FAMILY, SELF, AND SOCIOCULTURAL CONTRIBUTIONS TO BODY-IMAGE ATTITUDES OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN

This study examined factors that influenced body-image attitudes of 90 African-American college women. Participants completed two instruments assessing body image attitudes and measures of social self-esteem, racial identity attitudes, and family and personal characteristics. Data analyses indicated that self and sociocultural variables were associated with evaluations of physical appearance, fitness, and investment in health. Dissatisfaction with the total body was predicted with family variables, whereas family and self variables were related to satisfaction with body areas. Fathers' education; body mass and fathers' education; body mass and social self-esteem; internalization of racial attitudes; and social self-esteem best predicted body areas satisfaction, appearance evaluation, fitness evaluation, and health orientation, respectively. Implications for the divergence/convergence of subjective measures of body image are discussed and suggestions offered for future studies.     

A vigilance task sensitive to the effects of stimulants, hypnotics, and environmental stress: The Scanning Visual Vigilance Test

The Scanning Visual Vigilance Test is a variable-length detection test designed to assess the ability of individuals to maintain visual alertness for sustained periods of time. The test was designed to be sensitive to changes in vigilance produced by subtle variations in performance, such as those produced by low doses of centrally acting food constituents, drugs, or environmental stress. The test has been shown to be sensitive to the effects of stimulants and sedatives, as well as cold stress and sleep loss. It requires the subject to continuously scan a video monitor to detect the occurrence of infrequent stimuli that are difficult to detect. The number of stimuli correctly detected, false alarms, and reaction times are recorded. The stimulus is a small rectangle displayed for 2 sec at random locations on a darker region of a video monitor at random or pseudo-random times. The brightness of the stimulus can be adjusted for each subject individually on an automated threshold detection test. Training and test session length are defined by the experimenter. Hardware requirements are an IBM-compatible personal computer (286 or higher) with a color or grayscale VGA monitor.     

Gender of Subject and Target as Mediators of Aggression1

The effects of gender of the subject and the target of aggression were studied by examining responses of 414 undergraduates to four anger-inducing scenarios. As predicted, in the three scenarios not involving dating, males tended to be more aggressive and to expect more approval of aggression from their friends than did females; more aggression was directed against a male, and friends approved more of aggression against a male than a female target. Also as predicted, in the scenario involving a romantic partner, females were more aggressive than males and expected more approval for aggression from friends; males were more likely than females to feel guilty, apologize, and speak politely to their dates. The results suggest that the relationship between gender and aggression is influenced by situational context, friends' anticipated reactions, feelings of guilt, and expectancies of successful outcomes.     

A revised law of comparative judgment

In contrast to Thurstone's Law of Comparative Judgment, a model in which a comparison pair and its complement are assumed to give rise to two different distributions of differences is considered. The consequences of this revised model on scaling problems is developed.The research in this article was supported jointly by the Army, Navy, and Air Force under contract with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.     

Separation of data as a principle in factor analysis

Two systems of factor analysis—factoring correlations with units in the diagonal cells and factoring correlations with communalities in the diagonal cells—are considered in relation to the commonly used statistical procedure of separating a set of data (scores) into two or more parts. It is shown that both systems of factor analysis imply the separation of the observed data into two orthogonal parts. The matrices used to achieve the separation differ for the two systems of factor analysis.     

Children's Ideas About What Can Really Happen: The Impact of Age and Religious Background

Five- to 11-year-old U.S. children, from either a religious or secular background, judged whether story events could really happen. There were four different types of stories: magical stories violating ordinary causal regularities; religious stories also violating ordinary causal regularities but via a divine agent; unusual stories not violating ordinary causal regularities but with an improbable event; and realistic stories not violating ordinary causal regularities and with no improbable event. Overall, children were less likely to judge that religious and magical stories could really happen than unusual and realistic stories although religious children were more likely than secular children to judge that religious stories could really happen. Irrespective of background, children frequently invoked causal regularities in justifying their judgments. Thus, in justifying their conclusion that a story could really happen, children often invoked a causal regularity, whereas in justifying their conclusion that a story could not really happen, they often pointed to the violation of causal regularity. Overall, the findings show that children appraise the likelihood of story events actually happening in light of their beliefs about causal regularities. A religious upbringing does not impact the frequency with which children invoke causal regularities in judging what can happen, even if it does impact the type of causal factors that children endorse.     

MENTAL WELL‐BEING,NEUROSCIENCE, AND RELIGION: CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE SCIENCE AND RELIGION FORUM

The Science and Religion Forum (SRF) seeks to be the premier organization promoting the discussion between science and religion in the United Kingdom. Each year, the SRF holds a conference tackling a topical issue, and in 2017 focused on mental well‐being, neuroscience, and religion. This article introduces the thematic section which is made up of five papers from that conference. As a new field within the science and religion academy, these articles are both wide‐ranging and detailed. This introductory article locates this section within the academy and argues that its place is not only valid but vital, given the increase of mental health problems and the need for medicine, church, and society to answer this problem and present ways to help.     

Understanding ‘Unlikely (20% Likelihood)’ or ‘20% Likelihood (Unlikely)’ Outcomes: The Robustness of the Extremity Effect

Calls to communicate uncertainty using mixed, verbal‐numerical formats (‘unlikely [0–33%]’) have stemmed from research comparing mixed with solely verbal communications. Research using the new ‘which outcome’ approach to investigate understanding of verbal probability expressions suggests, however, that mixed formats might convey disadvantages compared with purely numerical communications. When asked to indicate an outcome that is ‘unlikely’, participants have been shown to often indicate outcomes with a value exceeding the maximum value shown, equivalent to a 0% probability —an ‘extremity effect’. Recognising the potential consequences of communication recipients expecting an ‘unlikely’ event to never occur, we extend the ‘which outcome’ work across four experiments, using verbal, numerical, and verbal‐numerical communication formats, as well as a previously unconsidered numerical‐verbal format. We examine how robust the effect is in the context of consequential outcomes and over non‐normal distributions. We also investigate whether participants are aware of the inconsistency in their responses from a traditional ‘how likely’ and ‘which outcome’ task. We replicate and extend previous findings, with preference for extreme outcomes (including above maximum values) observed in both verbal and verbal‐numerical formats. Our results suggest caution in blanket usage of recently recommended verbal‐numerical formats for the communication of uncertainty. Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Comparing patterning and biconditional discriminations in humans

In two experiments, human participants performed a causal judgment task that simultaneously comprised two reciprocal patterning discriminations and a biconditional discrimination. They learned both patterning discriminations more quickly than the biconditional discrimination. Postdiscrimination tests were used to identify participants who had, or had not, learned to apply the patterning rules, as well as participants who continued to expect summation when presented with two cues that predicted the same outcome. All groups were faster to learn the patterning than the biconditional discriminations. These results are inconsistent with models of stimulus representation that invoke configural representations (e.g., Pearce, 1987, 1994; Rescorla & Wagner, 1972) because these models solve biconditional discriminations more readily than patterning discriminations.