mutation-positive patients. This study is the first to explore reproductive endocrinologists’ (REI) practices and attitudes regarding involvement of genetic counselors in the care of ss="EmphasisTypeItalic ">BRCA1/2 mutation carriers seeking fertility preservation and PGD. A survey was mailed to 1000 REIs from Reproductive Endocrinology & Infertility (SREI), an American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) affiliate group. A 14.5 % response rate was achieved; data was analyzed using SPSS software. The majority of participating REIs were found to recommend genetic counseling to cancer patients considering fertility preservation (82 %) and consult with a genetic counselor regarding PGD for hereditary cancer syndromes (92 %). Additionally, REIs consult genetic counselors regarding PGD patient counseling (88 %), genetic testing (78 %), and general genetics questions (66 %). Two areas genetic counselors may further aid REIs are: elicitation of family history, which is useful to determine fertility preservation and PGD intervention timing (32 % of REIs utilize a cancer family history to determine intervention timing); and, interpretation of variants of uncertain significance (VOUS) as cancer panel genetic testing becomes more common (36 % of REIs are unfamiliar with VOUS). Given our findings, the Oncofertility Consortium® created an online resource for genetic counselors focused on fertility preservation education and communication strategies.     

Relationships Between Trait Anxiety,Demographic Variables,and School Adjustment in Students with Specific Learning Disabilities

The present study investigated relationships between dimensions of anxiety, age, gender, and school adjustment in students with specific learning disabilities (SLD). The 177 students with SLD completed measures of anxiety and school adjustment. The results of a hierarchical regression analysis indicated that age and gender together were not significant predictors of attitude to school, and that after the influence of age and gender had been removed students with more physiological and social anxiety, but less worry tended to have poorer attitudes toward school. A second hierarchical regression indicated that younger students reported more negative attitudes toward teachers, and after controlling for age and gender, students with more social anxiety reported more negative attitudes toward teachers. Implications for school personnel are discussed.     

Perception of Sentence Stress in Speech Correlates With the Temporal Unpredictability of Prosodic Features

Numerous studies have examined the acoustic correlates of sentential stress and its underlying linguistic functionality. However, the mechanism that connects stress cues to the listener's attentional processing has remained unclear. Also, the learnability versus innateness of stress perception has not been widely discussed. In this work, we introduce a novel perspective to the study of sentential stress and put forward the hypothesis that perceived sentence stress in speech is related to the unpredictability of prosodic features, thereby capturing the attention of the listener. As predictability is based on the statistical structure of the speech input, the hypothesis also suggests that stress perception is a result of general statistical learning mechanisms. To study this idea, computational simulations are performed where temporal prosodic trajectories are modeled with an n‐gram model. Probabilities of the feature trajectories are subsequently evaluated on a set of novel utterances and compared to human perception of stress. The results show that the low‐probability regions of F0 and energy trajectories are strongly correlated with stress perception, giving support to the idea that attention and unpredictability of sensory stimulus are mutually connected.     

A Theoretical Model of Psychometric Effects of Faking on Assessment Procedures: Empirical findings and implications for personality at work

This article proposes a theoretical model for explaining the psychometric effects of faking on assessment procedures (e.g., biodata, interviews, assessment center, personality inventories, and self‐reported measures). The model hypothesizes that faking is a phenomenon of homogenization of scores, consisting of a double mechanism that increases the mean, on one hand, and decreases the standard deviation of distributions of scores, on the other. Subsequently, this affects the covariance, reliability, and validity of assessment procedures negatively. The model predicts that a mean ratio (faking ratio) greater than 1 and a coefficient of homogeneity u smaller than 1 characterizes faking. Meta‐analysis was used to test several predictions of the theoretical model in the case of the personality measures. A database of 46 independent studies was created. All the studies used the NEO‐PI‐R for assessing the Big Five and their facets. The general pattern of data fully supported the model predictions. Implications for personnel assessment and, particularly, for personality assessment are discussed.     

Masked orthographic priming in bilingual word recognition

Two lexical decision experiments tested the influence of briefly presented orthographically related primes on target word recognition in bilinguals. The prime stimuli were high-frequency words either from the same language as that of the target or from the other language known by the bilingual subjects. When the prime and target were from the same language, orthographically related primes systematically inhibited target word recognition, whereas orthographically dissimilar primes did not. When the prime and target were words from different languages, the amount of inhibition increased as a function of subjects’ level of proficiency in the prime word’s language, with highly proficient bilinguals showing practically equivalent amounts of within and across language inhibitory priming. These results strongly suggest that a printed string of letters can simultaneously activate lexical representations in both of the bilingual’s languages (insofar as these share the same alphabet), even when subjects are performing a monolingual task.     

Perceptions of Chicano/Latino Students Who Have Dropped Out of School

Chicano/Latino drop out was investigated in a qualitative study, conducting focus group interviews with Chicano/Latinos who had dropped out of high school. Participant responses revealed themes of alienation and discrimination in the school setting. The roles of school counselors as multicultural advocates and community-family-school liaisons are discussed.     

The effect of situation familiarity on the establishment of co-references between mother and infant

The purpose of this study was to determine whether the familiarity or the novelty of play objects available during mother-infant interaction has an effect on the mother's ability to capture and maintain the infant's attention. Twelve mother-infant dyads with 5- and 9-month-old infants were filmed during two 5-minute sessions with familiar or unfamiliar toys. Changes in the infant's visual orientation preceded by a maternal behaviour within a 3-sec interval were studied. In the familiar toy situation, the infants focused more frequently on the maternal referent than with the unfamiliar toys. The mother's verbal and non-verbal interventions were more effective at initiating and maintaining co-reference, because the infant was more frequently in an receptive state. Conversely, when the toys were unfamiliar, the baby was often the initiator. Unfamiliar objects, which appear more attractive, may compete with the mother's attempts to gain the child's attention.     

The structure of social attitudes in three countries: Tests of a criterial referent theory(1)

A criterial referents theory of attitudes was tested cross-culturally by administering a social attitude referents (single words and short phrases) summated-rating scale, suitably “transformed”, to 500 graduate students of education in the United States, 470 mature students of psychology in Spain, and 270 students of the social sciences and a stratified random sample of 685 persons in the Netherlands. The theory claims a dualistic (two second-order factors) structure of social attitudes, thus challenging the common assumption of attitude bipolarity, which arises from the notion that differing attitude orientations oppose each other, e. g., conservatism versus liberalism. First-order factor analysis of the correlations among the items and second-order factor analysis of the correlations among the first-order obliquely rotated factors supported the theoretical predictions with certain exceptions. In general, the first-order factors of the referents scales contained only conservatism or only liberalism items; negative loading were mostly low in magnitude. Four similar conservative factors and four similar liberalism factors appeared in the three countries, with one, two, or three unique factors in each sample. The second-order factor analyses yielded two main orthogonal factors, one identifiable as conservatism, the other as liberalism; a third factor was complementary to one of the two main factors. Bipolarity was a relatively minor phenomenon. Thus the results indicated the empirical cross-cultural validity of the theory, but also the need for its further specification.