Children's Theories of God: Explanations for Difficult-to-Explain Phenomena

Participants in 3 age groups (preschoolers, 3rd graders, and college students) generated explanations for various phenomena. Participants with higher levels of religious involvement provided more attributions to God than participants with lower levels of religious involvement. Also, older participants provided more attributions to God than younger participants. The results suggest that individuals who have higher levels of religious involvement develop theorylike understanding based on their conception of God. It appears that this theorylike understanding has explanatory utility that increases with age.     

Developmental changes in children's understanding of horizontal projectile motion

This study investigated 5‐ to 13‐year‐old children's performance in solving horizontal projectile motion problems, in which they predicted the trajectory of a carried object released from a carrier in three different contexts. The results revealed that 5‐ and 8‐year‐olds' trajectory predictions were easily distracted by salient contextual features (e.g. the relative spatial locations between objects), whereas a proportion of 11‐ and 13‐year‐olds' performance suggested the engagement of the impetus concept in trajectory prediction. The impetus concept is a typical misconception of inertial motion that assumes that motion is caused by force. Children's performance across ages suggested that their naïve knowledge of projectile motion was neither well‐developed and coherent nor completely fragmented. Instead, this study presented the dynamic process in which children with age gradually overcame the influences of contextual features and consistently used the impetus concept across motion problems.     

Children's and adults' understanding of the impact of nutrition on biological and psychological processes

Four studies examined children's and adults' beliefs about the impact of nutrition on growth and mood states. In Studies 1 and 2, 271 participants (preschoolers through adults) judged the impact of healthy and unhealthy nutrition on height and weight. In Studies 3 and 4, 267 participants judged the impact of healthy and unhealthy nutrition on positive and negative mood states. The results suggest that young children demonstrate a co‐existence of an ontologically distinct theory of biology as well as a theory of cross‐domain interaction when reasoning about the impact of food on biological and psychological processes.     

You Get What You Need: An Examination of Purpose‐Based Inheritance Reasoning in Undergraduates,Preschoolers, and Biological Experts

This set of seven experiments examines reasoning about the inheritance and acquisition of physical properties in preschoolers, undergraduates, and biology experts. Participants (N = 390) received adoption vignettes in which a baby animal was born to one parent but raised by a biologically unrelated parent, and they judged whether the offspring would have the same property as the birth or rearing parent. For each vignette, the animal parents had contrasting values on a physical property dimension (e.g., the birth parent had a short tail; the rearing parent had a long tail). Depending on the condition, the distinct properties had distinct functions (“function‐predictive”) were associated with distinct habitats (“habitat‐predictive”), or had no implications (“non‐predictive”). Undergraduates' bias to view properties as inherited from the birth parent was reduced in the function‐ and habitat‐predictive conditions. This result indicates a purpose‐based view of inheritance, whereby animals can acquire properties that serve a purpose in their environment. This stance was not found in experts or preschoolers. We discuss the results in terms of how undergraduates' purpose‐based inheritance reasoning develops and relates to larger‐scale misconceptions about Darwinian evolutionary processes, and implications for biology education.     

Why Externalist Representationalism is a Form of Disjunctivism

Externalist representationalism is touted as a superior rival to naïve realism, and yet a careful analysis of the externalist representationalist's analysis of our ordinary perceptual experiences shows the view to be far closer to naïve realism than we might have expected. One of the central advertised benefits of representationalist views in general is that they are compatible with the idea that ordinary, illusory and hallucinatory perceptual experiences are of the same fundamental kind. Naïve realists are forced to deny the ‘common fundamental kind claim’ and adopt disjunctivism. However, I argue that externalist representationalism is also a version of disjunctivism. Consequently, one of the main rivals to naïve realism turns out not to be a rival at all.     

阴谋论信念的产生机制——社会认知视角的三种解释

社会心理学将阴谋论视作一种意识形态上的信念,并定义为人们将重大的政治或社会事件归因为有权力的群体或个人暗中预谋以达成其目的的解释倾向。社会认知视角为个体这种阴谋论信念的产生提供了三种解释。错觉模式感知导致人们认知上倾向于在不相关的事件之间建立联系;敏感性动因觉察影响人们过度感知并假定事件背后的动因、目的和意图等;投射是将自己愿意参与阴谋的意图归因于事件中的他人。     

社会融合的心理建构理论研究

社会融合的心理建构对促进社会融合和构建和谐社会具有重要意义。社会融合的心理建构通常涉及两个方面：一方面是个体对群体或社会的认同,另一方面是群体或社会对个体的接纳。因此,社会融合的心理建构主要围绕认同和接纳展开。从这个意义上说,理想的社会融合应该是个体积极主动地认同群体或社会,而群体或社会以更具包容性的姿态接纳个体。     

Children's understanding of death as the cessation of agency: a test using sleep versus death

An important problem faced by children is discriminating between entities capable of goal-directed action, i.e. intentional agents, and non-agents. In the case of discriminating between living and dead animals, including humans, this problem is particularly difficult, because of the large number of perceptual cues that living and dead animals share. However, there are potential costs of failing to discriminate between living and dead animals, including unnecessary vigilance and lost opportunities from failing to realize that an animal, such as an animal killed for food, is dead. This might have led to the evolution of mechanisms specifically for distinguishing between living and dead animals in terms of their ability to act. Here we test this hypothesis by examining patterns of inferences about sleeping and dead organisms by Shuar and German children between 3 and 5-years old. The results show that by age 4, causal cues to death block agency attributions to animals and people, whereas cues to sleep do not. The developmental trajectory of this pattern of inferences is identical across cultures, consistent with the hypothesis of a living/dead discrimination mechanism as a reliably developing part of core cognitive architecture.     

Theory learning as stochastic search in the language of thought

We present an algorithmic model for the development of children's intuitive theories within a hierarchical Bayesian framework, where theories are described as sets of logical laws generated by a probabilistic context-free grammar. We contrast our approach with connectionist and other emergentist approaches to modeling cognitive development. While their subsymbolic representations provide a smooth error surface that supports efficient gradient-based learning, our symbolic representations are better suited to capturing children's intuitive theories but give rise to a harder learning problem, which can only be solved by exploratory search. Our algorithm attempts to discover the theory that best explains a set of observed data by performing stochastic search at two levels of abstraction: an outer loop in the space of theories and an inner loop in the space of explanations or models generated by each theory given a particular dataset. We show that this stochastic search is capable of learning appropriate theories in several everyday domains and discuss its dynamics in the context of empirical studies of children's learning.     

Children's Personal Narratives and Their Mothers' Responsiveness as Covariates of the Children's Compliance

Twenty-six mother–child dyads volunteered to be observed interacting at home, and the children agreed to participate in interviews designed to elicit their personal narratives. Observers coded the children's compliance with mother instructions and the mothers' responsiveness to their children's prosocial behaviors. Other raters coded the children's narratives for coherence of story structure. Correlational analyses of the data sets confirmed hypotheses that mother responsiveness and child coherence scores would account for separate variance in the children's willingness to comply with their mothers' instructions. These results were interpreted within the literature on child–mother synchrony and functional aspects of children's personal narratives.     

A developmental examination of the conceptual structure of animal, artifact, and human social categories across two cultural contexts

Previous research indicates that the ontological status that adults attribute to categories varies systematically by domain. For example, adults view distinctions between different animal species as natural and objective, but view distinctions between different kinds of furniture as more conventionalized and subjective. The present work (N = 435; ages 5-18) examined the effects of domain, age, and cultural context on beliefs about the naturalness vs. conventionality of categories. Results demonstrate that young children, like adults, view animal categories as natural kinds, but artifact categories as more conventionalized. For human social categories (gender and race), beliefs about naturalness and conventionality were predicted by interactions between cultural context and age. Implications for the origins of social categories and theories of conceptual development will be discussed.     

Children's behavioural reactions to marital conflict as a function of parents' conflict behaviours and alcohol problems

This paper examines how children's previous exposure to destructive marital conflict and parental problem drinking relate to children's immediate and specific behavioural reactions to marital conflict. Data are from 215 second-graders and their families participating in a larger study. Children watched analogues of marital conflict and indicated their behavioural response. Parents completed questionnaire measures of marital conflict and drinking problems. Children's exposure to marital stonewalling was associated with increased child intervention in conflict and decreased avoidance of conflict. Exposure to maternal drinking was related to child caretaking responses to escalated conflict. Exposure to paternal drinking was related to child mediation and avoidance of child-related conflict, but inactive response to escalated conflict. Boys were more likely to mediate and less likely to avoid escalated conflict.     

Social interpretation bias and generalized social phobia: the influence of developmental experiences

Patients with generalized social phobia (N = 42) and non-phobic community controls (N = 42) engaged in a social interaction with an experimental assistant whose behavior was used to create either a positive or an ambiguous social environment. Participants then rated their own performance and their partner's behavior. As a group, social phobic patients displayed negatively biased self-judgments, but failed to display biased social interpretations. Among the social phobia group, a social developmental history marked by parental hostility was associated with negative interpretations of partner behavior and a history of parental overprotection was associated with less sensitivity to partner behavior. The results supported cognitive models of social phobia, which implicate negative learning experiences in the development of information processing biases.     

Theory as a Tool in the Social Scientific Study of Religion and Martin Riesebrodt's The Promise of Salvation

No single paradigm or debate currently orients the social scientific study of religion. Because of this, those engaged in the multidisciplinary study of religion find that a public conversation is often difficult. In this article and the Forum it introduces, we explore Martin Riesebrodt's recently published book, The Promise of Salvation: A Theory of Religion. Responding to the inadequacies of secularization paradigms, rational choice models, and postmodern criticism, Riesebrodt proposes an approach that ideal‐typically reconstructs the subjective meanings of institutionalized religious practices (liturgies). These subjective meanings center on the prevention and management of crises—social, natural, and bodily—through appeal and access to superhuman powers. This pragmatic emphasis on the superhuman defines religion as a distinct sphere of social action transhistorically and transculturally. Riesebrodt's theory creates new analytical possibilities, especially for understanding the modern resurgence of religion under conditions of secularization.     

Transforming Social Regularities in a Multicomponent Community‐Based Intervention: A Case Study of Professionals’ Adaptability to Better Support Parents to Meet Their Children's Needs

This paper presents an in‐depth case study of the dynamic processes of mutual adjustment that occurred between two professional teams participating in a multicomponent community‐based intervention (CBI). Drawing on the concept of social regularities, we focus on patterns of social interaction within and across the two microsystems involved in delivering the intervention. Two research strategies, narrative analysis and structural network analysis, were used to reveal the social regularities linking the two microsystems. Results document strategies and actions undertaken by the professionals responsible for the intervention to modify intersetting social regularities to deal with a problem situation that arose during the course of one intervention cycle. The results illustrate how key social regularities were modified in order to resolve the problem situation and allow the intervention to continue to function smoothly. We propose that these changes represent a transition to a new state of the ecological intervention system. This transformation appeared to be the result of certain key intervening mechanisms: changing key role relationships, boundary spanning, and synergy. The transformation also appeared to be linked to positive setting‐level and individual‐level outcomes: confidence of key team members, joint planning, decision‐making and intervention activities, and the achievement of desired intervention objectives.     

A Longitudinal Test of the Model of Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition

Using data from a longitudinal study of college students, this study assessed the relationships among the threat perceptions of realistic threat and intergroup anxiety, the ideological motives of system justification and social dominance orientation (SDO), and political conservatism. Those who had higher perceptions of realistic threat and intergroup anxiety at the end of their first year of college showed higher levels of system justification and SDO at the end of their second and third years of college, controlling for precollege expressions of each variable. Higher levels of these two ideological motives at the end of students' second and third years of college were associated with more politically conservative attitudes at the end of students' fourth year of college, again controlling for precollege expressions. These longitudinal results are discussed in terms of a model of political conservatism as motivated social cognition.     

On the Historical and Conceptual Foundations of a Community Psychology of Social Transformation

We examine historical and conceptual literature in community psychology in order to understand the field's potential to be the socially transformative subdiscipline of psychology to which it aspires. By reviewing papers from two prominent journals and other literature, we conclude that the claim that community psychology is well‐suited to social transformation, because it is a product of Sixties' radicalism and is theoretically equipped, is untenable. Systematic accounts of the subdiscipline's origins suggest that the transformative aspirations of current community psychologists do not correspond to the subdiscipline's reformist past. Furthermore, in analyzing three related concepts currently employed in the field—social justice, power, and praxis—we show that each suffers from conceptual ambiguity and a restricted political scope. These conceptual flaws, coupled with community psychology's historical inclination toward social reform, inhibit the possibility of contributing to radical social transformation. We conclude that neither questionable historical claims nor ambiguous and politically dubious concepts support a community psychology of social transformation. We offer solutions for the historical and conceptual problems we identify and, as a broader solution to the problem of engaging in socially transformative work, propose that community psychologists should seek direct political engagement in solidarity with other citizens as fellow citizens not as psychologists.     

Social Support as Predictor of Psychopathology in the Adolescent Offspring of Psychiatric Patients

The potential role of social support for the adolescent offspring of psychiatric patients has hitherto not been examined. We examined whether the adolescent's level of psychiatric symptoms is dependent on the content and the function of social support (whether direct or moderating), controlling for perceived stress. In a cross-sectional design, 40 adolescents (11–18 yrs) with a parent exhibiting an affective or personality disorder were given several questionnaires, including the Youth Self Report (Achenbach), a Social Support Inventory, and the MUSIC, an inventory assessing perceived emotional and physiological stress reactions. The social support inventory consisted of three subscales to assess the positive and negative perception of social support, and the discrepancy between demand and supply of social support. The mentally-ill parents were given the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ). Data were then analyzed using multiple linear regression analyses. Analyses showed that perceived stress and negative social support predicted the adolescent's level of psychiatric symptoms, and that social support served as a direct effect, and was independent of parental GHQ score. Results are discussed and the presently under-utilized potential of social support for this population at risk is highlighted as something warranting increased attention both in terms of research and practical preventative steps.     

Children's Judgments of Certainty and Uncertainty on a Problem Where the Possible Solutions Differ in Likelihood

In this study the author examined why children and adults think they need to eat. Preschoolers through adults were provided with physiological, social, psychological, and routine causes for eating breakfast, lunch, snack, and dinner, and were asked to either agree or disagree with the causal responses provided. A 4 Reason × 4 Meal repeated measures analysis of variance revealed significant main effects for meals and reasons, as well as significant Meal × Reason and Meal × Reason × Grade interactions. The effect sizes ranged from 0.1 to 0.7. Across all age groups, participants acknowledged physiological needs and desires (fulfilling hunger and needs to stay healthy) and routine (e.g., it is dinner time) as the primary causes for eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner. However, for snack physiological needs were the primary reason. Second-grade students onward spontaneously produced biological justifications such as the need for energy and nutrition as important reasons for food consumption. These results lend support to the developmental model that children's and adults’ understanding of eating changes in middle childhood.     

Holiness as a mark of the Church in the writings of John Henry Newman

‘Church’ is a common word to denote ordinary, traditional, mass Christian churches. In sociology, four main characteristics are used to describe these religious organisations: a bureaucratic organisational structure, a passive relationship with their members, a positive relationship and attitude to society and the state, and a leading vision for the whole of society including a positive attitude to other religious bodies. This article states that these characteristics are under pressure in the context of globalised social relations. With examples from European churches, it is shown that these organisations are becoming less likely to conform to the ideal type of ‘church’. In the conclusion, three scenario's for the future of ‘churches’ in western society are portrayed.