How to Resolve Comte’s Challenge: The Answer of Cognitive Neuroscience and the Neo-Aristotelian Alternative

Philosophia - Comte argued against the Cartesian conception of the mind that the thinker cannot simultaneously think or perceive and observe itself so doing. Based on insights from cognitive...     

Mental effort causes vigilance decrease due to resource depletion

The resource view on vigilance performance was tested. First, a low demanding task was compared with a similar low demanding task in which stimulus presentation was less monotonous due to added, irrelevant, stimuli. The resource view, maintaining that vigilance is lowered by hard mental work, predicts that addition of irrelevant stimuli will not affect performance. The classic arousal theory, however, states that arousal drops due to monotonous stimulus presentation and predicts that decreasing monotony will enhance performance. Results showed that performance was unaffected by added stimuli. Second, we tested whether a high-demanding task (with identical stimulus presentation as the low demanding task, but different instruction) would cause a greater decline in performance than the low demanding task. Indeed, in the high-demanding task performance was affected most. In sum, it appears that vigilance decreases due to hard mental work, which requires many resources. Both overall performance and decrement in performance can be explained in terms of resources, and this suggests that vigilance tasks should be resource-demanding tasks, which do not have to be of long duration.     

The Koala Fear Questionnaire: a standardized self-report scale for assessing fears and fearfulness in pre-school and primary school children

The Koala Fear Questionnaire (KFQ) is a standardized self-report scale for assessing fears and fearfulness in children aged between 4 and 12 years. The current article presents six studies which examined the reliability and validity of the KFQ. Study 1 (N=108) demonstrated that the visual fear scales of Koala bears as employed in the KFQ are highly comparable to the standard 3-point scales that are used in other childhood fear measures. Study 2 (N=163) provided support for the convergent validity of the KFQ in a sample of 8- to 14-year-old children. That is, the scale correlated substantially with alternative measures of childhood fear and anxiety. Study 3 (N=189) showed that the KFQ possesses good internal consistency and test-retest stability in a group of 8- to 11-year-old children. The results of Studies 4 (N=129) and 5 (N=176) indicated that the KFQ is suitable for children aged 4 to 6 years and demonstrated that the psychometric properties of the scale in younger children are highly similar to those obtained in older children. Study 6 (N=926) showed that the factor structure of the KFQ was theoretically meaningful: although the data clearly pointed in the direction of one factor of general fearfulness, spurs of the commonly found five-factor solution of childhood fear were found in the KFQ. Altogether, the KFQ seems to be a valuable addition to the instrumentarium of clinicians and researchers who are working with fearful and anxious children.     

Stress, Performance, and Organizational Cultures

This study concentrates on some issues concerning the origins and developmental patterns of salutogenesis, i.e., health fostering coping style. First, we identify a number of environmental factors reportedly connected to successful coping with stress. Then we describe a method with which we can analyze team cultures and identify cultural factors related to team health. Finally, we present some results that we obtained while testing this method on several teams of middle management in an industrial enterprise. These results suggest that an “and–and” approach to coordination of actions (as opposed to an “or–or” approach), and a clear awareness of the value of specialized contributions to the total outcome play a significant role in improving the well-being of teams.     

The impact of television,print, and audio on children's recall of the news.

Recent research has shown that children remember more from television news than from print news, a finding that has been explained by the extra mnemonic support offered by redundant television pictures (the dual‐coding hypothesis). The present study was designed to examine three alternative explanations, which attribute children's superior recall of television news to (a) underutilization of the print medium, (b) a recall advantage of listening compared with reading, and imperfect reading ability. A sample of 192 fourth and sixth graders was presented with children's news stories, either in (a) their original television form, (b) a bare print version, a print version supplemented with photo material or in (d) an audio version. Results indicated that the television presentation was remembered better than any of the other three versions. The results of the study were consistent with the dual‐coding hypothesis, whereas no support was found for the alternative explanations tested in the study.     

Developing the incentivized action view of institutional reality

Contemporary discussion concerning institutions focus on, and mostly accept, the Searlean view that institutional objects, i.e. money, borders and the like, exist in virtue of the fact that we collectively represent them as existing. A dissenting note has been sounded by Smit et al. (Econ Philos 27:1–22, 2011), who proposed the incentivized action view of institutional objects. On the incentivized action view, understanding a specific institution is a matter of understanding the specific actions that are associated with the institution and how we are incentivized to perform these actions. In this paper we develop the incentivized action view by extending it to institutions like property, promises and complex financial organisations like companies. We also highlight exactly how the incentivized action view differs from the Searlean view, discuss the method appropriate to such study and discuss some of the virtues of the incentivized action view.     

Cost-effectiveness of online positive psychology: Randomized controlled trial

As yet, no evidence is available about the cost-effectiveness of positive psychological interventions. When offered via the Internet, these interventions may be particularly cost-effective, because they are highly scalable and do not rely on scant resources such as therapists’ time. Alongside a randomized controlled trial of an online positive psychological intervention, a health-economic evaluation was conducted. Mild to moderately depressed adults seeking self-help and recruited in the general population were randomly assigned to the intervention group (n?=?143) and a waitlisted usual care group (n?=?141). Improved clinical outcomes were achieved in the intervention group (at least for depression) at higher costs. When outliers (the top 2.5%, n?=?5 in intervention group, n?=?2 in control group) were removed, cost-effectiveness was increased considerably. For positive psychology, economic evaluations may be a means to nudge policy decision-makers towards placing positive psychological interventions on the health agenda.     

Does Natural Mentoring Matter? A Multilevel Meta‐analysis on the Association Between Natural Mentoring and Youth Outcomes

In this meta‐analytic review, we examined the relation between natural mentoring and youth outcomes in four domains: academic and vocational functioning, social‐emotional development, physical health, and psychosocial problems. Natural mentoring relationships are thought to foster positive youth development and buffer against the risks associated with the tumultuous years of adolescence. Two separate meta‐analyses were conducted on the presence of a natural mentor and the quality of the natural mentoring relationship, including thirty studies from 1992 to present. The findings indicated that the presence of a natural mentor was significantly associated with positive youth outcomes (r = .106). A larger effect size was found for the quality of the natural mentoring relationship in terms of relatedness, social support, and autonomy support (r = .208). The largest effect sizes were found for social‐emotional development and academic and vocational functioning. Risk‐status (e.g., teenage mothers, homeless youth, youth in foster care, and youth of alcoholic parents) did not moderate the relation between presence and quality of natural mentoring relationships and youth outcomes, which may indicate that natural mentors are generally beneficial for all youth regardless of risk‐status. Implications for theory and practice concerning the quality of the natural mentoring relationship are discussed.