Lehigh GRR Abstracts Database

Stepping Off the Pendulum: Why Only a Thoroughly Action Based Approach Can Fully Transcend the Nativist Empiricist Epicycles and Ground Mind in the Natural World

Recent psychological proposals have attempted to reconcile the history of errors inherent to nativist and empiricist positions. These proposals share in their rejection of the nativist-empiricist debate as misguided or altogether incoherentsubsequent solutions typically take the form of some eclectic union or outright dismissal. The central thesis of this paper is that, in dissolving or ignoring the distinction between nativism and empiricism, researchers have failed to accomplish the shared goal of transcending the limitations inherent to their respective positions. Nativism and empiricism are two distinct attempts to account for the source of our knowledge. While different in this respect, they share in their commitment to foundationalism and both have a strong tendency towards anti-constructivism. Foundationalism is contrary to both a developmental perspective and to naturalism: any foundation that cannot itself be accounted for (in principle), must be wrong. An action-based approach constitutes a positive alternative to the problems inherent in foundationalism and it was this important difference that separated Piaget from both nativists and empiricists. Of contemporary relevance, a series of infant studies have revealed alternative perceptual explanations for a number of classic nativist experiments. We suggest that the failure of past researchers to provide these perceptual controls was derivative from their nativism and its anti-constructivist corollary.

Belief in Human Kinds versus Belief in Inherent Character: Which Type of Essentialism is Associated with Prejudice?

Recently, scholars have begun to examine the possibility that essentialism of social groupsa belief that social groups are bound together by deep propertiesis linked to negative intergroup attitudes. Attempts to document such links have met with mixed success however. Some scholars have found that essentialistic beliefs are associated with prejudice (Keller, 2005), whereas others have found puzzling and inconsistent patterns (e.g., Haslam, Rothschild, and Ernst, 2000).

We propose that relations between essentialism and prejudice will become clearer once a distinction is made between two types of essentialistic beliefs. The distinction is between a belief in social groups as human kinds, which involves the notion that membership in a social grouptypically defined in terms of physicalityis linked to an underlying property, versus a belief in social groups as possessing inherent character, which involves the notion that the behaviors, cognitions, and emotions of a group grow out of an underlying property. We expect that prejudice will be most strongly associated with this latter type of essentialism.

In two correlational studies testing our hypothesis in the context of both gender and racial attitudes, scores on an Essentialism of Inherent Character Scale were significantly related to prejudice such that those endorsing biological explanations for gender- or race-linked behavior, cognition, and emotion showed higher levels of prejudice. In contrast, scores on an Essentialism of Physical Attributes Scale showed no relation to prejudice. It thus appears that essentialism does beget prejudice, but only if it is essentialism of inherent character.

Familiarity and Emotion Adaptation

Familiarity with a face strengthens identity adaptation aftereffects and increases the degree to which adaptation effects transfer across changes in view (Jiang et al., 2007). In the present study, we examine whether familiarity with an emotionally expressive face has a similar effect on emotion adaptation. Participants were familiarized with dynamic emotionally expressive faces. After familiarization, emotion adaptation effects were assessed for familiar and unfamiliar faces. In our study, familiarization was associated with a restriction in the range of values that produce a strong adaptation effect. More specifically, adaptation effects were weaker at intermediate morph levels for familiar faces than they were for unfamiliar faces. These findings suggests that adaptation effects can be used to study how perceptual mechanisms are fine tuned to recognize subtle emotional expressions.