Piety as a concept underpinning Muslim women’s online discussions of marriage and professional career

In this article, I address piety as a concept shaping Muslim women’s online discussions about gender roles, marriage and professional careers. I also investigate cross-cultural religious encounters in these women-only groups as I am interested in the potential of such online environments to facilitate women’s religious reflection and intellectual engagement. Finally, I explore motivations and religious interpretations of three categories of participants in these discussions: egalitarians, for whom gender equality is a necessary component of piety (Barlas 2006); traditionalists, identified by other authors as Islamists (Karam 1998) or social conservatives (Gül and Gül 48:1–26, 2000; Mahmood 2005) and finally, holists, a group that cannot be mapped out on the political landscape by using the progressive–conservative binary (Badran, Agenda 50:41–57, 2001) and which exists and acts outside of it, neither subverting nor enacting norms of any dominant system, be it secular–liberal or patriarchal. Following Mahmood’s argument that formulating an analysis based exclusively on such a binary is simplistic (Mahmood 2005), I argue that actions of holists can be only addressed by formulating a set of questions different to those used to analyse self-defined egalitarians or traditionalists.     

Depression and anxious apprehension distinguish frontocingulate cortical activity during top-down attentional control

A network consisting of left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (LDLPFC) and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) has been implicated in top-down attentional control. Few studies have systematically investigated how this network is altered in psychopathology, despite evidence that depression and anxiety are associated with attentional control impairments. Functional MRI and dense-array event-related brain potential (ERP) data were collected in separate sessions from 100 participants during a color-word Stroop task. Functional MRI results guided ERP source modeling to characterize the time course of activity in LDLPFC (300-440 ms) and dACC (520-680 ms). At low levels of depression, LDLPFC activity was indirectly related to Stroop interference and only via dACC activity. In contrast, at high levels of depression, dACC did not play an intervening role, and increased LDLPFC activity was directly related to decreased Stroop interference. Specific to high levels of anxious apprehension, higher dACC activity was related to more Stroop interference. Results indicate that depression and anxious apprehension modulate temporally and functionally distinct aspects of the frontocingulate network involved in top-down attention control.     

Attentional effects of masked famous faces (but not names) and subjective evaluations of a target person

Two experiments are reported using a 1986 version of the dot-probe paradigm of MacLeod, Mathews, and Tata, in which the masked subliminal faces of famous persons were differentially associated with attention depending on participants' attitudes toward the famous person. There was attentional avoidance of the faces of persons invoking high disgust (Exp. 1, n=20) or dislike (Exp. 2) but attentional orientation toward the faces of persons invoking low disgust or liking. In Exp. 2 (n=28), this effect was apparent for the faces but not the names of famous persons, despite evidence that the famous names were recognised without awareness. The aversion of attention from faces, but not the names of famous persons who are regarded in a negative light but who are not particularly threatening, may suggest an automatic tendency to avoid making eye contact with an undesirable person thereby avoiding unwanted social interaction.     

Multitasking: multiple,domain-specific cognitive functions in a virtual environment

Multitasking among three or more different tasks is a ubiquitous requirement of everyday cognition, yet rarely is it addressed in research on healthy adults who have had no specific training in multitasking skills. Participants completed a set of diverse subtasks within a simulated shopping mall and office environment, the Edinburgh Virtual Errands Test (EVET). The aim was to investigate how different cognitive functions, such as planning, retrospective and prospective memory, and visuospatial and verbal working memory, contribute to everyday multitasking. Subtasks were chosen to be diverse, and predictions were derived from a statistical model of everyday multitasking impairments associated with frontal-lobe lesions (Burgess, Veitch, de Lacy Costello, & Shallice, 2000b). Multiple regression indicated significant independent contributions from measures of retrospective memory, visuospatial working memory, and online planning, but not from independent measures of prospective memory or verbal working memory. Structural equation modelling showed that the best fit to the data arose from three underlying constructs, with Memory and Planning having a weak link, but with both having a strong directional pathway to an Intent construct that reflected implementation of intentions. Participants who followed their preprepared plan achieved higher scores than those who altered their plan during multitask performance. This was true regardless of whether the plan was efficient or poor. These results substantially develop and extend the Burgess et al. (2000b) model to healthy adults and yield new insight into the poorly understood area of everyday multitasking. The findings also point to the utility of using virtual environments for investigating this form of complex human cognition.     

Deriving an empirical structure of personality pathology for DSM-5

The DSM-IV model of personality disorders is composed of trait sets arranged into 10 theoretically distinct, polythetically assessed categories, with little regard for how the traits comprising these disorders are interrelated and structured. Research since the publication of DSM-III has shown that this model is untenable. The question is not whether this model needs revision; rather, the question is how to move from the existing DSM-IV framework to a model better connected with data. Empirically-based models of personality trait variation provide a starting point for DSM-5, and ongoing research will be used to delineate further the empirical structure of personality traits in the pathological range. The ultimate goal is to frame future DSMs in a way that is maximally useful for clinicians as well as researchers. It is also critical to understand that the DSM-5 is intended to be a living document that will facilitate novel inquiry and clinical applications, as opposed to a document designed to promote and perpetuate a fixed set of constructs. Thus, we view a proposed trait system as a first step on a path to a well-validated, clinically-useful structure.     

Investigators under influence: How social norms activate goal‐directed processing of criminal evidence

Previous research has shown that exposure to social information can influence behaviour through the automatic activation of goals. In the first study to examine such influences in a legal setting, an experiment with 104 experienced criminal investigators tested the idea that exposure to occupational norms can activate distinct information‐processing goals. As predicted, exposure to norms associated with efficiency (vs. thoroughness) sped up and reduced the depth of investigators' processing of criminal evidence, thus reducing their openness to sequentially late witness evidence. In addition, the goal activation operated outside investigators' awareness, illustrating the insidious cognitive influence of occupational norms. The results are discussed in terms of practical significance and contributions to the goal activation literature and the applied study of criminal investigations. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Co-activation of syntax in bilingual language production

We report four experiments that examined whether bilinguals’ production of one language is affected by the syntactic properties of their other language. Greek–English and English–Greek highly proficient fluent bilinguals produced sentence completions following subject nouns whose translation had either the same or different number. We manipulated whether participants produced completions in the same language as the subject (the source language; one-language production) or the other language (the non-source language; two-language production), and whether they used only one language or both languages within the experimental session. The results demonstrated that the grammar systems of both languages were activated during both one-language and two-language production. The effects of the non-source language were particularly enhanced in two-language utterances, when both languages were used in the experiment, and when it was the bilinguals’ native language. We interpret our results in terms of a model of bilingual sentence production.     

Semantic similarity of labels and inductive generalization: Taking a second look

Prior research suggests that preschoolers can generalize object properties based on category information conveyed by semantically-similar labels. However, previous research did not control for co-occurrence probability of labels in natural speech. The current studies re-assessed children’s generalization with semantically-similar labels. Experiment 1 indicated that adults made category-based inferences regardless of co-occurrence probability; however, 4-year-olds generalized with semantically-similar labels that co-occurred in child-directed speech (e.g., bunny–rabbit) but not with non-co-occurring labels (e.g., crocodile–alligator). Experiment 2 indicated that generalization with semantically-similar labels increased gradually between 4- and 6-years of age. These results are discussed in relation to theories of early learning.