The measurement of Human Life History strategy

This retrospective essay appraises J. Philippe Rushton’s application of life history to understanding the covariation among human traits in light of subsequent developments in the measurement and latent structure of Human Life History, covitality, and personality. We conclude that Rushton should be recognized for having initiated a theoretically and empirically highly fertile paradigm in human individual differences research.     

An epistemological history of time: From technology to representations

Abstract

This paper attempts to link the social history of the mechanization of time with the history of the psychological notion of time. Historical processes such as the mechanization of tower clocks from the Middle Ages onwards, the reform of the Gregorian calendar and the quarrel of the Christian and Chinese calendars characterized the modern representation of time on three points: isochrony, desacralization and abstraction. While Western societies learned to domesticate the practical aspects of time, the scholars of the Enlightenment naturalized time. They considered it a concept only related to man and used quantified time for scientific purposes. Empiricists saw time as a product of the succession of thought while idealists considered it a form necessary for the human experience to occur. Both trends agreed in removing time from nature and accepted isochrony, desaralization and abstraction as the necessary foundation for the modern notion of time.     

Sex in the City: The ambiguity of female mating strategies

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the limitations of evolutionary explanations of female mating strategies, and to present an alternative theory that accounts for the ambiguity of mating strategies throughout a woman's life. While mating strategies are considered to be discrete entities, it is clear that women's decision making in everyday life is based on mutually fused, ambiguous courses of actions. The current perspective addresses the commonality of female mating experiences while highlighting the uniqueness of each woman's mating strategy and outlines a multi-level perspective on strategies of women's reproductive decision making.     

The neuropsychology of religious experience. A review of different scientific approaches to the phenomenon / Neuropsicología de la experiencia religiosa. Una revisión de distintas aproximaciones científicas al fenómeno

Abstract

The current article is a critical review of the neuropsychological study of religious experience. First, we analyse the philosophical and theological roots of the term and its characterization as a sui generis and unique phenomenon. We subsequently describe the adoption of the concept in psychology, as well as the emergence of alternative approaches that emphasize the role of categorization of experiences as religious. We then move on to explore how both approaches have influenced the neuropsychological study of religious experience, consequently producing different models: sui generis, attributional and others that consider the variety of factors and the heterogeneity of experiences associated with religious practices.     

Brightness differences influence the evaluation of affective pictures

We explored the possibility of a general brightness bias: brighter pictures are evaluated more positively, while darker pictures are evaluated more negatively. In Study 1 we found that positive pictures are brighter than negative pictures in two affective picture databases (the IAPS and the GAPED). Study 2 revealed that because researchers select affective pictures on the extremity of their affective rating without controlling for brightness differences, pictures used in positive conditions of experiments were on average brighter than those used in negative conditions. Going beyond correlational support for our hypothesis, Studies 3 and 4 showed that brighter versions of neutral pictures were evaluated more positively than darker versions of the same picture. Study 5 revealed that people categorised positive words more quickly than negative words after a bright picture prime, and vice versa for negative pictures. Together, these studies provide strong support for the hypotheses that picture brightness influences evaluations.     

Ruth

No abstract available for this article.     

Social Responsibility and the Mental Health Professions

Summary

While mental health professionals tend to primarily focus on their professional responsibilities toward the specific members of the public whom they serve, many are also concerned about positively impacting the broader society or culture in which they live and work. This notion of social responsibility is addressed in the ethics codes of both psychologists and social workers. This article reviews how this notion is addressed for these two mental health professions and also examines the changes that have occurred for psychologists between the 1992 and 2002 ethics codes. Finally, some general issues regarding the role of mental health professionals in changing society are considered.     

La construction de la personne dans les Confessions de Saint-Augustin. Perspectives historique et épistémologique

The psychologists code of ethics specifies that the object of the psychology is the person, without the notion of person seems clearly defined. This study analyses certain aspects envisaged as historic construction, according to the perspectives opened by the psychology of Meyerson which dialectize the connection between the person and its works. In this context, Confessions of Augustin is examined in conformance with the “concern of itself, investigating and working the « folds » of the soul, which contribute to the emergence of the modern person by occurring as work”.     

Betting on conditionals

A study is reported testing two hypotheses about a close parallel relation between indicative conditionals, if A then B, and conditional bets, I bet you that if A then B. The first is that both the indicative conditional and the conditional bet are related to the conditional probability, P(B|A). The second is that de Finetti's three-valued truth table has psychological reality for both types of conditional—true, false, or void for indicative conditionals and win, lose, or void for conditional bets. The participants were presented with an array of chips in two different colours and two different shapes, and an indicative conditional or a conditional bet about a random chip. They had to make judgements in two conditions: either about the chances of making the indicative conditional true or false or about the chances of winning or losing the conditional bet. The observed distributions of responses in the two conditions were generally related to the conditional probability, supporting the first hypothesis. In addition, a majority of participants in further conditions chose the third option, “void”, when the antecedent of the conditional was false, supporting the second hypothesis.