Do questionnaires reflect their purported cognitive functions?

Rationalization and Cognitive Dissonance: Do Choices Affect or Reflect Preferences?

Cognitive dissonance is one of the most influential theories in social psychology, and its oldest experiential realization is choice-induced dissonance. Since 1956, dissonance theorists have claimed that people rationalize past choices by devaluing rejected alternatives and upgrading chosen ones, an effect known as the spreading of preferences. Here, I show that every study which has tested thi...

Do constraints on word meanings reflect prelinguistic cognitive architecture?

Aesthetic emotions, what are their cognitive functions?

DIFFICULTIES OF DEFINING “AESTHETIC” A huge number of publications are devoted to aesthetic emotions; Google Scholar gives 319,000 references. Nevertheless, finding a definition of what is aesthetic is not easy. Most authors use no definitions. Wikipedia (2013) gives a circular definition: “aesthetic emotions. . . are felt during aesthetic activity.” This is similar to the “institutional theory...

Do Rossby-wave critical layers absorb, reflect, or over-reflect?

The Stewartson-Warn-Warn (SWW) solution for the time evolution of an inviscid, nonlinear Rossby-wave critical layer, which predicts that the critical layer will alternate between absorbing and over-reflecting states as time goes on, is shown to be hydrodynamically unstable. The instability is a two-dimensional shear instability, owing its existence to a local reversal of the cross-stream absolu...

Iranian EFL Students’ Perceptions and Preferences for Teachers’ Written Feedback: Do Students’ ideas Reflect Teachers’ Practice?

The present study-both qualitative and quantitative--explored fifty EFL learners’ preferences for receiving error feedback on different grammatical units as well as their beliefs about teacher feedback strategies. The study also examined the effect of the students’ level of writing ability on their views about the importance of teacher feedback on different error types. Data was gathered throug...