The Conceptual Complexity of Central Bankers and the Asian Financial Crisis

This paper examines the impact of the conceptual complexity of central bankers on exchange rate volatility during the Asian Financial Crisis of the late 1990s. Theoretically, this paper develops a framework to study the cognitive style of individual central bankers in conjunction with the institutional features of the central banks they head. The paper also controls for a variety of other common explanations for exchange rate volatility during this time period, including the number of veto players representing the political system and underlying structural features of the Asian economies. Empirically, the cross-sectional time-series analysis finds that more conceptually complex central bankers were able to reduce exchange rate volatility during the crisis years, especially when they inhabited highly independent central banks. This paper concludes that linking the study of key individuals to macroeconomic outcomes in the global political economy is a promising area of research.     

Historical Analogies and the Definition of Interests: The Iranian Hostage Crisis and Ronald Reagan's Policy Toward the Hostages in Lebanon

Students of political psychology have long shown an interest in exploring how analogical reasoning affects decision-making. However, the existing literature on analogical reasoning has remained within the rationalist explanatory framework by assuming that an actor's interests can be deduced from that actor's position in a certain material structure, thus treating those interests as unaffected by the process of analogical reasoning. This assumption unduly restricts the role that analogies may play. Analogies can do more than simply allow decision-makers to figure out what specific policies will advance their preexisting interests—they can also determine the interests themselves. To demonstrate the benefits of moving the analogical literature beyond rationalism, this article explores the Reagan administration's policy toward American hostages in Lebanon, which culminated in the Iran-Contra scandal.     

Training to be a volunteer Rape Crisis counsellor: a qualitative study of women's experiences

This is an account of a qualitative study designed to elicit and analyse the narratives of women who had trained to be volunteer counsellors at a Rape Crisis centre. Little prior research has focused on the experiences of workers in Rape Crisis centres and this project was designed to explore women's experiences in ways that were meaningful to them. The research methods used were face-to-face, unstructured, in-depth individual interviews and group sessions. Participants in the individual interviews had all undertaken Rape Crisis training within the preceding two years. The group sessions involved all workers who were actively involved with the Rape Crisis centre at the time of the research. Five themes emerged from an inductive analysis of the data: motivation to train, complexity and change, changes in personal relationships, personal change and feminism. Overall the study highlights the complex, transformative processes that volunteer Rape Crisis counsellors may experience. The article concludes by identifying implications for practice that may serve to enhance training for volunteer counsellors in the future.     

刺激结构对视觉定位的影响

本实验采用多点定位作业,结合部分报告法,研究视觉刺激的整体结构对定位成绩的影响。所呈现的刺激为1、2、3或4个颜色点。其中2、3、4点刺激分别是直线、正三角形和正方形。结果发现,当呈现时间较长时,1点和2、3、4点的定位误差无显著差异。但是1点的定位反应时却显著少于2、3、4点。这提示出现视觉定位的结构效应。而当呈现时间较短时,却没有这种结构效应。实验还发现,这种结构效应并不因刺激结构的不同而有区别。     

Using trait–state models to evaluate the longitudinal consistency of global self-esteem from adolescence to adulthood

The present research used a latent variable trait–state model to evaluate the longitudinal consistency of self-esteem during the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Analyses were based on ten administrations of the Rosenberg self-esteem scale (Rosenberg, 1965) spanning the ages of approximately 13–32 for a sample of 451 participants. Results indicated that a completely stable trait factor and an autoregressive trait factor accounted for the majority of the variance in latent self-esteem assessments, whereas state factors accounted for about 16% of the variance in repeated assessments of latent self-esteem. The stability of individual differences in self-esteem increased with age consistent with the cumulative continuity principle of personality development.     

Ce que la crise sanitaire révèle du rapport à l’espace : le cas de la fermeture de la frontière franco-allemande en Alsace

IntroductionThe COVID-19 crisis of 2020 has led authorities to re-establish measures at the French-German border. The media refer to a “closure” of the border. This constitutes a rapid and brutal event in terms of the cross-border practices and mobility of local inhabitants.ObjectiveBy considering the closure period as a socio-spatial crisis, we question, first, the thematic structure of media discourse during the period of border closure, and second, the psychological continuity of the crisis discourse, by comparing it with pre-crisis interviews.MethodA thematic analysis of the discourse is done on a corpus of 407 local press articles, and on 12 semi-structured interviews with young, local inhabitants.ResultsThe analysis identified five themes which support the discursive media structure, and which organize and enable the debate. The international comparison and the use of historical and memorial content in the discourse enable actors to take a position on the border closure. The analysis of the links with the interviews shows that the relationship to the border during the crisis is structured on representational dimensions already present in the pre-crisis discourse of the inhabitants.ConclusionResults show a psychological continuity in pre- and post-crisis discourse: the media discourse reveals preexisting representations of the border, which act as generators of opinions on its closure. Additionally, we discuss the results by focusing on the place of identity-based feelings in the representational relationship to the border: this phenomenon is analysed here on a group and positional level.     

Asymmetrical hemisphere activation enhances global–local processing

Decades of research focusing on the neurophysiological underpinnings related to global–local processing of hierarchical stimuli have associated global processing with the right hemisphere and local processing with the left hemisphere. The current experiment sought to expand this research by testing the causal contributions of hemisphere activation to global–local processing. To manipulate hemisphere activation, participants engaged in contralateral hand contractions. Then, EEG activity and attentional scope were measured. Right-hand contractions caused greater relative left-cortical activity than left-hand contractions. Participants were more narrowly focused after left-hemisphere activation than after right-hemisphere activation. Moreover, N1 amplitudes to local targets in the left hemisphere were larger after left-hemisphere activation than after right-hemisphere activation. Consistent with past research investigating hemispheric asymmetry and attentional scope, the current results suggest that manipulating left (right) hemisphere activity enhanced local (global) attentional processing.     

Can global justice provide a path toward achieving justice across the Americas?

In this article, I investigate actions that the United States took against Costa Rica during the 1980s in order to argue that current discussions about global justice and its foundations are flawed in three ways. First, it misidentifies the parties of global justice as individual citizens. Second, it conceptualizes global justice as exclusively a distributive justice concern and, as a result, it misidentifies what constitutes a global injustice as being the adverse fate of individuals who live in a poor nation. Finally, the current debate provides no guidance in what must be considered to identify the specific obligations one nation may have to another nation. Given these three problems, I maintain that we conceptualize global injustice as an issue of social justice rather than one exclusively of distributive justice. This will require identifying nations as the parties to global justice, at least in certain cases, and realizing that our goal is to remedy oppressive global structures of power. Utilizing the social justice I propose will put us on the road toward achieving justice across the Americas.     

Applying an exemplar model to the serial reaction-time task: Anticipating from experience

We present a serial reaction time (SRT) task in which participants identified the location of a target by pressing a key mapped to the location. The location of successive targets was determined by the rules of a grammar, and we varied the redundancy of the grammar. Increasing both practice and the redundancy of the grammar reduced response time, but the participants were unable to describe the grammar. Such results are usually discussed as examples of implicit learning. Instead, we treat performance in terms of retrieval from a multitrace memory. In our account, after each trial, participants store a trace comprising the current stimulus, the response associated with it, and the context provided by the immediately preceding response. When a target is presented, it is used as a prompt to retrieve the response mapped to it. As participants practise the task, the redundancy of the series helps point to the correct response and, thereby, speeds retrieval of the response. The model captured performance in the experiment and in classic SRT studies from the literature. Its success shows that the SRT task can be understood in terms of retrieval from memory without implying implicit learning.     

The Coming Epoch of New Coalitions: Possible Scenarios of the Near Future

This article analyzes some important aspects of socioeconomic and political development of the world in the near future. The future always stems from the present. The first part of the article is devoted to the study of some crucial events of the present, which could be regarded as precursors of forthcoming fundamental changes. In particular, it is shown that the turbulent events of late 2010 and 2011 in the Arab World may well be regarded as a start of the global reconfiguration. The article also offers an analysis of some aspects of the global financial system that, according to the authors, notwithstanding all its negative points, performs certain important positive functions including the “insurance” of social guaranties at the global scale. The second part of the article considers some global scenarios of the World System's new future and describes a few characteristics of the forthcoming “Epoch of New Coalitions.” The article attempts to answer such questions as the following: What are the implications of the economic weakening of the United States as the World System center? Will the future World System have a leader? Will it experience a global governance deficit? Will the world fragmentation increase?