Recent behavioral evidence indicates a key role for intent in moral judgments of harmful acts (e.g. assault) but not impure acts (e.g. incest). We tested whether the neural responses in regions for mental state reasoning, including the right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ), are greater when people evaluate harmful vs impure violations. In addition, using multivoxel pattern analysis, we investigated whether the voxel-wise pattern in these regions distinguishes intentional from accidental actions, for either kind of violation. The RTPJ was preferentially recruited in response to harmful vs impure acts. Moreover, although its response was equally high for intentional and accidental acts, the voxel-wise pattern in the RTPJ distinguished intentional from accidental acts in the harm domain but not the purity domain. Finally, we found that the degree to which the RTPJ discriminated between intentional and accidental acts predicted the impact of intent information on moral judgments but again only in the harm domain. These findings reveal intent to be a uniquely critical factor for moral evaluations of harmful vs impure acts and shed light on the neural computations for mental state reasoning.
Definitions of effective teaching focus on three primary areas: performances, essential knowledge, and critical dispositions. While no one measure provides a complete picture of teacher effectiveness, empirical inquiry into critical dispositions lags behind what is known about essential knowledge and performances. We found this underdevelopment true in our own educator preparation program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, which led to the development, testing, and implementation of the Professional Competencies, Attitudes, and Dispositions (ProCAD) assessment. In this article, we introduce the ProCAD assessment, describing each piece of the ProCAD framework and its alignment with InTASC critical disposition substandards. We present findings from the analysis of ProCAD data and close with implications for better understanding effective teaching and future research.
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