Old Fears Die Hard: Return of Public Speaking Fear in a Virtual Reality Procedure

Exposure-based therapy is an effective treatment for social anxiety, but some patients relapse. We used a novel virtual reality procedure to examine spontaneous recovery (i.e., a return of fear over time) and fear renewal (i.e., the return of fear after a context switch) in individuals with fear of public speaking. On Day 1, 32 participants received exposure training before a virtual audience. On Day 8, participants completed a spontaneous recovery phase, followed by a fear renewal test, in which they gave a presentation in front of a new (context switch) or the same audience (no context switch). After exposure, participants exhibited a lower heart rate, subjective distress, negative valence, and arousal. One week later, participants showed spontaneous recovery of heart rate, and the context switch group showed renewal of subjective distress, negative valence, and arousal. Future studies can use this procedure to test interventions aimed at improving long-term exposure effects in individuals with public speaking fear.     

Social influence matters: We follow pandemic guidelines most when our close circle does

Why do we adopt new rules, such as social distancing? Although human sciences research stresses the key role of social influence in behaviour change, most COVID-19 campaigns emphasize the disease’s medical threat. In a global data set (n = 6,675), we investigated how social influences predict people’s adherence to distancing rules during the pandemic. Bayesian regression analyses controlling for stringency of local measures showed that people distanced most when they thought their close social circle did. Such social influence mattered more than people thinking distancing was the right thing to do. People’s adherence also aligned with their fellow citizens, but only if they felt deeply bonded with their country. Self-vulnerability to the disease predicted distancing more for people with larger social circles. Collective efficacy and collectivism also significantly predicted distancing. To achieve behavioural change during crises, policymakers must emphasize shared values and harness the social influence of close friends and family.     

Screw Those Guys: Polarization,Empathy, and Attitudes About Out-Partisans

Empathic ability is the ability to interpret the emotional state of others. In today's highly partisan and polarized environment, empathic ability may play a key role in determining how partisans respond emotionally to changes in public policy and those helped or harmed by the policy. Utilizing Baron-Cohen et al.'s (Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 42, 241–251, 2001) “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test to measure empathic ability, we conduct a survey experiment where we asked participants to read about a partisan individual who may lose their health insurance if the Affordable Care Act were to be repealed. We show that empathic ability shapes attitudes about people and policies, but that the effects are contingent upon the respondent's partisanship, the target's partisanship, and an interaction of the two. Empathic ability produces more positive affect and policy support among Democrats but reduces positive affect among Republicans. The divergent effects of empathic ability on Democrats and Republicans are further exacerbated when the target is an out-partisan.     

Doing history that matters: Going public and activating voices as a form of historical activism

For many of us academics, doing community‐engaged research means coming to terms with the significant gaps in experience, privilege, and power, and overall access to knowledge. We are trained to learn through texts, not through direct experience. In some ways, we are even conditioned to tune out experience, or anecdote, to dilute personal subjectivities in favor of a critical analysis informed by a combination of methods and sources, and a reliance on text‐based forms of evidence. Whereas for most community members, evidence is experiential. This dynamic also underscores the tremendous power and responsibility we have as historians to shape identities and legacies through the stories we tell. In the end, I believe the risks are worth the rewards.     

Students’ individual interest in physical education: Development and validation of a questionnaire

Identifying the specificity of students’ individual interest in physical education is necessary to capture the different facets of this construct. In contrast to existing questionnaires in education which assess the multidimensionality of individual interest, the current scale used in physical education consists of a single‐item measurement which rates students’ individual interest for multiple physical activities taught during lessons. Even if this single‐item rating provides a basis for classifying interest relative to others, it does not provide information about the nature and internal components of individual interest. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to develop a valid and reliable questionnaire measuring the multidimensionality of students’ individual interest in physical education. Four stages were followed: (1) the development of a preliminary version based on the findings of a literature review on individual interest and a committee process validation; (2) a first study conducted on 481 secondary school students to establish the factor structure, and internal reliability of this questionnaire; (3) a second study based on 243 secondary school students to confirm its factor structure and to test its temporal stability; and finally, (4) a third study with 253 students to test its concurrent validity. The final form of the questionnaire consists of a three‐factor structure based on 14 items that measure students’ individual interest in physical education: positive affect and willingness to reengage (five items), stored utility value (four items), and stored attainment value and knowledge‐seeking intentions (five items).     

Antiwomen But Proquota: Disaggregating Sexism and Support for Gender Quota Policies

Previous research on support for gender quotas focuses on attitudes toward gender equality and government intervention as explanations. We argue the role of attitudes toward women in understanding support for policies aiming to increase the presence of women in politics is ambivalent—both hostile and benevolent forms of sexism contribute in understanding support, albeit in different ways. Using original data from a survey conducted on a probability-based sample of Australian respondents, our findings demonstrate that hostile sexists are more likely to oppose increasing of women's presence in politics through the adoption of gender quotas. Benevolent sexists, on the other hand, are more likely to support these policies than respondents exhibiting low levels of benevolent sexism. We argue this is because benevolent sexism holds that women are pure and need protection; they do not have what it takes to succeed in politics without the assistance of quotas. Finally, we show that while women are more likely to support quotas, ambivalent sexism has the same relationship with support among both women and men. These findings suggest that aggregate levels of public support for gender quotas do not necessarily represent greater acceptance of gender equality generally.     

Beyond trigger warnings: Toward a trauma‐informed andragogy for the graduate theological classroom*

Although development of trauma‐informed pedagogy for elementary and secondary classrooms has developed significantly, a dearth of resources for trauma‐informed andragogy in graduate theological classrooms remains. Theological classrooms are a unique context in which many students and professors carry experiences of trauma with them. This article makes the case for the need for a trauma‐informed andragogical model for the graduate theological classroom by: discussing the pervasiveness of trauma; providing definitions of key terms that need to be understood for elaborating a trauma‐informed andragogy; recommending trauma‐informed principles for course design and class‐session planning based in safety, trust, choice, collaboration, and empowerment; and identifying a few next steps for cultivating trauma‐informed classrooms and institutions at the graduate level.     

Does change in ethical education influence core moral values? Towards history- and culture-aware morality model with application in automatic moral reasoning

In this study, we focus on ethical education as a means to improve artificial companion’s conceptualization of moral decision-making process in human users. In particular, we focus on automatically determining whether changes in ethical education influenced core moral values in humans throughout the century. We analyze ethics as taught in Japan before WWII and today to verify how much the pre-WWII moral attitudes have in common with those of contemporary Japanese, to what degree what is taught as ethics in school overlaps with the general population’s understanding of ethics, as well as to verify whether a major reform of the guidelines for teaching the school subject of “ethics” at school after 1946 has changed the way common people approach core moral questions (such as those concerning the sacredness of human life). We selected textbooks used in teaching ethics at school from between 1935 and 1937, and those used in junior high schools today (2019) and analyzed what emotional and moral associations such contents generated. The analysis was performed with an automatic moral and emotional reasoning agent and based on the largest available text corpus in Japanese as well as on the resources of a Japanese digital library. As a result, we found out that, despite changes in stereotypical view on Japan’s moral sentiments, especially due to historical events, past and contemporary Japanese share a similar moral evaluation of certain basic moral concepts, although there is a large discrepancy between how they perceive some actions to be beneficial to the society as a whole while at the same time being inconclusive when it comes to assessing the same action’s outcome on the individual performing them and in terms of emotional consequences. Some ethical categories, assessed positively before the war, while being associated with a nationalistic trend in education have also disappeared from the scope of interest of post- war society. The findings of this study support suggestions proposed by others that the development of personal AI systems requires supplementation with moral reasoning. Moreover, the paper builds upon this idea and further suggests that AI systems need to be aware of ethics not as a constant, but as a function with a correction on historical and cultural changes in moral reasoning.