Terrorism's Toll on Civil Liberties

Summary

The toll that terrorism takes on civil liberties has become clear in the United States in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Horrendous as those attacks were, they were hardly unique in the fear that they spurred on the part of the politicians and the public, resulting in a counterattack on civil liberties in the name of preventing terrorism. The cost to civil liberties is thus imposed not directly by terrorism itself, but rather by unjustified policies that are labeled “counter-terrorist.” In that sense, this chapter would more aptly be entitled, “Counter-Terrorism's Toll on Civil Liberties.”     

Honor to the core: Measuring implicit honor ideology endorsement

People from honor-oriented societies emphasize the maintenance and defense of reputation. Prior research has used geographical distinctions or self-report scales to identify honor-oriented regions and people. The current study examined if honor orientations can be assessed at an implicit level through the use of the Affect Misattribution Procedure (Payne, Cheng, Govorun, & Stewart, 2005). People high in explicit honor ideology scored significantly higher on a newly developed implicit honor ideology measure than people low in explicit honor. In addition, people high in implicit honor ideology demonstrated a better memory for honor- and dishonor-related words on a surprise memory test. These results support the possibility that honor ideology can be measured implicitly and open up a new realm for research on honor cultures.     

Equivalent testimonies as a touchstone of coherence measures

Over the past years, a number of probabilistic measures of coherence have been proposed. As shown in the paper, however, many of them do not conform to the intuitition that equivalent testimonies are highly coherent, regardless of their prior probability.     

What would you have as a last supper? Thoughts about death influence evaluation and consumption of food products

Terror Management Theory posits that after thinking about their own deaths, people take sides with and defend their culture by either increasing their support for worldview-consistent examples, decreasing support for worldview-threatening examples, or both. We tested the hypothesis that mortality salience leads to an increased preference for products from one’s own culture as compared to products from a foreign culture in terms of evaluation and consumption. In a product test, participants sampled local and foreign soft drinks (Study 1) or local and foreign chocolates (Study 2). As expected, relative to a control condition, mortality salience led to more accentuated evaluative preferences for local as compared to foreign products. Furthermore, the preference for the local product in terms of actual consumption was greater under mortality salience. Independent from cultural worldview defense effects mortality salience led to more impulsive behavior as indicated by an increased correspondence between eating behavior and an implicit measure tapping into impulsive processes in Study 2.     

System JLZ – rational default reasoning by minimal ranking constructions

We present a powerful quasi-probabilistic default formalism for graded defaults based on a well-motivated canonical ranking construction procedure, System JLZ. It implements the minimal construction paradigm and verifies the major inference principles and inheritance desiderata, including rational monotony for propositions and structured cumulativity for default conditionals. With help from a structured ranking semantics for defaults, it also avoids some drawbacks of semi-qualitative entropy maximization and other competing accounts.     

Critical considerations about the use of poverty measures in the study of cognitive development

Developmental psychology and developmental cognitive neuroscience generated evidence at different levels of analysis about the influences of poverty on neurocognitive development (i.e., molecular, neural activation, cognition, behaviour). In addition, different individual and environmental factors were identified as mediators of such influences. Such a complexity is also illustrated through the many poverty conceptual and operational definitions generated by social, human and health sciences. However, to establish the causal relationships between the different factors of poverty and neurocognitive outcomes is still an issue under construction. Most studies of this area apply classic unidimensional poverty indicators such as income and maternal education. Nonetheless, this approach does not take into adequate consideration the variability of neurocognitive outcomes depending on the type of poverty measures, and the dynamic nature of changes during development. This creates a virtual underestimation of the complexity imposed by the involved mediating mechanisms. The scientific and policy implications of this underestimation include the risk of not adequately addressing children rights and developmental opportunities. This article proposes to explore such scenario, which is necessary for the reconsideration of the criteria used to analyse the influences of poverty on child development in general and neurocognitive development in particular.     

Practice‐based supervision research: A network of researchers using a common toolkit

Aim: Given that various systematic reviews of supervision literature have revealed how little is known about supervision, that studies are not usually routed in practice, and that a multitude of diverse measures are used, the primary aim of this project was to support and encourage practitioner research related to supervision using a prescribed common set of instruments. Method: Funded by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP), a Supervision Research Practice Network (SuPReNet) was established. A toolkit (a series of measures) that could be used routinely by practitioners was selected following the assembly of available measures of supervision and an assessment of them. Findings: The appraisal, conducted by the three authors, yielded five core measures, free for anyone to use, and accessible through the SuPReNet website. The measures are being piloted through a practice research network at a university counselling and psychotherapy research clinic where supervision data are being collected through a special module of CORE Net. Discussion: The potential yield from this initiative for practitioners, researchers, and the developing evidence‐base is discussed and a model proposed for the next generation of research on supervision.