Profiles of behavioral inhibition and anxiety symptoms during the preschool years

Behavioral inhibition (BI) during the preschool years can be defined as a biologically-based wariness when exposed to novel people, situations and activities, and has been associated with an increased risk of developing anxiety symptoms. Although BI is not a unitary concept, to date, few studies aimed to characterize different subgroups of children, using multidimensional parental measures, and compare them in terms of anxiety symptoms. This study aimed to identify different profiles of children with BI and explore potential differences concerning anxiety symptoms. One hundred and eight mothers of children with a mean age of 54 months completed the Behavioral Inhibition Questionnaire and the Preschool Anxiety Scale. Two profiles of children were identified: children with high and medium levels of BI. Children with high levels of BI displayed more generalized anxiety, social anxiety and physical injury fears symptoms than children with average BI levels. These differences were of greater magnitude for social anxiety symptoms. These findings highlight the importance of early intervention with children who display high levels of BI as early as the preschool years.

Habit and the Explanation of Action

In this paper, I synthesize recent work in the philosophy of action to propose an analytic reconstruction of the concept of habit. My main point is that habit (or habitus) can be a central, not just supplemental or auxiliary concept in action theory and the explanation of action. To show this, I systematically analyze the way habits can be used as a resource to explain action while comparing the way habits explain action with the standard way we explain action as being caused by the interplay of beliefs, desires, and intentions. I point to the specific “historical” way that habits can be seen as causes of action and show that the conceptual commitments of habit‐based explanations are both more substantial and more robust than intention‐based explanations. Once formed, habits act as inclinations and dispositions, being reliably triggered in the requisite context by the appropriate circumstances. Finally, I analyze the core concept of automaticity as applied to habit. I argue that since automaticity is not a unitary concept, different features of automaticity are more central to habit than others, allowing us to differentiate the most representative members of the habit category from more peripheral members.

Attention as a Unitary Concept

In this paper, I discuss attention in terms of selecting visual information and acting on it. Selection has been taken as a bedrock concept in attention research since James (1890). Selective attention guides action by privileging some things at the expense of others. I formalize this notion with models which capture the relationship between input and output under the control of spatial and temporal attention, by attenuating or discarding certain inputs and by weighing energetic costs, speed, and accuracy in meeting pre-chosen goals. Examples are given from everyday visually guided actions, and from modeling data obtained from visual searches through temporal and spatial arrays and related research. The relation between selection, as defined here, and other forms of attention is discussed at the end.

Not All Emotional Demands Are the Same: Emotional Demands from Clients’ or Co-Workers’ Relations Have Different Associations with Well-Being in Service Workers

There has been an increased interest in the study of emotional demands (ED) at work and its impact on workers’ well-being. However, ED have been conceptualized as a unitary concept, focused on interactions with clients, and excluding other potential sources of ED at work. Therefore, the aim of the current study is to explore the relation between ED from different relational sources (clients/patients/customers and colleagues, supervisors, and employees) and service workers’ exhaustion and engagement. Cross-sectional data from a sample of 2742 service workers were analysed using structural equation modelling. Results showed that ED from both sources (clients and colleagues) were associated with more emotional exhaustion, particularly if dealing with clients was not an integrated part of the role. Further, ED from clients’ relations were negatively associated with engagement for managers with staff responsibility, but positively for managers without staff responsibility. We also found moderating effects of psychosocial safety climate (PSC), whereby ED had the strongest effect on emotional exhaustion when PSC was low. This study suggests that different relational sources of ED at work have a different impact on employees’ well-being. Strategies that promote a reduction of extra-role ED, and the development of a PSC in the organization, could therefore offer possible solutions to promote employees’ psychological well-being and motivation.

Von Repräsentation zu demokratischer Gleichheit

Aufgrund seiner historischen Genese wurzelt das verfassungsrechtliche Verständnis repräsentativer Demokratie in einem unitären Begriff von Repräsentation, der kein Vokabular für die Verhandlung des Verhältnisses von Demokratie und gesellschaftlicher Ungleichheit entwickelt hat. Die Rekonstruktion unitärer und pluralistischer Repräsentationsbegriffe zeigt jedoch, dass ein modernes Demokratieverständnis nicht auf den Repräsentationsbegriff angewiesen ist. Dementsprechend wird vorgeschlagen, ein pluralistisches Demokratieverständnis ausgehend von der demokratischen Gleichheit zu konzipieren. Ein solches kann historisch-gesellschaftlich verortet begründen, dass es in einer pluralistischen Gesellschaft eines diskriminierungsfreien Zugangs zur Demokratie und folglich eines gewährleistenden Diskriminierungsschutzes bedarf. In diesem Sinne werden Paritätsgesetze, die ein diskriminierungsfreies Nominierungsverfahren für Wahlen gewährleisten, als demokratisches Antidiskriminierungsrecht beschrieben. Due to its historical genesis, the constitutional understanding of representative democracy is rooted in a unitary concept of representation that has not developed a vocabulary for negotiating the relationship between democracy and social inequality. However, the reconstruction of unitary and pluralistic concepts of representation shows that a modern understanding of democracy does not depend on the concept of representation. Accordingly, it is proposed to conceive a pluralistic understanding of democracy based on democratic equality. Such an understanding can be historically and socially located to justify the need for non-discriminatory access to democracy in a pluralistic society and, consequently, for guaranteed protection against discrimination. In this sense, parity laws that guarantee a non-discriminatory nomination procedure for elections are described as democratic anti-discrimination law.

Les guerres froides : Le film Cold War de Pawel Pawlikowski (2018)

Every attempt to replace the cold war polarisation represents a reinterpretation of the global conflict in the modern history. In my text, I will link the movie Cold War of the Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski (2018) to the analysis made by Heonik Kwon in his study The Other Cold War (Columbia University Press, 2010), who claims that the very notion of cold war as an unitary concept does not exist. Starting from this presupposition, I will examine the movie, which stages the love story of a couple crossing the Iron Courtain of the post-war Europe. The result is a Polish and British-French coproduction, opening the field of political action and moral imagination rather than of a homogenous perspective over the cold war.

Adapting Labour Law to Complex Organisational Settings of the Enterprise: Why Rethinking the Concept of the Employer is Not Enough

Labour law struggles to deal with the vertical disintegration of the enterprise, a phenomenon that questions the traditional bilateral and contractual analysis of the employment relationship and the unitary concept of the employer. Multiple employer patterns have been proposed by the Italian and English scholarship to try to sidestep the current impasse. However, these seem to be inconsistent with the existing legal framework and, in addition, it is debatable that they can be always instrumental in addressing the issues arising from the vertical disintegration of the enterprise. Nevertheless, an alternative and more nuanced analytical path can be followed. Labour law mostly takes the view that the employer is the contractual counterparty to the employee. Yet it also recognises that other entities can assume certain responsibilities of the employer in certain specific regulatory domains, where legislators recur to particular regulatory strategies often independent of a contractual analysis of the employment relationship. This article argues that the law takes this step not because these other legal entities are functionally akin to employers, but precisely in spite of the differences between them and the employer form. Rather than seeking to redefine the concept of employer, a better understanding of the subject must recognise that employment law consists of a kaleidoscopic blend of different regulatory domains, characterised by a range of different purposes, the achievement of which requires the adoption of different and even non-contractual normative tools. Adopting a variable geometry approach to frame the scope of labour laws would constitute a better analytical response to potentially restore the coherence and completeness of the scope of employment protective norms.

A toolbox approach to improving the measurement of attention control

Cognitive tasks that produce reliable and robust effects at the group level often fail to yield reliable and valid individual differences. An ongoing debate among attention researchers is whether conflict resolution mechanisms are task-specific or domain-general, and the lack of correlation between most attention measures seems to favor the view that attention control is not a unitary concept. We have argued that the use of difference scores, particularly in reaction time, is the primary cause of null and conflicting results at the individual differences level, and that methodological issues with existing tasks preclude making strong theoretical conclusions. The present article is an empirical test of this view in which we used a toolbox approach to develop and validate new tasks hypothesized to reflect attention processes. Here, we administered existing, modified, and new attention tasks to over 400 subjects (final N = 396). Compared to the traditional Stroop and flanker tasks, performance on the accuracy-based measures was more reliable, had stronger intercorrelations, formed a more coherent latent factor, and had stronger associations to measures of working memory capacity and fluid intelligence. Further, attention control fully accounted for the relationship between working memory capacity and fluid intelligence. These results show that accuracy-based tasks can be better suited to individual differences investigations than traditional reaction time tasks, particularly when the goal is to maximize prediction. We conclude that attention control is a unitary concept.

Neuropsychological Profiles of Three Subtypes of Impulsivity in the General Population: A Young Adults Study

The impulsivity construct has been investigated in the psychological literature as both a personality factor and a manifestation of the cognitive functioning of individuals. In addition, an increasing number of studies have shown that impulsivity is not a unitary concept and that it must be conceived of as several subtypes. We investigated whether a self-report test of three types of impulsivity could be a good predictor of cognitive functioning in healthy individuals. The sample was composed of 230 subjects (65% women) with a mean age of 28.4 years (SD = 13.6 years) from the general population of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The sample was evaluated using the Questionnaire on Compulsive Urgency, Sensation Seeking, and Impulsive Improvidence (CUBI-18; Squillace Louhau, & Picón Janerio, 2019), which measures three impulsivity subtypes. A battery of neuropsychological tests was administered to measure not only executive-attentional functioning, verbal and non-verbal fluency, and speed of processing, but also strategies in the decision-making process. The results showed a differential profile of the three subtypes of impulsivity. Compulsive Urgency was associated with greater executive- attentional difficulties, Impulsive Improvidence with lower fluency in processing nonverbal information, and Sensation Seeking with better general cognitive performance and risk-taking during decision-making.

Patterns of Regularity, Stability and Interdependence in Research Related to Communities in ELT

This paper presents a review of studies on communities in ELT in English-speaking countries and Latin America, including Colombia. The purpose of the article is to show that it is necessary to understand the senses Language Preservice Teachers make of the concept of communities and the ways they relate to each other and their teachers. Also, there is a unitary concept of community in the policies related to English Language Teacher Education in Colombia, a naturalization of the concept of community and patterns of regularity, stability and interdependence in research related to communities in English Language Teaching that make invisible how the English Language Preservice Teachers make sense of the concept of community in their affiliations or no affiliations with particular groups. Understanding the senses the English Language Preservice Teachers make about communities might bring to the fore other ways of knowing that can contribute to the improvement of the design of teacher education programmes.