Three studies examined the effect of primed psychological distance on level of perceptual construal, using Navon’s paradigm of composite letters (global letters that are made of local letters). Relative to a control group, thinking of the more distant future (Study 1), about more distant spatial locations (Study 2), and about more distant social relations (Study 3) facilitated perception of global letters relative to local letters. Proximal times, spatial locations, and social relations had the opposite effect. The results are discussed within (...) the framework of Construal Level Theory of psychological distance (Liberman & Trope, 2008; Trope & Liberman, 2003). (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Language and Cognition - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language and Cognitive Science Jahrgang: 5 Heft: 4 Seiten: 409-436.

Microdevelopment is the process of change in abilities, knowledge and understanding during short time-spans. This book presents a new process-orientated view of development and learning based on recent innovations in psychology research. Instead of characterising abilities at different ages, researchers investigate processes of development and learning that evolve through time and explain what enables progress in them. Four themes are highlighted: variability, mechanisms that create transitions to higher levels of knowledge, interrelations between changes in the short-term scale of microdevelopment and (...) the crucial effect of context. Learning and development are analysed in and out of school, in the individual's activities and through social interaction, in relation to simple and complex problems and in everyday behaviour and novel tasks. With contributions from the foremost researchers in the field Microdevelopment will be essential reading for all interested in cognitive and developmental science. (shrink)

PurposeThis paper discusses the need for health information specialists who can promote patient empowerment by tailoring the information patients receive as they cope with illness. The objectives of this study are to distinguish the various stages of coping with illness, examine the informational needs of patients during these stages, explore how web information contributes to patient empowerment, and describe the potential role of the health information specialist.Design/methodology/approachIn order to meet the study's objectives, a qualitative research method was used in which (...) 110 in‐depth interviews were conducted with patients who told their story of coping throughout the course of illness. By distinguishing and understanding the different stages of coping with illness, we came to distinguish the distinct informational needs during the coping process, and understand how web information contributes to patient empowerment.FindingsThe process of coping with illness has four stages. In each stage, the patient's informational needs differ, as does his ability to absorb and process information. Health systems do not provide information to match the coping stage of the patient. Patients turn to professional and unprofessional internet sites in their search for medical knowledge. The current study, integrated with other studies that show patients' difficulties using the internet, emphasizes the importance of the information specialist in the patient empowerment process.Originality/valueThe study will aid policy makers in the process of empowering patients by demonstrating patients' dynamic informational needs when coping with illness. This study proposes a role for the information specialists that will enable them to expand into the health domain. This role is the health information specialist, a professional who will, among other things, learn how health systems work, identify types of web information sources, assess medical site quality, recognize patients' coping stages, and adapt information to individual characteristics. (shrink)

The article explores various ways collectivity boundaries and territorial borders, as well as the act of crossing them, are experienced and imagined, particularly by women. In doing so, the article draws on autobiographical material collected by email from women in about 25 different countries.

The paper examines the effects of intersecting social divisions on constructions of multi‐layered citizenships and the politics of belonging in contemporary Britain. It starts with conceptual clarifications of the notions of citizenship, belonging and intersectionality and then turns to examine contemporary politics of belonging in contemporary Britain, focusing on the current debate on the ‘death of multiculturalism’ and on ‘social cohesion’. It illustrates how the use of civic and democratic values as signifiers of belonging can end up as exclusionary, rather (...) than inclusionary in that discourse. (shrink)

This article explores various analytical issues involved in conceptualizing the interrelationships of gender, class, race and ethnicity and other social divisions. It compares the debate on these issues that took place in Britain in the 1980s and around the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism. It examines issues such as the relative helpfulness of additive or mutually constitutive models of intersectional social divisions; the different analytical levels at which social divisions need to be studied, their ontological base and their relations (...) to each other. The final section of the article attempts critically to assess a specific intersectional methodological approach for engaging in aid and human rights work in the South. (shrink)

The article discusses some of the major issues which need to be examined in a gendered reading of citizenship. However, its basic claim is that a comparative study of citizenship should consider the issue of women's citizenship not only by contrast to that of men, but also in relation to women's affiliation to dominant or subordinate groups, their ethnicity, origin and urban or rural residence. It should also take into consideration global and transnational positionings of these citizenships. The article challenges (...) the gender-blind and Westocentric character of many of the most hegemonic theorizations of citizenship, focusing in particular on the questions of membership in ‘the community’, group rights and social difference and the ways binaries of public/private and active/passive have been constructed to differentiate between different kinds of citizenships. The article argues that in order to be able to analyse adequately people's citizenship, especially in this era of ethnicization on the one hand and globalization on the other hand, and with the rapid pace at which relationships between states and their civil societies are changing, citizenship should best be analysed as a multi-tiered construct which applies, at the same time to people's membership in sub-, cross- and supra-national collectivities as well as in states. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to further assess and develop feminist standpoint theory by introducing the notion of the `situated imagination' as constituting an important part of this theory as well as that of `situated knowledge'. The article argues that the faculty of the imagination constructs as well as transforms, challenges and supersedes both existing knowledge and social reality. However, like knowledge, it is crucial to theorize the imagination as situated, that is, as shaped and conditioned (although not determined) (...) by social positioning. (shrink)

The present study was motivated by the hypothesis that inputs from internal states in obsessive–compulsive individuals are attenuated, which could be one source of the pervasive doubting and checking in OCD. Participants who were high or low in OC tendencies were asked to produce specific levels of muscle tension with and without biofeedback, and their accuracy in producing the required muscle tension levels was assessed. As predicted, high OC participants performed more poorly than low OC participants on this task when (...) biofeedback was not available. When biofeedback was provided, the difference between the groups was eliminated, and withdrawing the monitor again reversed this effect. Finally, when given the opportunity, high OC participants were more likely than low OC participants to request biofeedback. These results suggest that doubt in OCD may be grounded in a real and general deficiency in accessing internal states. (shrink)

In recent years, scientists have increasingly taken to investigate the predictive nature of cognition. We argue that prediction relies on abstraction, and thus theories of predictive cognition need an explicit theory of abstract representation. We propose such a theory of the abstract representational capacities that allow humans to transcend the “here-and-now.” Consistent with the predictive cognition literature, we suggest that the representational substrates of the mind are built as ahierarchy, ranging from the concrete to the abstract; however, we argue that (...) there are qualitative differences between elements along this hierarchy, generating meaningful, often unacknowledged,diversity.Echoing views from philosophy, we suggest that the representational hierarchy can be parsed into:modality-specificrepresentations, instantiated on perceptual similarity;multimodalrepresentations, instantiated primarily on the discovery of spatiotemporal contiguity; andcategoricalrepresentations, instantiated primarily on social interaction. These elements serve as the building blocks ofcomplex structures discussed in cognitive psychology (e.g., episodes, scripts) and are the inputs for mental representations that behave like functions, typically discussed in linguistics (i.e.,predicators). We support our argument for representational diversity by explaining how the elements in our ontology are all required to account for humans’ predictive cognition (e.g., in subserving logic-based prediction; in optimizing the trade-off between accurate and detailed predictions) and by examining how the neuroscientific evidence coheres with our account. In doing so, we provide a testable model of the neural bases of conceptual cognition and highlight several important implications to research on self-projection, reinforcement learning, and predictive-processing models of psychopathology. (shrink)

The commentaries address our view of abstraction, our ontology of abstract entities, and our account of predictive cognition as relying on relatively concrete simulation or relatively abstract theory-based inference. These responses revisit classic questions concerning mental representation and abstraction in the context of current models of predictive cognition. The counter arguments to our article echo: constructivist theories of knowledge, “neat” approaches in artificial intelligence and decision theory, neo-empiricist models of concepts, and externalist views of cognition. We offer several empirical predictions (...) that address points of contention and that highlight the generative potential of our model. (shrink)

The present studies were motivated by the hypothesis that attenuated access to internal states in obsessive-compulsive (OC) individuals, which leads to extensive reliance on external proxies, may manifest in a maximizing decision making style, i.e., to seeking the best option through an exhaustive search of all existing alternatives. Following previous research, we aimed to explore the possible relationships between OC tendencies, seeking proxies for internal states, indecisiveness and maximization. In Study 1, we measured levels of OC tendencies, seeking proxies for (...) internal states, indecisiveness, maximization, depression and anxiety in an online Hebrew speaking sample (N = 201). In Study 2, we administrated the same questionnaires to an online English speaking sample (N = 240) and in addition, examined participants’ decision making strategies in a hypothetical situation. The participants in both studies were unscreened adults. Correlational and linear regressions analyses indicated that OC tendencies are related to maximization, even when levels of indecisiveness, depression and anxiety are controlled for. Moreover, the findings suggested that reliance on external proxies may partially account for the aforementioned association. Possible implications and future directions are discussed. (shrink)

According to Lee and Schwarz, the sensorimotor experience of cleansing involves separating one physical entity from another and grounds mental separation of one psychological entity from another. We propose that cleansing effects may result from symbolic cognition. Instead of viewing abstract meanings as emerging from concrete physical acts of cleansing, this physical act may be appended with pre-existing, symbolic meaning.