bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Effects, Determinism, Neither Compatibilism Nor Incompatibilism, Consciousness
Authors: Honderich Ted 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article expresses the kernel of hard determinism with regard to a certain traditional idea of free will. It argues that the traditional notion of free will requires a power of ultimate “origination” of choices or actions that is incompatible with determinism. And it argues that no such power of ultimate origination could exist in the real world, so that libertarian free will in this traditional sense is impossible. The discussion reviews arguments for these claims. In addition, it expresses belief that determinism in physics is still an open question, despite quantum theory, and that, in any case, human behavior, neural events, and human choices would not be significantly affected by indeterminism in the microworld.
Motivation and the Organization of Human Behavior: Three Reasons for the Reemergence of a Field
Authors: Ryan Richard M. 
Published: February 2013

Abstract
The fact that behavior is typically active, organized, and goal oriented represents one of the wonders of animate nature. Nonetheless, the organization and integrity of behavior can be disrupted by social contexts, implicit primes and motives, or by biological factors. There has been a strong resurgence in empirical research on these topics, as well as recognition of the potency of psychological factors. Three reasons for this resurgence of interest in the psychology of human motivation are reviewed in detail: (1) the theoretical depth and interdisciplinary nature of the field; (2) methodological innovations that have opened up new avenues of inquiry, and (3) the practical importance of motivation research as a translational science and for improving individual and community wellness through empirically supported interventions. Contributions within this volume are illustrative of all these factors, manifesting interdisciplinary depth, sophisticated methods, and practical applicability.
Cybernetic Control Processes and the Self-Regulation of Behavior
Authors: Carver Charles S. , Scheier Michael F. 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis chapter describes a set of ideas bearing on the self-regulation of action and emotion that has been given labels such as cybernetic and feedback control processes. The ideas have roots in many sources, including the concept of homeostasis and attempts to create mechanical devices to serve as governors for engines. With respect to motivation, these ideas yield a viewpoint in which goal-directed action is seen as reflecting a hierarchy of feedback control processes and the creation and reduction of affect are seen as reflecting another set of feedback processes. The portion of the model devoted to affect is of particular interest in that it generates two predictions that differ substantially from those deriving from other theories. The first is that both approach and avoidance can give rise to both positive and negative feelings; the second is that positive affect leads to coasting, reduction in effort regarding the goal under pursuit. The latter suggests a way in which positive affect is involved in priority management when many goals are in existence at the same time. Recent interest in dual-process models, which distinguish between top-down goal pursuit and reflexive responses to cues of the moment, has caused us to reexamine some of our previous assumptions and to consider the possibility that behavior is triggered in two distinct ways. The chapter closes with a brief consideration of how these ideas might be compatible with other viewpoints on motivation.
On Gains and Losses, Means and Ends: Goal Orientation and Goal Focus Across Adulthood
Authors: Freund Alexandra M. , Hennecke Marie , Mustafić Maida 
Published: February 2013

AbstractPersonal goals guide behavior toward a desired outcome, motivate behavior over time and across situations, provide direction and meaning, and contribute to the acquisition of skills and subjective well-being. The adaptiveness of goals, however, might vary with dimensions such as their orientation toward the achievement of gains, maintenance of functioning, or the avoidance of losses. We argue that goal orientation is most adaptive when it corresponds to the availability of resources and the ubiquity of losses. In line with this argument, younger adults show a predominant orientation toward the promotion of gains, whereas goal orientation shifts toward maintenance and avoidance of loss across adulthood. This shift in goal orientation seems adaptive both regarding subjective well-being as well as engagement in goal pursuit. A second goal dimension that has been largely overlooked in the literature is the cognitive representation of goal pursuit primarily in terms of its means (i.e., process focus) or its ends (i.e., outcome focus). This chapter investigates the antecedents and consequences of goal focus. In particular, it highlights the importance of factors related to chronological age (i.e., the availability of resources, future time perspective, goal orientation, motivational phase) for the preference for and adaptiveness of an outcome or process focus. Finally, we posit that a process focus leads to more adaptive behavioral and affective reactions when people encounter failure during goal pursuit.
Evolved Individual Differences in Human Motivation
Authors: Bernard Larry C. 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThree social science approaches—evolutionary psychology, behavioral ecology, and behavioral genetics—share the metatheory of evolution. They also suggest several mechanisms that may account for heritable individual differences in personality and motivation, including stabilizing selection, fluctuating selection, trade-offs, balancing selection, life history theory, and behavioral syndromes. These mechanisms are discussed as possible explanations for individual differences in the five-factor model of personality and in a new theory of human motivation. The theory postulates that 15 latent motive dimensions evolved in humans to facilitate behavior in five social domains. Trade-offs that, in combination with fluctuating and balancing selection, might have maintained individual differences in motive phenotypes are described. The reliability and validity of a method to assess individual differences in the strength of these motive dimensions is also discussed.
Advances in Motivation in Exercise and Physical Activity
Authors: Hagger Martin S. 
Published: February 2013

AbstractGiven the considerable epidemiological evidence linking regular physical activity with good health and reduced risk of chronic disease, exercise psychologists have adopted theories and models of motivation to understand the antecedents and processes that give rise to health-related physical activity. These theories are important because they provide the basis for the development and evaluation of interventions aimed at promoting increased physical activity in a largely sedentary population. This chapter reviews three of the leading theories that have been applied in physical activity contexts: the theory of planned behavior, self-determination theory, and achievement goal theory. Advances in research that have aimed to promote better understanding of the factors that underpin motivation in physical activity and the relevant processes are also reviewed, including implementation intentions, the increasing importance of psychological needs, and theoretical integration. In addition, the role of methodological improvements such as the measurement of implicit motivational processes and the need for “gold standard” designs when evaluating physical activity interventions based on these theories are highlighted. It is concluded that future research needs to develop hybrid interventions adopting both motivational and implemental strategies to change physical activity behavior, research should extend knowledge of the relative contribution of implicit and explicit motivational processes on physical activity behavior, and investigations to evaluate physical activity interventions should pay careful attention to design and evaluation.
Evolution of the social brain as a distributed neural system
Authors: Barton Robert A. 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThe many different diverse methods and models of neuroscience are aimed at answering basic questions such as: what are brains for? How are they organised? and How does this organisation support adaptive behaviour? A key biological fact to bear in mind in constructing answers to those questions is that brains have evolved. The key point that this article emphasises, however, is that understanding species differences in cognitive mechanisms requires a close relationship between evolutionary biology and cognitive neuroscience. The distinctive cognitive attributes of primates, including humans, are widely assumed to relate in some way to their large brains. The key point is this: the intellect of an animal cannot be entirely isolated from the rest of its biology. However, to some extent, all experiments carried out in the laboratory are attempts to do precisely that, in that the point of experiments is to isolate a phenomenon of interest by controlling confounding variables.
Mirror neurons and social cognition
Authors: Rizzolatti Giacomo , Fogassi Leonardo 
Published: February 2013

AbstractIn spite of great progress in neuroscience over the last decade, it would be excessive to claim that neurophysiology can offer a scientific account of social cognition. However, there is little doubt that the discovery of mirror neurons represents an important step towards providing a biological substrate for some of the basic phenomena on which social cognition is built. This article gives a general overview of the properties of mirror neurons, discusses the basic functional role of the mirror neuron system, and examines which cognitive functions are built on top of it. Mirror neurons are a specific set of motor neurons first discovered in area F5 (a part of the ventral premotor cortex) of the macaque monkey. F5 neurons discharge in association with active monkey movements. Some F5 neurons are merely motor neurons. Others also respond to visual stimuli (visuomotor neurons).
Mechanisms of ecological rationality: heuristics and environments that make us smart
Authors: Todd Peter M. , Gigerenzer Gerd 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article describes some of the simple heuristics that the human mind has evolved to use in particular circumstances, and the pressures on decision making that may have shaped the contents of the mind's adaptive toolbox. It begins by considering the notion of bounded rationality — the assumption that human cognition is constrained by limits of some sort — and just which types of bounds have been most important in cognitive evolution. It then looks at the components that decision mechanisms are built up from and examines how they enable simple and fast choices to be made. It also presents four main classes of simple heuristics that have been explored in depth: ignorance-based heuristics, one-reason decision mechanisms, elimination strategies, and satisficing search methods. The article considers some of the challenges facing the understanding of simple heuristics and why they can work so well.
Birth order and sibling competition
Authors: Sulloway Frank J. 
Published: February 2013

AbstractSibling competition is widespread in the natural world, and sometimes ends in siblicide. Birth order among siblings affects the outcome of such contests, because it is a proxy for disparities in age, size, power, and opportunity. In humans, birth order combines with the prolonged period of childhood dependence on parents to promote differences in parental investment. In addition, siblings often occupy different niches within the family and employ differing tactics in competition with one another. These disparate experiences influence personality, sentiments about the family, patterns of motivation, and attitudes more generally. Birth order has also been implicated in support for, and opposition to, radical social and scientific revolutions. Although the persistence of birth-order effects in adulthood is well established by numerous studies, the extent and magnitude of these effects remains controversial.
The evolutionary ecology of human family size
Authors: Mace Ruth 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThe concentration of reproduction into the central portion of the lifespan means that motherhood involves the expenditure of a great deal of energy. The most likely explanation for how human females achieve this rapid reproduction is with the help of mates and kin. The early termination of reproduction could be an adaptation either to complete the lengthy, child-rearing process without risking early death through maternal mortality, and/or to help daughters with their reproductive careers. Different strategies for optimal reproductive scheduling, and how they depend on the resources available, can be modelled formally using state-dependent optimality theory. However, as the net food supply had not increased and family sizes had increased, childhood malnutrition also went up. This may be a counter-intuitive result for those in the business of supplying much-needed infrastructural development in such areas, but one that can be understood in the light of optimal reproductive scheduling in a natural fertility population.
Kinship and descent
Authors: Cronk Lee , Gerkey Drew 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article highlights the ways in which social anthropology and evolutionary biology converge and complement each other. This is made easier by recognizing that each discipline focuses on different but related phenomena. The evolutionary biology of kinship is about the behaviour of organisms towards their kin and the evolved psychology underlying such behaviour. The anthropology of kinship is about the socially transmitted information — in a word, culture — in which behaviour towards kin is embedded. While evolutionary biologists document and analyse nepotistic behaviour, social anthropologists seek to understand and interpret the language, values, and symbols that often distinguish the collective behavioural patterns of one society from another. The evolutionary biologist's position follows logically from the fact that most organisms cannot talk. When dealing with organisms that do have language, this position needs to be supplemented by the anthropological focus on kinship terminology, descent, and alliance.
Individual differences
Authors: Nettle Daniel 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThe enduring differences between individuals have been one of psychology's central concerns over the past one hundred years or more. In the last twenty five years, evolutionary thinking has begun to make a huge impact on psychological explanations, particularly in social and cognitive psychology. However, the integration of evolutionary thinking into the study of individual differences has been more uneven. Evolutionary psychologists were initially more concerned with explaining central tendencies, and species-typical or sex typical patterns of cognition, than they were with the individual variation. Nonetheless, a wave of recent work on humans and other species, including both theory and empirical study, has shed considerable light on how evolution shapes inter-individual variation. This article outlines the key frameworks that we have for explaining distributions of individual differences from an adaptive perspective. The focus is primarily on heritable individual differences, that is, differences underlain by population polymorphisms of particular genes.
Memes
Authors: Aunger Robert 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThe meme is a recently coined name for an old idea: one that explains how culture evolves through a process of inheritance involving bits of information. A meme is thus considered to be analogous to a gene as the unit of cultural, as opposed to genetic, evolution. Some memeticists believe that inheritance is enough to define replication. This article also uses the term ‘imitation’ in the broad sense. However, this is not a definition of imitation which social psychologists would accept. For most psychologists, imitation involves observation of a behavioural model — a figure conspicuously absent when reading a text. This article demonstrates that replication must be something more than just the inheritance of information. The question then is whether cultural reproduction of any type fulfils the criteria for replication.
The evolution of religion
Authors: Bulbulia Joseph 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article reviews recent theoretical and experimental work in the cognitive and evolutionary psychology of religion, and motivates an adaptationist stance. By ‘religious cognition’ and ‘religiosity’, the article means belief and practice relative to supernatural beings and powers — call them ‘gods’. It suggests that religiosity — god commitment and the behaviour it prompts and that motivate it — bears the hallmark of adaptive design. Adaptive religiosity is more like an achievement than a harmless mistake, as spandrelists urge, or catching a cold, as meme theorists urge. It begins with a serious obstacle to any evolutionary treatment of religion. Science assumes methodological naturalism. The article does not stipulate the gods out of existence. However, it suggests the idea that nature is secular and provides a good explanation from minimal assumptions about the complexity of the world.
Music and cognitive evolution
Authors: Cross Ian 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article suggests that several different factors converged to suggest that evolutionary thinking about music was likely to be unfruitful. Over much of the twentieth century, consideration of origins in the study of music moved away from any exploration of music's relationship to biology to re-focus on the historical relationships between contemporary Western musical theory and practice, and Western musical history, or on music's relationships with abstract domains such as mathematics. For both strands of thought, evolution was simply irrelevant to their concerns which were viewed as primarily musicological, focused on the explication of the historical and ontological roots of Western music. Any evolutionary approach to understanding music requires at least an operational definition of what might constitute ‘music’. Music involves patterned action in time, as does dance. Music appears communicative, complex, generative, and representational, as does language. The concept of music is amalgamated with that of dance in many — perhaps the majority of — cultures.
The evolution of language
Authors: Kirby Simon 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article discusses the significance of the emergence of language. One of Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry's observations is that, despite their diversity, these transitions have some features in common. In particular, many of the transitions give rise to a new mechanism for the transmission of information. Language, they argue, provides just such a novel mechanism — essentially enabling a system of cultural transmission with unlimited heredity. It is clearly true that language enables the transmission and storage of very complex cultural information. Arguably, it is this aspect of the biological heritage that makes the impact of humans so great, and so unusual. The article argues that human language achieves this by briefly surveying the structural features of language, and the characteristics of language as a biological endowment.
Semantic representation
Authors: Vigliocco Gabriella , Vinson David P. 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article explores how word meaning is represented by speakers of a language, reviewing psychological perspectives on the representation of meaning. It starts by outlining four key issues in the investigation of word meaning, then introduces current theories of semantics. Meaning representation has long interested philosophers (since Aristotle) and linguists, in addition to psychologists, and a very extensive literature exists in these allied fields. When considering semantic representation, four fundamental questions to ask are: How are word meanings related to conceptual structures? How is the meaning of each word represented? How are the meanings of different words related to one another? Can the same principles of organisation hold in different content domains? The article also discusses holistic theories of semantic representation, along with featural theories.
Conceptual structure
Authors: Moss Helen E. , Tyler Lorraine K. , Taylor Kirsten I. 
Published: February 2013

AbstractConcepts lie at the heart of our mental life, supporting cognitive functions from language comprehension and production to reasoning, remembering, and recognising objects. Therefore, the study of the representation and processing of conceptual knowledge has been a central activity across many disciplines, traditionally in the realm of philosophy, and more recently psycholinguistics, neuropsychology, and neuroscience. This article examines the role of concepts and conceptual structure in the comprehension and production of language. It considers evidence from beyond the traditional boundaries of psycholinguistics, in particular from cognitive neuropsychology. Brain-damaged patients with deficits in one category or domain of knowledge have provided valuable insights into the nature of conceptual representations, and represent an alternative study population with which to test the claims of psycholinguistically motivated theories of conceptual knowledge. After presenting a brief overview of concepts and meanings, the article focuses on componentiality, feature distinctiveness, feature correlation, and the conceptual structure account and semantic deficits, as well as the speed of intact processing.
The multilingual lexicon
Authors: Dijkstra Ton 
Published: February 2013

AbstractAlthough precise numbers are lacking, in the world at large there may be more multilinguals than monolinguals when we define “multilingualism” as the regular use of two or more languages. This prominence of multilingualism in the world has its consequences, of course, for educational systems (for example, with respect to foreign language teaching), but also for psycholinguistic research, because the language processing system might be differently organised in monolinguals and bilinguals. This article discusses structural, process, and context/control issues with respect to the multilingual lexicon, addressing the following questions: How are words stored in the mental lexicon of multilinguals? How does a multilingual retrieve words in reading, listening, and speaking? What is the effect of context and cognitive control on multilingual processing? What models have been proposed to account for the available data? What can cognitive neuroscience contribute to bilingualism? The article also looks at the process of multilingual word recognition, focusing on visual modality, auditory modality, models of bilingual word processing, multilingual word production, and contributions of cognitive neuroscience.