Measuring Satisfaction with Religiosity and Its Contribution to the Personal Well-Being Index in a Muslim Sample

This research aims to explore Satisfaction with Religiosity/Spirituality (SR/S) in a large sample of Muslims (1388 males, 1172 females) from Algeria. It also provides empirical evidence for the addition of a SR/S Domain item to the Personal Well-Being Index (PWI). A questionnaire dealing with satisfaction with a range of personal and societal domains was used. Results support previous findings (Wills Journal of Happiness Studies 10(1):49–69, 2009), and are in agreement with the recommendations of the International Well-being Group (Group discussion, 2006; IWG 2006). The new domain item makes a statistically significant — albeit a slight — contribution in predicting general satisfaction with life (SWL). Notably, higher satisfaction with religiosity/spirituality is found in women compared to men, married individuals compared to single ones, and inhabitants of the Sahara desert locations compared to people from other regions of Algeria.     

The Making of the Reliably Religious Boy

In Men, Religion, and Melancholia: James, Otto, Jung, and Erikson (D. Capps, 1997) and Men and Their Religion: Honor, Hope, and Humor (D. Capps, 2002), I argued that men are no less religious than women, but their religiousness is different from that of women because it has its psychological origins in the emotional separation between a boy and his mother around the ages of three to five. Employing Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” (S. Freud, 1917/1963) essay, I suggested that their religiousness is rooted in an ontological state of melancholy (which is different from the psychological state of depression). In Men and Their Religion I identified the religions of honor and of hope as the primary forms of male melancholic religion, and suggested that humor is a third form that may come to one’s assistance when one experiences the limitations of the other two religions. In this article, I focus on my own early adolescent years (age 11–14) and explain how one boy became reliably religious, that is, how he embraced or internalized the religions of honor and of hope. In the companion article, I will explain how these two religions were relativized—and thereby preserved—by the religion of humor.     

Semantic Challenges to Scientific Realism

This paper is concerned with connections between scientific and metaphysical realism. It is not difficult to show that scientific realism, as expounded by Psillos (1999) clearly qualifies as a kind of metaphysical realism in the sense of Putnam (1980). The statement of scientific realism therefore must not only deal with underdetermination and the dynamics of scientific theories but also answer the semantic challenges to metaphysical realism. As will be argued, the common core of these challenges is the proposition that a (metaphysical) realist semantics leads to semantic agnosticism in the sense that we are unable to grasp the proper meanings and referents of our linguistic expressions. Having established this, I will focus more specifically on the question of whether scientific realism—in its state-of-the-art account—has the resources to make reference to scientific concepts intelligible such that the semantic challenges can be answered.     

Activity-Based Accounts of Mechanism and the Threat of Polygenic Effects

Accounts of ontic explanation have often been devised so as to provide an understanding of mechanism and of causation. Ontic accounts differ quite radically in their ontologies, and one of the latest additions to this tradition proposed by Peter Machamer, Lindley Darden and Carl Craver reintroduces the concept of activity. In this paper I ask whether this influential and activity-based account of mechanisms is viable as an ontic account. I focus on polygenic scenarios—scenarios in which the causal truths depend on more than one cause. The importance of polygenic causation was noticed early on by Mill (1893). It has since been shown to be a problem for both causal-law approaches to causation (Cartwright 1983) and accounts of causation cast in terms of capacities (Dupré 1993; Glennan 1997, pp. 605–626). However, whereas mechanistic accounts seem to be attractive precisely because they promise to handle complicated causal scenarios, polygenic causation needs to be examined more thoroughly in the emerging literature on activity-based mechanisms. The activity-based account proposed in Machamer et al. (2000, pp. 1–25) is problematic as an ontic account, I will argue. It seems necessary to ask, of any ontic account, how well it performs in causal situations where—at the explanandum level of mechanism—no activity occurs. In addition, it should be asked how well the activity-based account performs in situations where there are too few activities around to match the polygenic causal origin of the explanandum. The first situation presents an explanandum-problem and the second situation presents an explanans-problem—I will argue—both of which threaten activity-based frameworks.     

Visual preferences for sex and status in female rhesus macaques

Most primates are both highly visual and highly social. These qualities predict that visual cues to social variables, such as identity, sex, social status, and reproductive quality, would be intrinsically valuable and systematically attract attention. Supporting this idea, thirsty male rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) will forego fluid reward to view images of the faces of high-ranking males and the sexual skin of females. Whether female rhesus macaques, who experience dramatically different social pressures and reproductive costs than male macaques, also systematically and spontaneously value visual cues to social information remains untested experimentally. We probed the preferences of female rhesus macaques, given the opportunity to display an image from a known class of social stimuli or touch a second target to display a blank screen. We found that females preferred faces of high-status males and also images of the perinea of both males and females, but were not motivated to display images of subordinate males or control stimuli. These findings endorse the view that both male and female rhesus macaques—and presumably other highly social primates—seek information about other individuals in a way that matches the adaptive value of that information for guiding social behavior.     

The Logic of Theory Assessment

This paper starts by indicating the analysis of Hempel’s conditions of adequacy for any relation of confirmation (Hempel, 1945) as presented in Huber (submitted). There I argue contra Carnap (1962, Section 87) that Hempel felt the need for two concepts of confirmation: one aiming at plausible theories and another aiming at informative theories. However, he also realized that these two concepts are conflicting, and he gave up the concept of confirmation aiming at informative theories. The main part of the paper consists in working out the claim that one can have Hempel’s cake and eat it too — in the sense that there is a logic of theory assessment that takes into account both of the two conflicting aspects of plausibility and informativeness. According to the semantics of this logic, α is an acceptable theory for evidence β if and only if α is both sufficiently plausible given β and sufficiently informative about β. This is spelt out in terms of ranking functions (Spohn, 1988) and shown to represent the syntactically specified notion of an assessment relation. The paper then compares these acceptability relations to explanatory and confirmatory consequence relations (Flach, 2000) as well as to nonmonotonic consequence relations (Kraus et al., 1990). It concludes by relating the plausibility-informativeness approach to Carnap’s positive relevance account, thereby shedding new light on Carnap’s analysis as well as solving another problem of confirmation theory. A precursor of this paper has appeared as “The Logic of Confirmation and Theory Assessment” in L. Běhounek & M. Bílková (eds.), The Logica Yearbook 2004, Prague: Filosofia, 2005, 161–176.     

A Woman’s Place and a Man’s Duty: How Gender Role Incongruence in One’s Family Life Can Result in Home-Related Spillover Discrimination at Work

The purpose of this study was to investigate how gender role incongruence in terms of women being primary wage earners and males being secondary wage earners in their families could affect them at work. Using an experimental design and a sample of 306 college students, I explored how females who are the primary wage earners in their families and males who are the secondary wage earners are perceived and evaluated in a work setting. I proposed, and found, that female primary wage earners are seen as the least overqualified and are given lower reward recommendations than equally qualified male peers (i.e., peers with exactly the same credentials and job performance). Male secondary wage earners are seen as being the most overqualified and are given higher reward recommendations than equally qualified female peers. Results demonstrate how the lack of fit model, which has been shown to penalize women who succeed in traditionally masculine domains (Dipboye, Acad Manag Rev 10:16–127, 1985; Heilman, Res Organ Behav 5:269–298, 1983, J Soc Issues 57:657–674, 2001), can be applied to situations where gender-incongruent behavior exists in the form of women being primary wage earners in their families. I refer to this phenomenon as “home-related spillover discrimination,” named after the spillover effects that derive from societal expectations that are transferred into employment situations (Nieva and Gutek, Acad Manag Rev 5:267–276, 1980). The practical implication of this finding is that this may present a new form of sex discrimination against women that has not yet been considered. This is the first study to show how violating stereotypical roles in terms of family wage earner status can influence outcomes in work settings.     

Achieving Our Goals in Life

In 2009 we distributed a questionnaire on the deadly sins. It combined two research instruments—The Life Attitudes Inventory constructed by Capps (Pastoral Psychology 37:229–253, 1989) and the Deadly Sins Scale developed by Nauta and Derckx (Pastoral Psychology 56:177–188, 2007). In a previous article (Capps and Haupt 2011) we reported on findings from the Life Attitudes Inventory. In this article we report on findings from the Deadly Sins Scale and then discuss the fact that an unusually high percentage of the respondents identified positively with the item “I achieve my goals in life.” We suggest that their identification with this item is a reflection of the fact that humans are hopeful by nature.     

Anti-Luck Epistemology and Safety’s (Recent) Discontents

Anti-luck epistemology is an approach to analyzing knowledge that takes as a starting point the widely-held assumption that knowledge must exclude luck. Call this the anti-luck platitude. As Duncan Pritchard (2005) has suggested, there are three stages constituent of anti-luck epistemology, each which specifies a different philosophical requirement: these stages call for us to first give an account of luck; second, specify the sense in which knowledge is incompatible with luck; and finally, show what conditions must be satisfied in order to block the kind of luck with which knowledge was argued to be incompatible. What I’ll show here is that the modal account of luck offers a plausible story at the first stage and leads naturally to equally plausible lines to take at the second and third stages, at which a safety condition on knowledge is squarely motivated. There are, however, recent challenges—advanced by Jonathan Kvanvig (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77: 272–281, 2008); Kelly Becker (2007); and Jennifer Lackey (Australasian Journal of Philosophy 86(2):255–267, 2008), among others—to the plausibility of the safety-based anti-luck project I’ve sketched here at each of its three stages of development. Once I’ve made precise the challenges, I’ll show why none implies that we abandon the commitments of the safety-based anti-luck project at any of its stages. What we should conclude, then, is that a safety-condition on knowledge is motivated by independently defensible accounts of (1) what luck is; and (2) just how knowledge should be thought incompatible with it.     

Death Unto Life: The Power of the Incarnation

Black families traditionally print photographs, poems, songs and sayings in funeral programs as a tribute to the deceased. These artistic expressions, which are part of the black funeral tradition, communicate a theology of death and the afterlife. Yet, the contributions of black, feminist, womanist and pastoral theologies are conventionally ignored in the development of theologies of death. This essay explores the practical implications of using elements of these theologies—black, feminist, womanist and pastoral—to effectively minister to a person with fears, doubts, and questions, and who is facing death. These theologies reveal that death is not the enemy of the dying person who taps into the power of the Incarnation—the “erotic power” housed in human flesh that overcomes and triumphs over death.     

“We All Have Feelings for Our Girlfriends:” Progressive (?) Representations of Lesbian Lives on the <Emphasis Type="Italic">The L Word</Emphasis>

The Showtime series The L Word (2004–2009) marked one of the first dramatized representations of prominent lesbian characters. While many popular culture scholars are focusing attention on the recent “gaying” of television narrative (e.g., Battles and Hilton-Morrow in Critical Studies in Media Communication 19: 87–105, 2002; Shugart in Text and Performance Quarterly 23: 30–54, 2003; Critical Studies in Media Communication 20: 67–91, 2003), far less attention is given to non-romantic interpersonal relationships surrounding main characters in these narratives. Sexuality scholarship notes that lesbian individuals must negotiate their self-disclosure to heterosexuals (Dindia in Dialectical approaches to studying personal relationships, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc., Mahwah, NJ, 1998), and that this can be challenging for forming relationships and maintaining identity (Meyer in Communication Quarterly 51: 262–276, 2004). Ultimately, this essay argues that despite the gains in visibility and even in intimacy, The L Word articulates an ideology of avoidance whereby the underlying problems of heterosexism and homophobia are left unchallenged.     

Emergent Issues in Assessing Personality Pathology: Illustrations from Two Studies of Adolescent Personality and Related Pathology

As illustrated by two articles that each investigate personality pathology and its correlates in adolescents—Aelterman et al. (2010) on obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD) from a dimensional personality perspective, and Barry and Wallace (2010) on indicators of pathological and normative development of youth narcissism—this commentary discusses four important assessment issues that have become more salient as the field considers a shift, through proposed changes in the DSM, to an approach that incorporates trait dimensions as an important aspect of diagnosis: (1) the importance of using multiple information sources for valid personality/ PD assessment; (2) relations of personality traits to (mal)adaptivity in general and also with regard to (3) trait uni- versus bi-polarity; and (4) whether personality types have incremental predictive value beyond their component personality traits and related pathology. The article also discusses why research on childhood and adolescent personality/ PD is important in addressing these issues.     

Object-based attention occurs regardless of object awareness

In this study, we investigated whether awareness of objects is necessary for object-based guidance of attention. We used the two-rectangle method (Egly, Driver, & Rafal, 1994) to probe object-based attention and adopted the continuous flash suppression technique (Tsuchiya & Koch, 2005) to control for the visibility of the two rectangles. Our results show that object-based attention, as indexed by the same-object advantage—faster response to a target within a cued object than within a noncued object—was obtained regardless of participants’ awareness of the objects. This study provides the first evidence of object-based attention under unconscious conditions by showing that the selection unit of attention can be at an object level even when these objects are invisible—a level higher than the previous evidence for a subliminally cued location. We suggest that object-based attentional guidance plays a fundamental role of binding features in both the conscious and unconscious mind.     

The fundamentality of existence and the subjectivity of quiddity

It would not be an overstatement to say that Mulla Sadra’s metaphysical system—commonly known as transcendent philosophy or transcendent wisdom (hikmat muta‘aliyyah)—is founded on the fundamentality of existence and the subjectivity of quiddity or whatness. I will begin this essay by drawing a rather simple picture of this principle under the title “A Common Error.” Then I will proceed by explaining its background and the reasoning supporting it, while offering a more detailed elucidation of the problem. The essay will end by examining two recent interpretations that have gone to extremes in describing quiddity’s subjective nature. This article was written in Farsi specifically for this edition of Topoi and was translated by D. D. Sodagar and Muhammad Legenhausen.

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Feeling right or being right: When strong assessment yields strong correction

Negotiators in regulatory fit report feeling right about an upcoming negotiation more than those in non-fit, and this intensifies their responses to negotiation preparation (Appelt et al. in Soc Cogn 27(3), 365–384, 2009). High assessors emphasize critical evaluation and being right (Higgins et al. in Advances in experimental social psychology, Vol 35, pp 293–344, 2003). This emphasis should motivate them to engage in correction processes when they only feel right—so strongly as to produce elimination, and perhaps even overcorrection, of the fit effects found previously. We found that low assessors replicated regulatory fit effects on negotiation preparation measures of anticipated performance and perceived assessment competence. For high assessors, however, these fit effects were eliminated and even reversed to some extent. This is consistent with the prediction that high assessors correct because they want to be right, and not just feel right, and correcting can result in overcorrection. Implications for understanding the trade-offs of a strong assessment orientation are discussed.     

Toward a scalable holographic word-form representation

Phenomena in a variety of verbal tasks—for example, masked priming, lexical decision, and word naming—are typically explained in terms of similarity between word-forms. Despite the apparent commonalities between these sets of phenomena, the representations and similarity measures used to account for them are not often related. To show how this gap might be bridged, we build on the work of Hannagan, Dupoux, and Christophe, Cognitive Science 35:79-118, (2011) to explore several methods of representing visual word-forms using holographic reduced representations and to evaluate them on their ability to account for a wide range of effects in masked form priming, as well as data from lexical decision and word naming. A representation that assumes that word-internal letter groups are encoded relative to word-terminal letter groups is found to predict qualitative patterns in masked priming, as well as lexical decision and naming latencies. We then show how this representation can be integrated with the BEAGLE model of lexical semantics (Jones & Mewhort, Psychological Review 114:1–37, 2007) to enable the model to encompass a wider range of verbal tasks.     

Discipleship and Spirituality from a Christian Perspective

Spirituality is an important aspect of being a human. One may approach this topic from a purely psychological or religious perspective. In this paper, it is argued that spirituality as defined from a purely psychological perspective is inadequate to capture the depth of this human experience because it misses the core of spirituality—discipleship. Following Foster’s (1998) Streams of Living Water, it will be argued that discipleship is the core of Christian spirituality, and each of these streams provides an important context for fostering one’s relationship to the transcendent.     

Time for consciousness: intention and introspection

We assume that we can act—in at least some cases—by consciously intending to do so. Wegner (2002) appeals to empirical research carried out by Libet et al. (1983) to challenge this assumption. I argue that his conclusion presupposes a particular view of conscious intention. But there is an alternative model available, which has been developed by various writers in the phenomenological tradition, and most recently defended by Moran (2001). If we adopt this alternative account of conscious intention, Wegner’s argument no longer goes through, and we can retain the claim that our conscious intentions can give rise to action.     

The Lessons of Artistic Creativity for Pastoral Theologians

This article applies David W. Galenson’s (2006) typology of artistic creativity to pastoral theology. Galenson identifies two types of painters—conceptualists and experimentalists—and shows that their most important innovations occur at different stages of an artist’s career, that their methods are very different, and that each type produces predictable career frustrations which may, however, be counteracted. The fact that these types are found among sculptors, poets, novelists and film directors leads Galenson to propose that they are also found among scholars, thus inviting application of the findings of the study to pastoral theology as a discipline and to individuals who identify themselves as pastoral theologians. Galenson’s work is supplemented by Thomas Dormandy’s (2000) study of older painters.