No,one should not believe all truths

In a recent paper, Alexander Greenberg defends a truth norm of belief according to which if one has some doxastic attitude towards p, one ought to believe that p if and only if p is true (da). He responds, in particular, to the ‘blindspot’ objection to truth norms such as da: in the face of true blindspots, such as it is raining and nobody believes that it is raining, truth norms such as da are unsatisfiable; they entail that one ought to believe p, but if one does believe p, they entail that it is not the case that one ought to believe p. In this paper, it is argued that Greenberg’s response to the blindspot objection is unsatisfactory.     

Stereotypes and stereotyping: What's the brain got to do with it?

Influential social-psychological models suggest that perceivers frequently use information-processing strategies that result in the stereotype-based construal and treatment of other people. To elucidate in greater detail when, why, and how social encounters elicit stereotyping, researchers have begun to incorporate neuroscientific tools into their repertoire of investigative methods. The current article reviews these studies and considers their significance in light of existing theories of person perception, knowledge representation, and impression formation. Finally, using the concrete example of stereotyping, benefits and pitfalls of adopting a social neuroscience approach are discussed.     

When believing in the union is (not) enough: The role of threat and norms in intentions to act on union legitimacy and efficacy beliefs

Three field studies conducted with academics and students examined the dynamic role of threat and normative support for a union in qualifying the relationship between union‐related legitimacy and efficacy beliefs, and union intentions. There was evidence for interplay between threat and norms in facilitating people acting in accordance with their union beliefs, and in providing the conditions where those with weaker beliefs may be mobilised. In Study 1, students' perception of threat to group interests facilitated their preparedness to act on pro‐union legitimacy and efficacy beliefs. In Study 2, among academics who perceived low threat, acting on union legitimacy and efficacy beliefs was contingent on a pro‐union norm, while those who perceived high threat were prepared to act on their union legitimacy beliefs regardless of the normative environment. Finally, in Study 3, a pro‐union norm again facilitated acting on union beliefs in a low threat condition and overcame the importance of legitimacy and efficacy beliefs in a high threat condition. In sum, this research makes a case for the importance of union strategies attending to both the framing of intergroup threat and the communication of in‐group normative support for the union.     

Neuropsychological test norms controlled for physical health: Does it matter?

The objective of the present study was to investigate the effects of physical health on neuropsychological test norms. Medical and neuropsychological data from 118 healthy volunteer controls, aged 26–91 years, were collected during five recruitment occasions. The examinations included a clinical investigation, brain neuroimaging, and a comprehensive neuropsychological test battery. Test‐specific statistical regression‐weights for age, education and gender were calculated to establish preliminary test norms. Hierarchical regression analyses demonstrated that control in addition for physical health moved best performance from age 60 to 65 for abstraction; replaced a plateau above age 70 for verbal fluency, with a continued rise in performance; eliminated significant negative influences of age on auditory learning, spatial reasoning and complex copying; reduced them on wordlist recall, psychomotor speed, visual scanning and mental shifting; and slightly reduced negative influences of low education on most verbal tests, several memory tests, and psychomotor speed, indicating rises in normative scores of up to 0.8 SD at age 80 and 0.4 SD at age 60. No differences were found at age 40. Although the sample size is not adequate to be used for normative data, the findings indicate that norms uncontrolled for health overestimate the negative influence of advanced age and low education, implying a risk of drawing false diagnostic conclusions.     

The influence of self‐efficacy,subjective norms,and risk perception on behavioral intentions related to the H1N1 flu pandemic: A comparison between Korea and the US

This study examined the extent to which individualism‐collectivism moderates the relative effects of agency control beliefs (i.e., self‐efficacy), social norms (i.e., subjective norms), and risk perception (perceived vulnerability and perceived severity) on behavioral intention to engage in self‐protection behavior in the context of the H1N1 flu pandemic. Using multistage stratified sampling, the present study sampled people from the US (n = 399) and Korea (n = 500), two countries that have been found to be prototypical of individualistic and collectivistic national cultures, respectively. Consistent with the contrast between individualism and collectivism, the results of moderated regression analyses showed that intrapersonal control beliefs (i.e., self‐efficacy) and risk perception (i.e., perceived severity) had stronger effects on behavioral intention in the American sample than in the Korean sample, whereas social norms (i.e., subjective norms) had a stronger predictive power for the Korean sample than for the American sample. Overall, the findings contribute to health and risk studies by specifying which aspects of risk perceptions or beliefs are affected by national culture and how this translates into cross‐national variations in health risk behavioral intention.     

Reproducing affective norms with lexical co-occurrence statistics: Predicting valence,arousal, and dominance

Human ratings of valence, arousal, and dominance are frequently used to study the cognitive mechanisms of emotional attention, word recognition, and numerous other phenomena in which emotions are hypothesized to play an important role. Collecting such norms from human raters is expensive and time consuming. As a result, affective norms are available for only a small number of English words, are not available for proper nouns in English, and are sparse in other languages. This paper investigated whether affective ratings can be predicted from length, contextual diversity, co-occurrences with words of known valence, and orthographic similarity to words of known valence, providing an algorithm for estimating affective ratings for larger and different datasets. Our bootstrapped ratings achieved correlations with human ratings on valence, arousal, and dominance that are on par with previously reported correlations across gender, age, education and language boundaries. We release these bootstrapped norms for 23,495 English words.     

The Effectiveness of Functional Family Therapy in Reducing Adolescent Mental Health Risk and Family Adjustment Difficulties in an Irish Context

To evaluate the effectiveness of Functional Family Therapy (FFT) 42 cases were randomized to FFT and 55 to a waiting‐list control group. Minimization procedures controlled the effects of potentially confounding baseline variables. Cases were treated by a team of five therapists who implemented FFT with a moderate degree of fidelity. Rates of clinical recovery were significantly higher in the FFT group than in the control group. Compared to the comparison group, parents in the FFT group reported significantly greater improvement in adolescent problems on the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) and both parents and adolescents reported improvements in family adjustment on the Systemic Clinical Outcomes and Routine Evaluation (SCORE). In addition, 93% of youth and families in the treatment condition completed FFT. Improvements shown immediately after treatment were sustained at 3‐month follow‐up. Results provide a current demonstration of FFT's effectiveness for youth with behavior problems in community‐based settings, expand our understanding of the range of positive outcomes of FFT to include mental health risk and family‐defined problem severity and impact, and suggests that it is an effective intervention when implemented in an Irish context.     

The functional‐cognitive framework as a tool for accelerating progress in cognitive neuroscience: On the benefits of bridging rather than reducing levels of analyses

The subject matter of neuroscience research is complex, and synthesising the wealth of data from this research to better understand mental processes is challenging. A useful strategy, therefore, may be to distinguish explicitly between the causal effects of the environment on behaviour (i.e. functional analyses) and the mental processes that mediate these effects (i.e. cognitive analyses). In this article, we describe how the functional‐cognitive (F‐C) framework can accelerate cognitive neuroscience and also advance a functional treatment of brain activity. We first highlight that cognitive neuroscience can particularly benefit from the F‐C approach by providing an alternative to the problematic practice of reducing cognitive constructs to behavioural and/or neural proxies. Next, we outline how functional (behaviour–environment) relations can serve as a bridge between cognitive and neural processes by restoring mental constructs to their original role as heuristic tools. Finally, we give some examples of how both cognitive neuroscience and traditional functional approaches can mutually benefit from the F‐C framework.