Theoretical Account Research Articles

What the visual system can learn from the non-dominant hand: The effect of graphomotor engagement on visual discrimination.

Previous studies have demonstrated that engaging in graphomotor activity for creating graphemes can enhance their subsequent visual discrimination. This suggests a positive influence of the motor system on visual learning. However, existing studies have emphasized the dominant hand, which is superiorly dexterous in fine-motor movements. This near-exclusive focus prompts the inquiry of whether the observed perceptual facilitation is a general characteristic of the motor system, or specific to pathways controlling the skilled over-trained dominant hand. Furthermore, the mechanistic underpinning of visual facilitation from graphomotor training (i.e., the individual contribution of motor activity, temporal evolution of the visual trace, variability of visual output) remain unclear. To address these questions, we assessed visual discrimination capabilities of healthy right-handed participants (N = 60) before and after graphomotor or visual training. Contrary to our initial expectation, graphomotor engagement with the non-dominant hand did not yield additional benefits to visual learning beyond those attainable through visual training alone. Moreover, graphomotor training with the non-dominant hand resulted in visual discrimination improvements comparable to those of dominant hand training, despite the inherent differences between hands in motor performance and in the amount of improvement in shape tracing throughout training. We conclude that the motor components of graphomotor activity may not be critical for visual learning of shapes through tracing activity. Instead, our results are in agreement with the symbolic theoretical account, suggesting that basic shape features required for discrimination can be acquired through visual inspection alone, providing a perspective on the improvements observed in prior studies.

Power, Politics, and Personification: Toward a Critique of Postone’s Theory of Antisemitism

Abstract This essay offers an immanent critique of Moishe Postone’s theory of antisemitism. It argues that his account of modern antisemitism as a form of fetishistic anti-capitalism contains a decisive ambiguity. Postone oscillates between two distinct conceptions of anti-capitalism: explicit and implicit. These conceptions are conflated when Postone draws a line from his paradigm case of modern antisemitism to recent anti-imperialist criticism of particular nation-states. This conflation also allows him implicitly to suggest that anti-communism is a form of anti-capitalism. More attention to the differences between these senses of anti-capitalism could have led Postone to a richer theoretical account of the place of abstraction in the distinctively political dangers that obsessed modern antisemitism, which might, in turn, have drawn his attention in the present toward contemporary Islamophobia, rather than criticism of the US, as redolent of certain aspects of the modern antisemitic imaginary.

Financial stress and leadership behavior: The role of leader gender.

Concern about personal finances is one of the most widespread and salient sources of stress. We advance our emerging understanding of the work-related impacts of financial stress by examining the consequences of personal financial stress on leadership behavior. Drawing on compensatory control theory, we propose that financial stress positively relates to abusive supervision via a lowered sense of personal control. Integrating social role theory, we propose that these effects are stronger for leaders who are men than leaders who are women. We test our model in a vignette-based study using a sample of leaders (N = 201) and a second multiwave, multisource field survey study among leaders and their subordinates (N = 119 leader-subordinate dyads). Across both studies, we found that financial stress was positively associated with abusive supervision via lack of control and that this relationship was stronger for men than women. In Study 2, we examined an alternative tend-and-befriend theoretical account, proposing that leaders who are women exhibit more communion-striving motivation and empathic leadership as a result of financial stress. We found some support for this alternative pathway, though not gender differences in it, and in doing so we uncovered novel outcomes of financial stress. Our results offer implications for supporting employee financial health and uncover a context wherein men (and their subordinates), rather than women, experience the costs of misalignment with societal gender expectations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Surfacing of Latent Time Memories Supports the Representational Basis of Timing Behavior in Mice

Animals can adapt their reward expectancy to changes in delays to reward availability. When temporal relations are altered, associative models of interval timing predict that the original time memory is lost due to the updating of the underlying associative weights, whereas the representational models render the preservation of the original time memory (as previously demonstrated in the extinction of conditioned fear). The current study presents the critical test of these theoretical accounts by training mice with two different intervals in a consecutive fashion (short → long or long → short) and then testing timing behaviors during extinction where neither temporal relation is in effect. Mice that were trained with the long interval first clustered their anticipatory responses around the average of two intervals (indirect higher-order manifestation of two memories in the form of temporal averaging), whereas mice trained with the short interval first clustered their responses either around the short or long interval (direct manifestation of memory representations by their independent indexing). We assert that the original memory representation formed during training with the long interval “metrically affords” the integration of subsequent experiences with a shorter interval, allowing their co-activation during extinction. The original memory representation formed during training with the short interval would not metrically afford such integration and thus result in the formation of a new (mutually exclusive) time memory representation, which does not afford their co-activation during extinction. Our results provide strong support for the representational account of interval timing. We provide a new theoretical account of these findings based on the “metric affordances” of the original memory representation formed during training with the original intervals.

How students interpret points and positions in graphs of functions: an intersection of theoretical frameworks

In this paper, we examine the intersection of two previously recognised dimensions of students’ interpretations of symbolic notations within graphs of functions. One dimension distinguishes location-thinking, where notations refer only to a point’s location on a graph, from value-thinking, where such a point is treated as a multiplicative object. The other dimension distinguishes a nominal interpretation of expressions, where expressions refer to positions in the plane, from cardinal and magnitude interpretations, where expressions describe a discrete count of units, or measure of length, respectively. Taken together these dimensions provide six distinct ways students interpret expressions, especially those involving function notation, on graphs. Further, the frameworks offer suggestions about the ways of thinking underlying each interpretation. Each case reveals new meanings and affordances indicated by the interplay between the two dimensions. We provide both a theoretical account and empirical example of each case.

Reflexive Activation of Monoracial Categories During Multiracial Categorization.

Previous research has examined the real-time cognitive processes underlying perceivers' ability to resolve racial ambiguity into monoracial categorizations, but such processes for multiracial categorizations are less clear. Using a novel, three-choice mouse-tracking paradigm, we found that when perceivers categorized faces as multiracial their hand movements revealed an initial attraction to a monoracial category (study 1). Moreover, exposure to multiracial individuals moderated these effects. When measured (Study 2) or manipulated (Study 3), multiracial exposure reduced monoracial category activation and activation occurred for both morphed and real multiracial faces (Study 4). Together, the findings suggest that multiracial categorizations emerge from dynamic competition between relatively more accessible monoracial categories and a less-accessible multiracial category, which is attenuated through greater exposure to multiracial targets. This research is the first to chart out the real-time dynamics underlying multiracial categorizations and offers a new theoretical account of this increasingly common form of social categorization.

Interference across time: dissociating short from long temporal interference.

Our ability to identify an object is often impaired by the presence of preceding and/or succeeding task-irrelevant items. Understanding this temporal interference is critical for any theoretical account of interference across time and for minimizing its detrimental effects. Therefore, we used the same sequences of 3 orientation items, orientation estimation task, and computational models, to examine temporal interference over both short (<150 ms; visual masking) and long (175-475 ms; temporal crowding) intervals. We further examined how inter-item similarity modifies these different instances of temporal interference. Qualitatively different results emerged for interference of different scales. Interference over long intervals mainly degraded the precision of the target encoding while interference over short intervals mainly affected the signal-to-noise ratio. Although both interference instances modulated substitution errors (reporting a wrong item) and were alleviated with dissimilar items, their characteristics were markedly disparate. These findings suggest that different mechanisms mediate temporal interference of different scales.

How temporal orientations trigger, nurture and sustain deep engagement with consumption practices

Consumer researchers have provided empirical cases and theoretical accounts of the formation of ‘deep engagement’ with practices. Yet, this body of research has neglected Schatzki’s (2006, 2009 ) assertion that individuals differently engage with practices based on future expectations, past orientations and present experiences. This study investigates how different temporal orientations within teleoaffective structures affect the formation of deep engagement with consumption practices. It borrows from Schatzki’s (2006, 2009) ideas and from Thévenot’s (2001 , 2007) notion of regimes of engagement and its multiple temporal orientations to offer a theoretical account of how deep engagement with practices is formed amid consumers’ past, present and future temporal orientations regarding goals, projects, ends and affectivities. It proposes that three types of temporal orientations, which are labelled transformative, maintenance and envisioned-future, enmesh in the teleoaffective structure of practices, triggering, nurturing and sustaining deep engagement with practices.

The Pragmatist roots of scientific medicine: Reassessing Abraham Flexner's report on medical education

Abraham Flexner's 1910 report on medical education is widely regarded as a watershed moment in the history of modern medicine in the US and beyond. Most commentators focus on its administrative and managerial impact, despite Flexner dedicating a sizeable portion of his report to a theoretical account of the kind of medicine that he seeks to implement. Close attention to these sections reveals a surprisingly coherent account of medicine that, based on a Deweyan Pragmatist philosophy of science, unites scientific investigator and medical practitioner in a new experimental paradigm of science. Flexner can develop an account that goes beyond a mere epistemic redefinition of medicine, providing the profession with a social, cultural, and ethical identity that avails itself of the extremely wide purview that Dewey granted to modern science. Due to the subsequent narrowing of philosophy of science to a delimited academic subdiscipline, these broad Pragmatist philosophical commitments at the roots of Flexner's scientific medicine remained a largely unexplored intellectual legacy.

Talking about security in the era of high-tech and green-tech: China’s empathy with Russia and the rare earths trade with the West

ABSTRACT As high technology and green transition gain momentum in modern life, global supply chains of resources like rare earths become vital. China is the dominant actor in this market, Russia already holds a strategic niche albeit as an emerging actor, whereas the West is a “latecomer”, lagging considerably behind. Against the backdrop of ever deepening geopolitical fault lines, the article views the China/Russia – West rare earths trade through the lenses of weaponized interdependence. In particular, it employs this theoretical account for the first time from a non-Western angle and proves that in the recent wave of globalization not all the most central nodes are territorially concentrated in the advanced economies of the West. Moreover, it demonstrates that the West’s domination of relevant innovation cycles is not as absolute and autonomous as propounded by the theory. The conclusions summarize China’s (and Russia’s) panopticon effects on the rare earths trade with the West, and show that should their security concerns be overlooked, they are likely to escalate to chokepoint effects to the detriment of the global economy.

Expanding logical space; making room for Islamic theological contradictions

Islamic theological contradictions are metaphysical contradictions as opposed to logical and semantic ones. I shall demonstrate that if these theological contradictions are tolerable on the theoretical account of metaphysical dialetheism, then logical space, despite being the space of all possibilities, does not accommodate them in virtue of Chalmers’s ‘deep epistemic possibility’. To resolve this issue, I offer a recalibration of the modal concept of possibility. Doing so would redraw a demarcation between what is possible and what is not. Consequently, we can expand logical space, so it is properly inclusive of all possibilities, including metaphysical dialetheism. Expanding logical space in this way would repudiate Chalmers’s ‘deep epistemic possibility’ and make room for Islamic theological contradictions.

The Relationship Between Gender Inequality and Female-Victim Intimate Partner Homicide in China: Amelioration, Backlash or Both?

A debate existing in feminist and criminological literature is the plausible macro-level relationship between gender inequality and female-victim intimate partner homicide (FV-IPH). The amelioration hypothesis assumes the reduction of gender-based violence in more gender-egalitarian societies, while the backlash hypothesis anticipates that reducing gender inequality may actually increase males’ violence perpetration against women to maintain their dominance. A third theoretical account hypothesizes a curvilinear relationship that integrates the traditional theses and provides a possible explanation for some inconsistent findings. This study revisited and tested these three macro-level theoretical propositions using detailed incident information on 11,310 Chinese judgment documents of intentional homicides (2017-2019) and multidimensional gender inequality indices across provinces. By disentangling the incident-level effects from the aggregate-level forces, our models enable a more explicit estimation of the relationship between provincial gender inequality and FV-IPH. The results indicated that: 1) backlash processes are more likely to occur with increases in women’s empowerment; 2) the relationship between the degree of egalitarian gender ideology and men’s likelihood of committing FV-IPH conforms to an inverted U. Using an innovative Chinese big-data source and text-mining approach, this study represents a pioneering endeavor, as it furnishes robust empirical evidence to corroborate the curvilinear relationship between cultural gender inequality and FV-IPH in a non-Western context. The implications of our findings underscore the need for tailored policy interventions that take into account the nuanced dimensions of gender inequality, particularly those that are culture-related.

Examining behavioral settings and affordative space for the case of autism spectrum conditions in embodied cognition

ABSTRACT The aim of the paper is to deepen into a theoretical account on the role of behavioral settings and relational affordative space and how this perspective can be used to reconceptualize various human cognitive developmental trajectories and conditions. In the course of this theoretical work, we want to contribute in rethinking developmental trajectories based on the role of behavioral settings and relational affordances from an embodied perspective. Behavioral settings emerge from joint actions in conjunction with the affordances available. These affordances will have multiple levels and kinds of meanings for the organism which is why we need to distinguish between the general affordances for a form of life and the particular affordances for particular agents that are generated through sensorimotor interactions. We propose to apply this theoretical frame in different developmental conditions, taking as a leading example the Autistic Spectrum, extending it to other lived experiences of other groups marginalized by “normative behavioral settings” – and the ensuing ethical concerns.

Suppression and omission effects in auditory predictive processing-Two of the same?

Recent theories describe perception as an inferential process based on internal predictive models that are adjusted by prediction violations (prediction error). Two different modulations of the auditory N1 event-related brain potential component are often discussed as an expression of auditory predictive processing. The sound-related N1 component is attenuated for self-generated sounds compared to the N1 elicited by externally generated sounds (N1 suppression). An omission-related component in the N1 time-range is elicited when the self-generated sounds are occasionally omitted (omission N1). Both phenomena were explained by action-related forward modelling, which takes place when the sensory input is predictable: prediction error signals are reduced when predicted sensory input is presented (N1 suppression) and elicited when predicted sensory input is omitted (omission N1). This common theoretical account is appealing but has not yet been directly tested. We manipulated the predictability of a sound in a self-generation paradigm in which, in two conditions, either 80% or 50% of the button presses did generate a sound, inducing a strong or a weak expectation for the occurrence of the sound. Consistent with the forward modelling account, an omission N1 was observed in the 80% but not in the 50% condition. However, N1 suppression was highly similar in both conditions. Thus, our results demonstrate a clear effect of predictability for the omission N1 but not for the N1 suppression. These results imply that the two phenomena rely (at least in part) on different mechanisms and challenge prediction related accounts of N1 suppression.

"I'll take them another day": A qualitative study exploring the socio-behavioral complexities of childhood vaccination in urban poor settlements.

Despite improvement over recent decades, childhood vaccination uptake remains a concern across countries. The World Health Organization observed that over 25 million children missed out on one or more vaccines in 2021, with urban poor and other marginalized groups being the most affected. Given the higher risk of disease transmission and vaccine-preventable diseases (VPD) outbreaks across densely populated urban slums, identifying effective interventions to improve childhood vaccination in this vulnerable population is crucial. This study explored the behavioral and social factors influencing childhood vaccination uptake in urban informal settlements in Nairobi, Kenya. A grounded theory approach was employed to develop a theoretical account of the socio-behavioral determinants of childhood vaccination. Five focus group discussions (FGDs) were conducted with purposively sampled caregivers of children under five years of age residing in informal settlements. The Theory of Planned Behavior guided the structuring of the FGD questions. An iterative process was used to analyze and identify emerging themes. Thirty-nine caregivers (median age 29 years) participated in the FGDs. From the analysis, four main thematic categories were derived. These included attitude factors such as perceived vaccine benefits, cultural beliefs, and emotional factors including parental love. Additionally, subjective norms, like fear of social judgment, and perceived behavioral control factors, such as self-control and gender-based influences, were identified. Furthermore, a number of practical factors, including the cost of vaccines and healthcare providers attitude, also affected the uptake of vaccination. Various social, behavioral, cultural, and contextual factors influence caregiver vaccination decisions in urban poor settings. Community-derived and context-specific approaches that address the complex interaction between socio-behavioral and other contextual factors need to be tested and applied to improve the timely uptake of childhood vaccinations among marginalized populations.

The Political Economy of Sexual Identity

This article makes a case for developing a theoretical account of historically determined gendered, trans, and queer epistemologies out of value-form readings on social reproduction. The materialist turn in queer studies is revisited here first by critically engaging with Meg Wesling's GLQ article “Queer Value” (2012) in order to present a non-ontologizing conceptualization of labor that would avoid politically affirming stances toward historically feminized positions within the process of reproduction of labor-force. Second, the author reads the Foucauldian account of sex through the fetish character of capitalist social forms to expose the functioning of a sociohistorically specific epistemology of the body. Ultimately, the article unfolds a negative understanding of queer and trans processes of embodiment as precariously inaugurating new modes of sociality unrealizable under capitalist social reproduction.

We Accept: Bit-by-bit Constitution

Abstract In “We Accept: The Constitution of Airbnb”, published in 2020, I drew on Gunther Teubner’s systems theoretical approach, including to digitalisation and societal constitutionalism, to rethink Airbnb as an auto-constitutionalising domain. This dynamic process, the paper proceeded to suggest, instantiates a structural change, what can be described, in systems theoretical terms, as a “co-evolution” of multiple social systems through structural couplings. It renders observable an “emergence” of a general model of functioning – terms of use and engagement – epitomised by a reconceptualisation of the “social contract” as a network of “standard form contracts” or “contracts of adhesion”, and of an increasingly dominant mode of subjectivation: the standard formation or auto-constitution of subjects as adherents. In this new contribution, I continue this processing of social systems theory and Teubner’s work, this time through a deconstruction and reconstruction of Internet communication. Through this recursive illustration of social systems theory and Teubner’s work, the paper develops a social systems theoretical account of “process”, “constitution”, and “structural change”.

The impact of emotional states on bilingual language control in cued and voluntary switching contexts

This study investigated bilingual language control in emotional contexts. We assessed the language switching and mixing performance of two groups of Chinese-English bilinguals in picture naming under neutral, negative, and positive emotional states. One group switched languages voluntarily while another matched group switched languages according to external cues. We found that negative state impaired proactive control, whereas positive state seemed to improve proactive control. Importantly, the detrimental effects of negative state could be proportional to the cognitive demands imposed by the naming context. However, negative states disrupted proactive control in voluntary but not cued naming, where the proactive control demands were comparable. This finding suggests that the control system selectively compensates for the emotional disruption of control in a cued-naming context requiring strict control but not in a voluntary-naming context preferring less strict control. Accordingly, we tentatively proposed a theoretical account of the adaptive control mechanism in emotional contexts. These findings would extend the Adaptive Control Hypothesis to more naturalistic settings.

Joanna Baillie's Theory of Tragedy

Abstract Joanna Baillie (1762–1851) came to fame in 1798 with the first volume of her Plays on the Passions, which included her theoretical account of drama, including tragedy. This article reconstructs Baillie's theory of tragedy and shows how the theory informs the design of the Plays on the Passions. For Baillie, all human beings have powerful and dangerous passions that we need to learn to regulate. Tragedy can help with this and can serve an educative purpose by presenting us with narratives in which the protagonists repeatedly fail to check the growth of a particular passion, such as jealousy or hatred. We witness this passion gain more and more hold over the character's mind until they are destroyed. This offers a warning and motivates us to watch out for the growth of our own passions and keep them in check. Baillie's theory of tragedy is original and combines a moral orientation, a voluntarist belief in free will, and optimism about the human condition. For her, the sufferings undergone by tragic characters could have been avoided had the characters made better choices. Thus the message of tragedy is not that suffering is inescapable but that suffering can be minimized if we cultivate self-knowledge and emotional self-control.

Proxies of Trustworthiness: A Novel Framework to Support the Performance of Trust in Human Health Research.

Without trust there is no credible human health research (HHR). This article accepts this truism and addresses a crucial question that arises: how can trust continually be promoted in an ever-changing and uncertain HHR environment? The article analyses long-standing mechanisms that are designed to elicit trust-such as consent, anonymization, and transparency-and argues that these are best understood as trust represented by proxies of trustworthiness, i.e., regulatory attempts to convey the trustworthiness of the HHR system and/or its actors. Often, such proxies are assumed to operate as markers that trust exists or, at least, has not been lost. But, since trust can neither be "built" nor "secured," this is a precarious assumption. Worryingly, there is no existing theoretical account of how to understand and evaluate these proxies of trustworthiness as part of a trusted HHR ecosystem. To remedy this, the paper argues for a radical reimagining of trust and trustworthiness as performative acts that ought to be understood in relation to each other and by reference to the common values at stake. It is shown that proxies of trustworthiness are the operational tools used to perform trustworthiness. It advocates for a values-based approach to understanding the relationship between trust and trustworthiness. This establishes a strong basis for an evaluative framework for proxies of trustworthiness, i.e., to determine how to perform trustworthiness well. Five common proxies in HHR are scrutinized from a values perspective. The contribution is to provide a far-reaching normative and practical framework by which existing and future proxies of trustworthiness can be identified, assessed, maintained, or replaced in rapidly changing HHR regulatory ecosystems where trust itself is crucial to the success of the entire HHR enterprise.