Independent Judges Research Articles

The interpersonal nature of self-talk: Variations across individuals and occasions.

This research addressed the hypothesis that self-talk conveys a variety of interpersonal styles, representing different ways of addressing oneself, and that these different styles can be conceptualized with the interpersonal circumplex. Using a diary-like method for 14 days, 232 undergraduates were asked, toward the end of each day, to reflect on one positive and one negative event from that day and write down their self-talk about each. Using an instrument based on the interpersonal circumplex, participants and later independent judges rated the interpersonal qualities of each self-talk statement. Ratings showed a reasonably high degree of consistency over days, and averages over days for each participant showed reasonably good circumplex structure, consistent with an interpersonal conception of self-talk style. Multilevel modeling revealed that the interpersonal qualities of self-talk also showed substantial variance at the occasion level. There were synergistic interactions of self-talk dominance and affiliation in the prediction of post-self-talk affect, with higher positive and lower negative affect following self-talk that was relatively high in both dominance and affiliation. Conceptualizing self-talk styles in terms of the interpersonal circumplex offers a promising framework for further research on inner experience and its effects. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The Relationships between Cognitive Styles and Creativity: The Role of Field Dependence-Independence on Visual Creative Production.

Previous studies explored the relationships between field dependent-independent cognitive style (FDI) and creativity, providing misleading and unclear results. The present research explored this problematic interplay through the lens of the Geneplore model, employing a product-oriented task: the Visual Creative Synthesis Task (VCST). The latter requires creating objects belonging to pre-established categories, starting from triads of visual components and consists of two steps: the preinventive phase and the inventive phase. Following the Amabile’s consensual assessment technique, three independent judges evaluated preinventive structures in terms of originality and synthesis whereas inventions were evaluated in terms of originality and appropriateness. The Embedded Figure Test (EFT) was employed in order to measure the individual’s predisposition toward the field dependence or the field independence. Sixty undergraduate college students (31 females) took part in the experiment. Results revealed that field independent individuals outperformed field dependent ones in each of the four VCST scores, showing higher levels of creativity. Results were discussed in light of the better predisposition of field independent individuals in mental imagery, mental manipulation of abstract objects, as well as in using their knowledge during complex tasks that require creativity. Future research directions were also discussed.

Cross-border dispute resolution in Europe: looking for a new “normal”

We live in an increasingly digitally mediated, platform-based environment characterised by remote working, schooling, shopping, and socialising, where national borders blur and geographical location importance decreases. One of the main effects of this transformation is the growing relevance of cross-border (actual and potential) disputes and, therefore, the need for adequate means to address and resolve them. Geographically bounded forms of dispute resolution based on national justice systems, courts, and independent judges have shown their limits to face the new challenge. Building on Canguilhem’s work on the norm, normal and pathological concepts, the paper explores the European Union’s attempt to provide adequate cross-border dispute resolution mechanisms through traditional justice means, showing achieved results and limits. The paper then explores the increasing role of dispute resolution mechanisms integrated into platforms, such as Amazon, eBay and Booking, that bring together service-and-goods providers and buyers/users. These platforms 1) act as third parties in the adjudication of controversies and 2) deploy crowd-based adjudication and enforcement instruments.

Social innovations to increase health coverage: evidence from a crowdsourcing contest in Ghana

ObjectivesDespite progress made to expand access to health service in Ghana, inequities still exist. Social innovations have been developed as community-engaged solutions to decrease inequities.MethodsIn partnership with a multistakeholder group,...

Youth social innovation during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines: a quantitative and qualitative descriptive analyses from a crowdsourcing open call and online hackathon

IntroductionYoung people have played a pivotal role as part of the COVID-19 response, including developing health messages and social innovations. Social innovation in health engages multiple stakeholders in linking social...

Constitutional reforms in Poland after 7 April 1989

The political events of the late 1980s, as well as the results of the Round Table negotiations, needed their formal confirmation in the Constitution in order to secure their durability. During the political transformation in the years 1989–1991, there were seven amendments of the Constitution of 1952 adopted, out of which the first two were particularly important. The first amendment of April 1989 restored, among others, the office of the President as a head of state and the Senate, as well as established the National Council of the Judiciary as the body protecting independent courts and judges. The second amendment of December 1989 introduced the fundamental principles such as a democratic state ruled by law, social justice, political pluralism, freedom of economic activity and property protection. The current Constitution of 1997 has been amended only twice – in 2006 in regard to the extradition of a Polish citizen (art. 55 par. 3) and in 2009 in regard to passive electoral rights (art. 99 par. 3). As shown by the political experience after 2015, the procedure for adopting the amendment to the Constitution set out in art. 235 is extremely difficult, which has led to a situation in which it is bypassed and the content of constitutional provisions is changed by ordinary provisions.

The effect of gender identity and gender threat on self-image

The present work examined whether men's and women's gender-identities and experiences of gender threats influenced their self-images. Findings across two studies (N = 567) revealed that masculinity in men appears to be more precarious than femininity is in women, but when similarly threatened in a given situation both men's and women's anger predicted their construction of gender compensatory self-images. Specifically, in Study 1, participants' definition of the self in terms of gender ingroup (vs. outgroup) traits (a) positively predicted the gender stereotypicality of men's and women's actual photographs and women's constructed self-images, but (b) negatively predicted the gender stereotypicality of men's self-images. Men whose self definitions least strongly prioritized gender ingroup (over outgroup) traits generated the most gender stereotypic self-images, as rated by independent judges. In addition, in Study 2, after being led to believe that they performed like average members of their gender outgroup (i.e., threat condition) on a gender knowledge test, men expressed more public discomfort and were angrier than women. Gender threat (vs. assurance) also indirectly predicted the generation of more gender stereotypic self-images for men, but not women; this effect was significant via serial mediation, through public discomfort and anger. However, extending prior findings, anger (but not public discomfort) was significantly associated with and predicted the construction of feedback contradicting self-images similarly. We discuss the implications of these findings for theory and research on gender-identity, self-image, and compensatory gender threat responses.

Cognition and affect in imagined and recalled scenarios as a function of a specificity manipulation: An experience sampling study

Previous work has examined the effect of specificity and temporal focus (i.e., memory vs. imagination) on people's cognition and associated affect. Here, using experience sampling methods, we take these previously addressed questions out of the laboratory into daily-life settings. Participants (N = 228) were randomly assigned to a specificity or control condition, and recorded imagined or recalled scenarios twice a day for 1 week. Results revealed a main effect of specificity where specificity prompts resulted in written scenarios that were rated by independent judges as more creative, more positive, less negative, more coherent, and incorporated more sensory content. Specificity had few direct influences on affect, though an interaction showed that imagined scenarios with specificity prompts resulted in reduced self-reported anxiety. Implications and future directions are discussed.

Dissociated Effects of Age and Recent Troubling Experiences on Nightmares, Threats and Negative Emotions in Dreams.

Several studies have highlighted associations between adverse life events and the dysphoric character of dream experiences. This degree of continuity between waking-life and dream content seems partly attributed to the emotional and personal attachment linked to the incorporated waking experiences. Numerous changes in the processing of emotion-related stimuli are also reported across different human developmental stages. Therefore, we were interested in testing whether age would modulate the impact of recent troubling experiences on dream characteristics. Two hundred sixty participants, evenly distributed in five developmental stages, matched for gender and their exposure to a troubling experience, were selected from a large sample collected for a previous normative study of dreams of Canadians. Participants completed a dream questionnaire from which independent judges subsequently scored the dreams. We observed no interactions between the experience of troubling events and age. However, individuals who experienced a recent troubling event reported a higher frequency of nightmares and their dreams were more emotionally negative. Participants who experienced a moderately severe troubling event were also more likely to experience a dream whose maximal threat severity was of moderate intensity. Adolescents and young adults had dreams with a higher level of oneiric threats compared to older adults (>40 years old). Young adults also reported a higher frequency of nightmares compared to older adults. Our findings have implications for modern dream theories. They also suggest that dysphoric dreams might serve as potential proxies of mental health status and developmental stages. Future studies are now needed to explore the implications of these findings for psychological adaptation.

Estimates of the Losses of Polish Jews in Hiding, 1942–1945: Revisiting Yehuda Bauer’s Observations

ABSTRACT The Polish general elections of 2015 brought to power a right-wing, nationalistic party called PiS (Law & Justice). Since then, the nationalists have been busy dismantling the fundamental components of the democratic system, appropriating the entire machinery of the state, and attacking independent judges and journalists. However, their obsession with the defense of the so-called good name of the nation made history one of the most internationally visible areas of confrontation. And Holocaust studies, Holocaust research, and Holocaust education quickly found themselves at the very heart of this struggle over the past. In order to defend the myth of the alleged national innocence during the war, the Polish authorities have become one of the chief agents of Holocaust distortion worldwide. A number of institutions are now involved in a relentless campaign intended to prove that rescuing the Jews during the Shoah was the default position of Polish society. Driven by a phenomenon known as “Holocaust envy,” the official narrative multiplies the ranks of Polish Righteous Among the Nations and strives to present the Polish suffering, and the Polish physical losses, at par with the Jewish ones. The research into the scale of Polish complicity in the Holocaust therefore raises particular ire of the Polish state. Conservative estimates indicate that around 200,000 Jews were either killed or denounced to the Germans by the Poles.

Rewarding Numbers: Quantification Premia and Evaluative Convergence

The author advances the theory that when evaluation bears high stakes and is subject to high uncertainty of quality, a greater presence of numbers in the evaluated materials positively influences the evaluator’s assessment of the quality of the evaluated object and leads to less variance in the overall assessment of quality by evaluators. The author explores these ideas in a case study of the MacArthur Foundation’s 2016–2017 $100 million winner-take-all grant competition for nonprofit organizations and tests them using judges’ numeric scores and comments together with information from the application materials, tax records, and previous funding histories of the applicant organizations. In this competition, organizations that included more numbers of any kind in their application materials received on average higher scores. Furthermore, the independent judges on the nondeliberative panel were more likely to give the applicants similar scores. Quantification thus both carries a premium—it predicts higher scores—and produces evaluative convergence.

Democratic Capacity: Election Administration as Bulwark and Target

Headlines decried the fragility of American democracy during the 2020 elections, but extensive institutional structures steered officials in both political parties to certify the results of the election, and independent judges have validated their decisions. Political battles over election laws and procedures are not themselves signs of democracy’s demise, because legal and administrative guardrails contain the degree to which voting rights are threatened. These formidable institutional structures blunted former president Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and limited the scope and impact of new state legislation to restrict access to voting. The guardrails of elections operated as designed, but Trump’s unfounded charges of fraud coupled with state restrictions are corroding the credibility and fairness of elections. We examine the scope and function of election law and administration to understand how they protected American democracy in the contentious 2020 election.

W sprawie zgodności z Konstytucją RP powoływania sędziów – członków Krajowej Rady Sądownictwa przez Sejm

The subject of this text is to determine whether Article 9a of the Law on the National Council of the Judiciary is compatible with the Constitution of the Republic of Poland. In order to answer this question, the relationship that should prevail between the various authorities in a system based on the principle of separation of powers was analyzed. Then, doubts were resolved as to whether the NCJ is a body appearing in the division of powers of the judiciary. In the end, it was concluded that in the RP, the Sejm should have no other creative powers over the judiciary than those expressly provided for in the Constitution of the RP. Otherwise, the chamber is placed in a position of unjustified supremacy vis-àvis the judiciary, and the judicial power provides no guarantee that human freedoms and rights will be decided by independent and impartial courts staffed by independent judges.

Seeing Like Sophie: Developing Judgment in Rousseau's Émile

AbstractScholars often assume Émile seeks to educate readers to become like Émile. However, I suggest that by calling upon his readers to act as judges, Rousseau's aim is not for readers to copy Émile, but to educate them to act as independent judges. The first section of this article argues that Émile's education fails to teach him this kind of judgment. He never learns to navigate the interdependent relationships created by property ownership or family life. Rather, as explored in the second section, Sophie's education offers a better style of judgment. The article concludes with a consideration of the reader's education as distinct from that of either Émile or Sophie. By emulating Sophie readers do not become like her. Rather, through comparing the characters and situations Rousseau presents in Émile and “Émile et Sophie,” readers learn to judge for themselves.

Intention and Monitoring Influence the Content of Memory Reports.

While voluntary memories are intended and expected, involuntary memories are retrieved with no intention and are usually unexpected (when one is not waiting for a memory). The present study investigates the effects of retrieval intentionality (wanting to retrieve a memory) and monitoring processes (expecting a memory to appear) on the characteristics of autobiographical memories. To this end, by applying mixed-method analysis of memory descriptions (i.e. combining qualitative with quantitative analyses) we re-analysed the large pool of involuntary and voluntary memories obtained in one previously published study, asking independent judges to rate all the memories on several dimensions reflecting memory accessibility (i.e. the likelihood that a memory can be retrieved). When discussing our findings, we speculate that there may be several stages of memory retrieval that might be differently influenced by intention and monitoring. We discuss the novel hypothesis that there may be two different types of monitoring that operate independently of each other, before and after retrieval, respectively.

The Differentiation of Narrative Styles in Individuals with High Psychopathic Deviate

The current study was designed to show the differentiation of narrative styles in individuals with high scores in Psychopathic deviate (Pd) scale and develop a method enabling identification of psychopathic personality traits based on linguistic indicators. 600 spontaneous narrations related to emotional topics have been examined for grammar, syntactic, and lexical indicators. The indicators have been selected based on a review related to language of psychopaths. The narrations were written by 200 persons who were also tested for psychopathic deviate and intelligence level, including prisoners diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder. Independent judges identified the linguistic indicators which were then counted for each person with the use of computer software. The configuration profiles of the linguistic indicators/narrative styles were established using k-mean clustering method. Then, ANOVA was performed to show which clusters differentiate the levels of psychopathic deviate. The findings show there are two configurations of language features (important: single features were not examined) associated with high levels of psychopathic deviate patterns. Two narrative styles were identified, labelled demonstrative-digressive-egocentric-emotional-dogmatic and reserved-focused on the topic-repetitive, which indicate high psychopathic deviate traits. The ROC curves were applied to establish the prediction of the narrative styles for high psychopathic deviate scores.

Reflective Practices to Study Group Dynamics: Implement Empowerment and Understand the Functioning of Groups.

Introduction: Individual and group reflection practices are qualitative methods useful in a group context to develop group skills and more awareness of the dynamics that take place within the group to which one belongs.Aim: The aim of this work is to highlight how individual reflective practices and group reflections contribute to the development of group skills. More specifically, the effectiveness of relevant group dynamics is investigated, with the aim of creating a space for reflection, and activation for individual and group empowerment.Participants: The participants were 130 university students (86% female), resided in northwestern Italy, and had a mean age of 27.5 years (SD = 7.52). They were randomly divided into 23 groups (ranged from four to nine members).Method: The participants engaged in several online training activities and at the end of every activity they completed individual reflection practice in which they presented both positive and negative aspects related to the group experiences. Then they participated in online group reflections that allowed them to reflect on the group dynamics, particular attention given to factors such as climate, participation and roles played by each participant in a variety of training activities. This study analyzes 130 individual reflective practices and 23 group reflections. The data collected through individual reflective practices and the transcripts of the group reflections were analyzed using grounded theory. Two independent judges analyzed and categorized the data and then identified the main common categories that emerged by the support of Nvivo software.Results: From the analysis of the content, it is determined that the participants, based on the construction of the individual and group reflections, paid greater attention to the dynamics that occurred within the group during the various activities in which they participated, thus allowing them to be more aware of the various factors that affected the importance attributed to the different roles, the climate, and their active participation.Conclusion: Combined, these factors allowed participants to strengthen their relationships with each other and enhance the cohesion of the group.

3. International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS)

ITLOS is an autonomous specialized international judicial organ established pursuant the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). It is composed of twenty-one independent judges elected by the meeting of states parties to the Convention, among specialists in the law of the sea, according to a method that intends to assure an equitable geographical representation. The composition of ITLOS is renewed by thirds every three years. According to this system, the election of seven members of the tribunal took place on 24–6 August during the first in-person meeting held in the General Assembly hall at the United Nations (UN) headquarters in New York since the lockdown in March. Two judges ending their respective mandates, Attard and Kulyk, were re-elected, and the remaining five (Brown, Caracciolo, Duan, Infante Caffi, and Kamga) were elected for the first time—all of them for a period of nine years. Due to the pandemic, the swearing-in ceremony for the five new judges was held on 1 October in a hybrid format, with four of them present in the courtroom and Judge Brown attending the event via video conference link from her home. Triennial elections also meant the reconstitution of the Chambers of ITLOS (Seabed Disputes Chamber, Chamber of Summary Procedure, Chamber of Maritime Delimitation Disputes, Chamber for Fisheries Disputes, and Chamber for Marine Environment Disputes) and the election of a new president, Hoffman, and vice president, Heidar, for a three-year period. Regretfully, former Judge Mensah, who was the inaugural president of ITLOS and served as a judge from 1996 to 2005, passed away in April. The COVID-19 pandemic also meant some changes in the rules of the tribunal—namely, to provide for hearings and meetings by video conference (video link) as an exceptional measure (Articles 41, 74, 112, 124, and 135).

Creative Personal Identity and Creative Mindsets, and Their Implications for Creative Potential and Metacognition: A Latent Variable and a Latent Class Approach

Abstract The amount of attention given to creative beliefs has increased in recent years. This article suggests that the selection of one´s best ideas from a set of self-generated alternatives should be included as an indicator of metacognition; something known as creative metacognition accuracy. The present investigation examined the role of creative mindsets and creative personal identity on the selection of one´s best idea, creative self-efficacy, and potential, under two conceptualizations of these beliefs: latent variables and latent classes. College business students completed a battery of questionnaires assessing creative mindsets, creative personal identity, and creative self-efficacy. In addition, participants completed a divergent thinking task involving improvement of smartphones an-d were asked to choose their best idea. Two independent judges also selected the best idea from participants’ set of self-generated ideas. Under the latent class conceptualization, a class with high levels of growth mindset and creative personal identity, and low levels of a fixed mindset showed higher levels of accurate idea selection and creative self-efficacy than the rest of the classes. Similarly, under the latent variable conceptualization, creative personal identity had a positive influence on accurate idea selection and creative self-efficacy.

Virtual contact hypothesis: Preliminary evidence for intergroup contact hypothesis in interactions with characters in video games

This paper examines intergroup contact hypothesis in interactions in video games to conceptualize how intergroup contact with characters in games may relate to attitudes toward minorities. Intergroup contact hypothesis states that intergroup contact leads to more positive attitudes and stereotype reduction. It also specifies situational factors that promote or hinder such an outcome. In an online survey a sample of 1627 gamers stated games they played the most and filled out a questionnaire measuring their attitudes toward minorities. Independent judges assessed games that were played by most participants (N = 44 games). A multilevel regression analysis revealed that average quality of contact with minorities in a game (measured at game-level, as a characteristic of a game) was associated with higher acceptance of minorities of the players (measured at individual level). Diversity of the game world generated by fictional races had no significant connection to attitudes. Game-level predictors largely increased fit to the data showing that game worlds were significant for the acceptance of minorities. The results supply preliminary evidence for the validity of the intergroup contact hypothesis for the interactions with characters in video games.