What is a Person? And Why it Matters in Religious Ethics

Here I respond to four critics of my book, What Is a Person?, seeking to find areas of common ground and crucial disagreement. Most importantly, I explore the question of whether all human knowledge is conceptually mediated, acknowledging that, no, indeed, there are likely forms of experiential knowledge that are purely and directly acquired without conceptual mediation.     

Creativity in Digital Reality / Creatividad en la realidad digital

Abstract

Digital environments — simulations, games and realities — have been gaining more attention in behaviour research as the relevant technology has become more advanced and affordable. This increased attention has been paralleled by the growing research literature, a corner of which belongs to studies of creativity in digital environments. This mini review highlights the main threads of this corner, focusing on the utilization of digital environments in education and industry.     

Parental media monitoring,prosocial violent media exposure,and adolescents' prosocial and aggressive behaviors

Prosocial violent media (e.g., media that combines both violent and prosocial content) is especially popular in entertainment media today. However, it remains unclear how parental media monitoring is associated with exposure to prosocial violent content and adolescent behavior. Accordingly, 1,193 adolescents were asked about parental media monitoring, media content exposure, and behavior. Main findings suggest that autonomy supportive restrictive monitoring was associated with lower levels of exposure to prosocial violent content, but only among older adolescents. Additionally, autonomy supportive restrictive monitoring was the only form of parental media monitoring associated with lower levels of violent content and higher levels of prosocial content, and autonomy supportive active monitoring was the only parental monitoring strategy that promoted prosocial behavior via exposure to prosocial media content. Discussion focuses on the importance of autonomy supportive parental monitoring, as well as the implications of parents encouraging their children to watch media with limited violent content—even if it is prosocial violent content.     

Alterations in error-related brain activity and post-error behavior over time

This study examines the relation between the error-related negativity (ERN) and post-error behavior over time in healthy young adults (N=61). Event-related brain potentials were collected during two sessions of an identical flanker task. Results indicated changes in ERN and post-error accuracy were related across task sessions, with more negative ERN associated with greater improvements in post-error accuracy. This relationship was independent of any cross-sectional relationships between overall task performance, individual difference factors, including personality and self-efficacy, and indices of self-regulatory action monitoring. These results indicate that the relation between ERN and post-error accuracy remains intact and consistent regardless of variation in this set of individual difference factors previously associated with both of these indices of self-regulatory action monitoring, providing support for the strength, robustness, and persistence of this relationship in the process of adaptively controlling behavior to enhance task performance.     

Catching more than pocket monsters: Pokémon Go's social and psychological effects on players

ABSTRACT

The augmented reality mobile game Pokémon Go has reached unprecedented popularity since its release in 2016. The game has received intense media attention, but scientific inquiry into its popularity and the effects of play are in the early stages. Previous work has used secondary data or simple correlational analysis to draw early conclusions. A seven-day diary study was conducted to investigate potential health, psychological, and social outcomes of daily gameplay. Daily time spent playing Pokémon Go was related to higher scores of life satisfaction, vitality, and greater social interactions and conversation with both friends and strangers, but not with increased daily exercise. Increased total gameplay across the week was associated with increased interaction and conversations along with more exercise. Future directions for this unique type of game along with the need for theoretical development for unique style of games are discussed.     

The Effect of Self-awareness on the Identification of Goal-related Obstacles

When individuals strive towards personal goals, they may encounter obstacles that could compromise their goal progress and pose a challenge to self-regulation. Coping with obstacles first requires those obstacles to be identified. The purpose of the present studies was to apply an inter-individual approach to this important, but insufficiently studied self-regulatory aspect of goal striving. We therefore examined the role of self-awareness, that is, paying attention to one's own feelings, thoughts, and behaviours, for the identification of goal-related obstacles. We measured and manipulated self-awareness in two correlational and two experimental studies (one of them preregistered) and asked participants to identify obstacles to their goals. All studies confirmed the hypothesis that individuals with higher levels of dispositional and situational self-awareness identify more obstacles, both with regard to their idiosyncratic personal goals (Studies 1 and 2) and with regard to a goal in an assigned task during an experiment (Studies 3 and 4). The results indicate that self-awareness plays a crucial role for identifying obstacles. We discuss the implications of our findings for personality and self-regulation research.