Second-order beliefs about intention and children's attributions of sociomoral judgment

Predicting how another person will evaluate the intention underlying an action involves consideration of second-order mental states. Children (ages 5-10 years) and college students (N=105) predicted an observer's belief about an actor's intention and evaluated the actor from both their own perspectives and the perspective of the observer. Younger children were more likely than older children and adults to attribute a belief to the observer that mismatched the actor's prior intention. Attributed beliefs about intention were more likely to match negative prior intentions than to match positive prior intentions and were also more likely to match prior intentions when the observer knew the actor's prior intention than when the observer did not know the actor's prior intention. The judgments attributed to the observer were based on the beliefs about intention attributed to the observer, showing use of second-order mental states to infer another's sociomoral judgments.     

Emotional and behavioral reactions to social undermining: A closer look at perceived offender motives

This study examined how perceptions of underlying offender motives affect victims’ emotional and behavioral reactions toward their offender. Perceived offender motives of malice and greed were embedded in a cognition–emotion–behavior model based on theories of attribution, forgiveness and revenge, and tested in the context of social undermining. Findings suggested that victims distinguished between offender malice and greed, and that these attributions shaped subsequent emotional reactions, which in turn demonstrated independent relations with revenge, avoidance, and reconciliation.     

Simulation à la Goldman: pretend and collapse

Theories of mind draw on processes that represent mental states and their computational connections; simulation, in addition, draws on processes that replicate (Heal 1986) a sequence of mental states. Moreover, mental simulation can be triggered by input from imagination instead of real perceptions. To avoid confusion between mental states concerning reality and those created in simulation, imagined contents must be quarantined. Goldman bypasses this problem by giving pretend states a special role to play in simulation (Goldman 2006). We argue that this path leads to the resurgence of the threat of collapse (Davies 1994), diluting the principled distinction between simulation and theory use. Exploration of a related method of real-mental states operating in a pretend mode leads to a factually untenable model. Our main goal here is to raise this problem as a challenge for Goldman’s reconfigured simulation theory. Only at the end we will briefly sketch a possible alternative way of quarantine that preserves the replicative element of simulation and avoids collapse. Figure 1 provides a guide to our argument. Fig. 1 Structure of argument

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Four Keys to Success (Theory, Implementation, Evaluation, and Resource/System Support): High Hopes and Challenges in Participation

In this article, I attempt to merge two themes. First, there is often a large gap between high hopes about impacts of policies or programs and the demonstrated results. I describe four keys/threats to success in any social problem area: theory, implementation, evaluation, and resource/system support. Second, I present theory and research from over 30 years of work on participation, conducted by my colleagues and myself that can illuminate and be illuminated by theory, implementation, evaluation, and resource/system support. I offer ideas for solutions that increase the probability of success. I conclude with the need to have high hopes tempered by theory and research to develop realistically ambitious solutions to social problems.     

When some is actually all: Scalar inferences in face-threatening contexts

Accounts of the scalar inference from ‘some X-ed’ to ‘not all X-ed’ are central to the debate between contemporary theories of conversational pragmatics. An important contribution to this debate is to identify contexts that decrease the endorsement rate of the inference. We suggest that the inference is endorsed less often in face-threatening contexts, i.e., when X implies a loss of face for the listener. This claim is successfully tested in Experiment 1. Experiment 2 rules out a possible confound between face-threatening contexts and lower-bound contexts. Experiment 3 shows that whilst saying ‘some X-ed’ when one knew for a fact that all X-ed is always perceived as an underinformative utterance, it is also seen as a nice and polite thing to do when X threatens the face of the listener. These findings are considered from the perspective of Relevance Theory as well as that of the Generalized Conversational Inference approach.     

Relations between mental verb and false belief understanding in Cantonese-speaking children

Previous research has shown that linguistic forms that codify mental contents bear a specific relation with children’s false belief understanding. These forms include mental verbs and their following complements, yet the two have not been considered separately. The current study examined the roles of mental verb semantics and the complement syntax in children’s false belief understanding. Independent tasks were used to measure verb meaning, complements, and false belief understanding such that the verbs in question were present only in the verb meaning test, and no linguistic devices biased toward false belief were used in the false belief test. We focused on (a) some mental verbs that obligatorily affirm or negate what follows and (b) sentential complements, the content of which is to be evaluated against the mind of another person, not reality. Results showed that only (a) predicted false belief understanding in a group of Cantonese-speaking 4-year-olds, controlling for nonverbal intelligence and general language ability. In particular, children’s understanding of the strong nonfactive semantics of the Cantonese verbs /ji5-wai4/ (“falsely think”) predicted false belief understanding most strongly. The current findings suggest that false belief understanding is specifically related to the comprehension of mental verbs that entail false thought in their semantics.     

Producing and Recognizing Analogical Relations

Analogical reasoning is an important component of intelligent behavior, and a key test of any approach to human language and cognition. Only a limited amount of empirical work has been conducted from a behavior analytic point of view, most of that within Relational Frame Theory (RFT), which views analogy as a matter of deriving relations among relations. The present series of four studies expands previous work by exploring the applicability of this model of analogy to topography-based rather than merely selection-based responses and by extending the work into additional relations, including nonsymmetrical ones. In each of the four studies participants pretrained in contextual control over nonarbitrary stimulus relations of sameness and opposition, or of sameness, smaller than, and larger than, learned arbitrary stimulus relations in the presence of these relational cues and derived analogies involving directly trained relations and derived relations of mutual and combinatorial entailment, measured using a variety of productive and selection-based measures. In Experiment 1 participants successfully recognized analogies among stimulus networks containing same and opposite relations; in Experiment 2 analogy was successfully used to extend derived relations to pairs of novel stimuli; in Experiment 3 the procedure used in Experiment 1 was extended to nonsymmetrical comparative relations; in Experiment 4 the procedure used in Experiment 2 was extended to nonsymmetrical comparative relations. Although not every participant showed the effects predicted, overall the procedures occasioned relational responses consistent with an RFT account that have not yet been demonstrated in a behavior-analytic laboratory setting, including productive responding on the basis of analogies.     

Impaired self-reflection in psychiatric disorders among adults: A proposal for the existence of a network of semi independent functions

Self-reflection plays a key role in healthy human adaptation. Self-reflection might involve different capacities which may be impaired to different degrees relatively independently of one another. Variation in abilities for different forms of self-reflection are commonly seen as key aspects of many adult mental disorders. Yet little has been written about whether there are different kinds of deficits in self-reflection found in mental illness, how those deficits should be distinguished from one another and how to characterize the extent to which they are interrelated. We review clinical and experimental literature and suggest four different forms of deficits in self-reflection: (a) sense of ownership of one’s own thoughts and actions, (b) emotional awareness, (c) distinction between fantasy and reality and (d) the integration of a range of different views of oneself and others. We propose how these different impairments in self-reflection are linked with one another.     

自我和他人的协调与心理理论的神经机制

有关心理理论神经机制的研究远未达到共识。从自我与他人协调的角度看,可认为它是一个由多脑区有机组织而成的系统。自我中心化偏差是人类认知的一种默认选择,要正确理解他人的心理状态,需要抑制自我中心偏差。因此,心理理论的加工至少包括以下几个不同的过程：通过模拟自我理解他人,相应的加工脑区为镜像神经元系统;从他人与客体形成的二元关系中表征心理状态的内容,相应脑区是颞顶联合区;对模拟自我进行抑制,相应脑区为背外侧额叶;以及整合协调以上几个过程,其脑区可能是内侧前额叶     

Do maternal stress and home environment mediate the relation between early income‐to‐need and 54‐months attentional abilities?

Using Ecological Systems Theory and stage sequential modelling procedures for detecting mediation, this study examined how early developmental contexts impact preschoolers' performances on a measure of sustained attention and impulse control. Data from 1273 European‐American and African‐American participants in the NICHD Study of Early Child Care were used to identify the potential mediators of the relation between early household income‐to‐need (INR) and 54‐month impulsivity and inattention. Exploratory analyses were also conducted to determine whether the relationships between early income, home environment, parenting stress, and the outcome variables differ for African‐American versus European‐American‐American children. We found modest support for the study hypothesis that 36‐month home environment quality mediated the INR/attention relationship. INR accounted for more home environment score variance and home environment accounted for more Impulsivity score variance for African‐American children. Home environments were related to inattention in the European‐American, but not African‐American, group. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.