Islam Returns to Spain: Religious Diversity,Political Discourse and Women's Rights

On February 14, 2013, the Tribunal Supremo of Spain handed down a judgement which gave constitutional protection to the burka and which also contained important statements concerning contemporary Spanish society, its religious and cultural diversity and the convivencia of cultures and religions. Contrary to the position of the Tribunal Supremo, and showing very little variation, the political discourse is in favour of a ban, basing its arguments principally on women's rights, but with a perceptible shift towards public safety. This article will examine this bifurcated reaction to this manifestation of renewed religious diversity in Spain: the politicians’ arguments in favour of prohibition reflect the protectionist view of the French and Belgian parliamentary debates prohibiting the burka, but place them in the framework of the post-Franco rights-based society. On the other hand, the Tribunal Supremo anchors its judgement in a narrative of a free and democratic Spanish state and society in which a woman's individual freedom of choice takes precedence over all other considerations, including social norms.     

Mental rotation is not easily cognitively penetrable

When participants take part in mental imagery experiments, are they using their “tacit knowledge” of perception to mimic what they believe should occur in the corresponding perceptual task? Two experiments were conducted to examine whether such an account can be applied to mental imagery in general. These experiments both examined tasks that required participants to “mentally rotate” stimuli. In Experiment 1, instructions led participants to believe that they could reorient shapes in one step or avoid reorienting the shapes altogether. Regardless of instruction type, response times increased linearly with increasing rotation angles. In Experiment 2, participants first observed novel objects rotating at different speeds, and then performed a mental rotation task with those objects. The speed of perceptually demonstrated rotation did not affect the speed of mental rotation. We argue that tacit knowledge cannot explain mental imagery results in general, and that in particular the mental rotation effect reflects the nature of the underlying internal representation and processes that transform it, rather than participants’ pre-existing knowledge.     

Applying Cases to Solve Ethical Problems: The Significance of Positive and Process-Oriented Reflection

This study examined the role of reflection on personal cases for making ethical decisions with regard to new ethical problems. Participants assumed the position of a business manager in a hypothetical organization and solved ethical problems that might be encountered. Prior to making a decision for the business problems, participants reflected on a relevant ethical experience. The findings revealed that application of material garnered from reflection on a personal experience was associated with decisions of higher ethicality. However, whether the case was viewed as positive or negative, and whether the outcomes, processes, or outcomes and processes embedded in the experience were examined, influenced the application of case material to the new problem. As expected, examining positive experiences and the processes involved in those positive experiences resulted in greater application of case material to new problems. Future directions and implications for understanding ethical decision making are discussed.     

Explicit feedback maintains implicit knowledge

The role of feedback was investigated with respect to conscious and unconscious knowledge acquired during artificial grammar learning (AGL). After incidental learning of training sequences, participants classified further sequences in terms of grammaticality and reported their decision strategy with or without explicit veridical feedback. Sequences that disobeyed the learning structure conformed to an alternative structure. Feedback led to an increase in the amount of reported conscious knowledge of structure (derived rules and recollections) but did not increase its accuracy. Conversely, feedback maintained the accuracy of unconscious knowledge of structure (intuition or familiarity-based responses) which otherwise degraded. Results support a dual-process account of AGL. They suggest that implicit learning of the to-be-rejected structure at test contaminates familiarity-based classifications whereas feedback allows competing familiarity signals to be contextualised, which is incompatible with theories that consider familiarity context-insensitive.     

Does self-complexity moderate the effects of exposure to political violence for adolescents?

This study examined the moderating role of self-complexity (SC) on well-being (WB) and psychopathology among Israeli adolescents exposed to the Second Lebanon War (2006). Adolescents (N=584, mean age 16.41) completed a SC measure, Political and Negative Life Events (NLE) scales, Brief Symptom Inventory and Satisfaction with Life Scale. The theoretical model analyzed the function of SC as a moderator of exposure effects to political life events (PLE), while controlling for general NLE. Results corroborated the model with SC moderating the effects of the war-related PLE. Adolescents with low SC are at risk for damaged WB and psychiatric consequences from political violence exposure. This opens a diagnostic avenue for identification of at-risk adolescents in this socio-political context toward whom clinical programs should be directed.     

Conceptual knowledge attenuates viewpoint dependency in visual object recognition

Learning verbal semantic knowledge for objects has been shown to attenuate recognition costs incurred by changes in view from a learned viewpoint. Such findings were attributed to the semantic or meaningful nature of the learned verbal associations. However, recent findings demonstrate surprising benefits to visual perception after learning even noninformative verbal labels for stimuli. Here we test whether learning verbal information for novel objects, independent of its semantic nature, can facilitate a reduction in viewpoint-dependent recognition. To dissociate more general effects of verbal associations from those stemming from the semantic nature of the associations, participants learned to associate semantically meaningful (adjectives) or nonmeaningful (number codes) verbal information with novel objects. Consistent with a role of semantic representations in attenuating the viewpoint-dependent nature of object recognition, the costs incurred by a change in viewpoint were attenuated for stimuli with learned semantic associations relative to those associated with nonmeaningful verbal information. This finding is discussed in terms of its implications for understanding basic mechanisms of object perception as well as the classic viewpoint-dependent nature of object recognition.     

Expertise in biological conceptions: The case of the vineyard

To study how expertise impacts the understanding of a complex system like the vineyard, three measures were used with 259 participants (190 non-experts, 34 winemakers and/or winegrowers, and 35 biologists): a questionnaire to check for expertise (the Plant Biology Questionnaire), a task about the Structure, Behaviour and Function model, and a measure of the content of the participants’ discourse with the ALCESTE software. Results showed that biologists mentioned functions significantly more often than behaviours, whereas it was the opposite for winegrowers. Non-experts mentioned functions and behaviours significantly less frequently than experts did. The content analysis confirmed the differential expression of each kind of expertise: scientific wording for biologists, technical wording for winegrowers, and words focused on perceptible structures for the non-experts. Results from all tasks were highly correlated and allowed for an interpretation of expertise in terms of mental models of the vineyard.     

Motivational determinants of reasoning about social relations: The role of need for cognitive closure

The role of need for cognitive closure (NFCC) in reasoning about social relations was investigated. Participants learned pairwise liking/disliking relations between people who could also be categorised on the basis of nationality and then had to group them into social cliques. The social clique structures were either consistent or inconsistent with the nationality categorisation, and the diagnostic information that was necessary to determine the number of cliques appeared either early or late in the information sequence. We expected participants under conditions of high (vs low) NFCC to rely more on heuristic processing. As predicted, high (vs low) NFCC participants were less accurate in their representations of cliques when the clique structure was inconsistent with the nationality category (Study 1 and 2) and when the diagnostic information was presented late (Study 1). The implications regarding the influence of NFCC on reasoning and the role of specific NFCC manipulations are discussed.     

The Place of Rawls in Political and Ethical Theory

The work of John Rawls is central to contemporary political philosophy. A Theory of Justice provides a model for the justification of substantive principles of justice, and it defends principles that reject utilitarianism. Ultimately, justification is a matter of what the participants in a relationship or an institution can justify to one another. Unlike utilitarianism, which assumes that there is one good that it is the job of morality to maximize, Rawls holds that there are multiple conceptions of the good associated with different individuals. Furthermore, he holds that there are multiple principles of morality associated with different relationships and institutions. His principles of justice are designed for one of these—the basic structure of society. They establish a moral minimum that all members of a society owe to one another, but additional principles are required to govern other special relationships.     

Conscious knowledge influences decision‐making differently in substance abusers with and without co‐morbid antisocial personality disorder

Decision‐making impairment, as measured by the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), is a consistent finding among individuals with substance use disorder (SUD). We studied how this impairment is influenced by co‐morbid antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) and conscious knowledge of the task. Three groups were investigated: SUD individuals without co‐morbid ASPD (n = 30), SUD individuals with co‐morbid ASPD (n = 16), and healthy controls (n = 17). Both SUD and SUD+ASPD participants had poor overall IGT performance. A block‐by‐block analysis revealed that SUD participants exhibited slow but steady improvement across the IGT, whereas SUD+ASPD participants exhibited initial normal improvement, but dropped off during the last 40 trials. Conscious knowledge of the task was significantly correlated to performance for controls and SUD participants, but not for SUD+ASPD participants. Our findings suggest that decision‐making proceeds differently in SUD and SUD+ASPD individuals due to differences in acquisition and application of conscious knowledge.