Measuring Impartial Beneficence: A Kantian Perspective on the Oxford Utilitarianism Scale

To capture genuine utilitarian tendencies, (Kahane et al., Psychological Review 125:131, 2018) developed the Oxford Utilitarianism Scale (OUS) based on two subscales, which measure the commitment to impartial beneficence and the willingness to cause harm for the greater good. In this article, I argue that the impartial beneficence subscale, which breaks ground with previous research on utilitarian moral psychology, does not distinctively measure utilitarian moral judgment. I argue that Kantian ethics captures the all-encompassing impartial concern for the well-being of all human beings. The Oxford Utilitarianism Scale draws, in fact, a point of division that places Kantian and utilitarian theories on the same track. I suggest that the impartial beneficence subscale needs to be significantly revised in order to capture distinctively utilitarian judgments. Additionally, I propose that psychological research should focus on exploring multiple sources of the phenomenon of impartial beneficence without categorizing it as exclusively utilitarian.

Episodic Memory Precision and Reality Monitoring Following Stimulation of Angular Gyrus

The qualities of remembered experiences are often used to inform “reality monitoring” judgments, our ability to distinguish real and imagined events [Johnson, M. K., & Raye, C. L. Reality monitoring. Psychological Review, 88, 67–85, 1981]. Previous experiments have tended to investigate only whether reality monitoring decisions are accurate or not, providing little insight into the extent to which reality monitoring may be affected by qualities of the underlying mnemonic representations. We used a continuous-response memory precision task to measure the quality of remembered experiences that underlie two different types of reality monitoring decisions: self/experimenter decisions that distinguish actions performed by participants and the experimenter and imagined/perceived decisions that distinguish imagined and perceived experiences. The data revealed memory precision to be associated with higher accuracy in both self/experimenter and imagined/perceived reality monitoring decisions, with lower precision linked with a tendency to misattribute self-generated experiences to external sources. We then sought to investigate the possible neurocognitive basis of these observed associations by applying brain stimulation to a region that has been implicated in precise recollection of personal events, the left angular gyrus. Stimulation of angular gyrus selectively reduced the association between memory precision and self-referential reality monitoring decisions, relative to control site stimulation. The angular gyrus may, therefore, be important for the mnemonic processes involved in representing remembered experiences that give rise to a sense of self-agency, a key component of “autonoetic consciousness” that characterizes episodic memory [Tulving, E. Elements of episodic memory. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 1985].

National Webinar on Philosophy and Psychological Review of Thinking Disposition

In addition to the ability to think, students need a thinking disposition to succeed in learning. However, the results of preliminary research indicate that the knowledge of prospective teachers, teachers, and lecturers is still low on thinking dispositions. Therefore, this problem can be solved by conducting a national webinar on dispositions of thinking. Thus, the purpose of this service is to provide participants with an understanding of the philosophical and psychological dispositions of thinking. This service method is in the form of a national webinar, which is a seminar held online. This webinar activity is divided into three stages, namely the material presentation stage, the question and answer stage, and the community service evaluation stage. The results of this community service evaluation show that the percentage of the results of filling out the questionnaire is 81% which means that it is in the very high category. This means that this national webinar activity was very successful in understanding the participants towards a philosophical and psychological review of thinking dispositions. This success is supported by the availability of material, internet signals, and the ability of the presenters to convey the material. Apart from that, there are also inhibiting factors in this seminar activity, namely inadequate material delivery time, signal constraints, and too many presenters.

A Social Psychological Review on Women’s Surname Change after Marriage and Divorce

Surname is an integral part of a person’s identity. However, surname which has many psychological and social meanings for the person is changed only for women after marriage. In this regard, the purpose of the article is to review the factors affecting women’s decisions regarding surname choice after marriage and divorce, as well as explaining the stereotypes and attitudes towards women who made traditional or untraditional name choices. In terms of the marital surname choice, women may adopt husband’s surname, hyphenate their birth surname and their husband’s surname, and retain only their birth surname. In this context, we presented not only related demographic variables such as age, socio-economic level, education level, and political orientation but also social psychological variables such as emphasis on family/motherhood, sexism, feminist identification, religiosity and perceived social norms. Then, studies focusing on the attitudes and stereotypes towards women who make different marital surname choices were presented. The traditional surname change was also considered in terms of patriarchy and gender-based discrimination. Additionally, possible effects of the post-divorce surname change on a woman's life were mentioned. In the conclusion part, the effects of surname change at the individual and societal level were discussed in parallel with the issues mentioned in the current article and further possible research ideas were suggested. Keywords: Surname change, surname choice, marriage, divorce, sexism, attitudes, stereotype

گڈیکو نظر، افسانہ نا نفسیاتی جاچ اس

Psychological analysis of Brahui short story is quite new in Brahui research. This paper describes the psychological disorders of various characters of ‘’Guddiko Nazar”. In the 1986 century Waheed Zaheer penned down “Guddiko Nazar”, a psychological short story in Brahui language. It was first published in his book “Shanza”. The aim of this paper was to reveal the mental disorders as depicted in the mentioned short story. Mental illness is a state of mind where psychological problems impose not only hurdles in a harmonious co-existence but create distress felt by the individual who suffers from one. A mental condition may even hurt those around the sufferer. In this study, the researcher employed content analysis, a branch of descriptive and analytical research to conduct a psychological review of fiction writing, in comparison with modern psychological theories, especially related to mental illness. The investigation revealed that “Guddiko Nazar” is a master piece of literary work of Brahui language, which focuses the important psychological disorders, like obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) including anxiety, guilt, complexes and many more mental disorders. The short story reflects the writing skills in line with contemporary psychological fiction writing techniques.

Was John B. Watson Inspired by Anna Wyczółkowska and Her Studies in the Mechanism of Speech?

In 1913, an article by Anna Wyczółkowska entitled Theoretical and experimental studies in the mechanism of speech was published in the Psychological Review. It contains the results of her studies on internal speech and thought, which had been carried out by the author seven years earlier, in the psychological laboratory of the University of Chicago. John B. Watson was a participant in the study. Wyczółkowska believed that Watson was inspired by her research. Thanks to his participation, he gradually began to move away from his original interest in animal psychology, towards behaviourism. In his Behaviorist Manifesto published in the same year, Watson took, as one of the arguments for the rightness of his programme, the assumption that the thought process is really motor habits in the larynx, improvements, short cuts, changes, etc. According to Wyczółkowska, it was obviously inspired by her research. Her aforementioned article is still cited in the psychological literature today, and belongs to the canon of the most important early experimental studies in the field of research on thinking and speech processes. This text discusses the relationship between the research conducted by Wyczółkowska and some assumptions of behaviourism. Furthermore it presents the story of Wyczółkowska’s life, her scientific work, social commitment to women’s university education, and activities in the Polish American community.

Salience effects in information acquisition: No evidence for a top-down coherence influence

The Integrated Coherence-Based Decision and Search (iCodes) model proposed by Jekel et al. (Psychological Review, 125 (5), 744–768, 2018) formalizes both decision making and pre-decisional information search as coherence-maximization processes in an interactive network. Next to bottom-up attribute influences, the coherence of option information exerts a top-down influence on the search processes in this model, predicting the tendency to continue information search with the currently most attractive option. This hallmark “attraction search effect” (ASE) has been demonstrated in several studies. In three experiments with 250 participants altogether, a more subtle prediction of an extended version of iCodes including exogenous influence factors was tested: The salience of information is assumed to have both a direct (bottom-up) and an indirect (top-down) effect on search, the latter driven by the match between information valence and option attractiveness. The results of the experiments largely agree in (1) showing a strong ASE, (2) demonstrating a bottom-up salience effect on search, but (3) suggesting the absence of the hypothesized indirect top-down salience effect. Hence, only two of three model predictions were confirmed. Implications for various implementations of exogenous factors in the iCodes model are discussed.

Cross-modal commutativity of magnitude productions of loudness and brightness

In their fundamental paper, Luce, Steingrimsson, and Narens (2010, Psychological Review, 117, 1247-1258) proposed that ratio productions constituting a generalization of cross-modality matching may be represented on a single scale of subjective intensity, if they meet “cross-dimensional commutativity.” The present experiment is the first to test this axiom by making truly cross-modal adjustments of the type: “Make the sound three times as loud as the light appears bright!” Twenty participants repeatedly adjusted the level of a burst of noise to result in the desired sensation ratio (e.g., to be three times as intense) compared to the brightness emanating from a grayscale square, and vice versa. Cross-modal commutativity was tested by comparing a set of successive ×2×3 productions with a set of ×3×2 productions. When this property was individually evaluated for each of 20 participants and for two possible directions, i.e., starting out with a noise burst or a luminous patch, only seven of the 40 tests indicated a statistically significant violation of cross-modal commutativity. Cross-modal monotonicity, i.e. checking whether ×1, ×2, and ×3 adjustments are strictly ordered, was evaluated on the same data set and found to hold. Multiplicativity, by contrast, i.e., comparing the outcome of a ×1×6 adjustment with ×2×3 sequences, irrespective of order, was violated in 17 of 40 tests, or at least once for all but six participants. This suggests that both loudness and brightness sensations may be measured on a common ratio scale of subjective intensity, but cautions against interpreting the numbers involved at face value.

Human in the face of global pandemics: historical and psychological review

The article attempts to analyze the historical and psychological aspects of the world pandemics of the past and present. The authors provide a detailed overview of the world's pandemics and their impact on society and the individual. Historical and psychological reviews allow us to draw a parallel between the large-scale pandemics of the past and the present, which is especially relevant in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic that has engulfed humanity. A logical and reasonable periodization of global pandemics is suggested, and the authors give a detailed description of each stage. The first stage includes the pandemics of traditional and early industrial society that raged in the ancient world, the middle ages, and early modern times. The authors highlight such features as a high mortality rate, localization in certain regions and continents, the connection of the spread of diseases with the processes of population migration, crusades, and great geographical discoveries. The second stage includes the pandemics of the industrial era, which occur in the context of globalization, urbanization and increasing crowding of the population, but become less destructive. The authors associate the third stage with modern pandemics generated by the transition to a post-industrial (information) society. The authors note the reduction in mortality from pandemics, and at the same time mutations of viruses, which forces scientists around the world to constantly search for and develop new vaccines. Historical, cultural and psychological analysis of past pandemics allows us to understand better the psychological features of human life in the context of a new coronavirus infection. The authors reveal the role of technological progress in the fight against global pandemics, the role of virus mutations in the development of medical knowledge.