Teaching Engineering Ethics using BLOCKS Game

The aim of this study was to investigate the use of a newly developed design game called BLOCKS to stimulate awareness of ethical responsibilities amongst engineering students. The design game was played by seventeen teams of chemical engineering students, with each team having to arrange pieces of colored paper to produce two letters each. Before the end of the game, additional constraints were introduced to the teams such that they faced similar ambiguity in the technical facts that the engineers involved in the Challenger disaster had faced prior to the space shuttle launch. At this stage, the teams had to decide whether to continue with their original design or to develop alternative solutions. After the teams had made their decisions, a video of the Challenger explosion was shown followed by a post-game discussion. The students’ opinion on five Statements on ethics was tracked via a Five-Item Likert survey which was administered three times, before and after the ethical scenario was introduced, and after the video and post-game discussion. The results from this study indicated that the combination of the game and the real-life incident from the video had generally strengthened the students’ opinions of the Statements.     

Predictors and Outcomes of Experiences Deemed Religious: A Longitudinal Investigation

The two studies reported here revised Hunt's (1972) LAM (Literal, Anti-Literal, Mythological) Scale to include a Metaphorical dimension. The first study investigated the relationship between preference for literal versus metaphorical interpretations of religious language and structural levels of religious thinking. As predicted, participants who preferred a literal interpretation of religious statements gave evidence of a low developed structure of religious judgment. The predicted relationship between preference for metaphorical interpretations and style of religious thinking was not found. The second study compared samples of participants scoring highest on the Literal and the Metaphorical subscales. Literal participants scored lower on imaginative thinking and made greater use of religious language in an objectifying manner than did metaphorical participants. The meaning of these data for mature religious thinking is considered.     

“Faith Maturity Scale” for Chinese: A Revision and Construct Validation

Using a large sample of Chinese Christians (n = 2,196), we examined the internal structure, reliability, and validity of the Faith Maturity Scale (FMS). Despite its being developed in North America, and for a mainline Protestant population, the FMS was shown to have validity among non-Western, non-mainline Protestants. There is convergent validity with self-reported religious practices and a belief measure of religiosity. Our analyses also confirmed good construct validity with the Big Five personality dimensions, social axioms, attributional style, and quality of life. FMS remained associated with religious practices and high quality of life after personality was statistically controlled. Findings supported that the Chinese version of the FMS assesses the same theoretical construct as does the original scale and that the distinction between the vertical and horizontal dimensions of faith maturity is meaningful.     

Motivated message processing: How motivational activation influences resource allocation, encoding, and storage of TV messages

This paper investigates differences in overtime processing of television messages with three types of emotional trajectories—those which begin neutral and become negative, begin neutral and become positive and begin neutral and become equally positive and negative. The limited capacity model of motivated mediated message processing is used to predict how the type of emotional content influences real-time activation of the appetitive and aversive motivational systems which then alter concurrent and subsequent message processing. Results show that during the first time period, when motivational activation is low, more resources are allocated to coactive and positive compared to negative messages supporting the positivity offset hypothesis. In the middle time period, when activation is moderate, more resources are allocated to negative than to positive messages, supporting the negativity bias hypothesis. Further, the different patterns of motivational activation do result in different patterns of messages processing. During positive messages, encoding increases and storage decreases over time. During negative messages, encoding decreases and storage increases overtime. During coactive messages initial encoding and storage are high though both decrease slightly over time.     

Cardiovascular reactions to psychological stress and abuse history: the role of occurrence,frequency, and type of abuse

Background and objectives: Extreme cardiovascular reactions to psychological stress have been associated with traumatic life experiences. Previous studies have focused on the occurrence or frequency of abuse rather than type of abuse. We examined how occurrence, frequency, and the type of abuse history are related to cardiovascular reactivity (CVR) to acute psychological stress. Design: The study consisted of between group and continuous analyses to examine the association between occurrence, type, and frequency of abuse with cardiovascular reactions to acute psychological stress. Methods: Data from 64 participants were collected. Heart rate, systolic blood pressure, and diastolic blood pressure were measured at baseline and during a standard mental arithmetic stress task. Results: Individuals who experienced abuse showed diminished CVR to acute psychological stress; this was driven specifically by the history of sexual abuse. Frequency of abuse did not relate to stress reactions. Conclusions: These findings accord with previous work suggesting a relationship between traumatic life experience and hypoarousal in physiological reactivity and extend previous findings by suggesting the relationship may be driven by sexual abuse.     

Prospective relations between maternal autonomy support and child executive functioning: investigating the mediating role of child language ability

Although emerging evidence suggests that parental behavior is related to the development of child executive functioning (EF), the mechanisms through which parenting affects child EF have yet to be investigated. The goal of this study was to examine the potential mediating role of child language in the prospective relation between maternal autonomy support and child EF. A total of 53 mother–infant dyads took part in three home visits at 15 months, 2 years, and 3 years, allowing for the assessment of maternal autonomy support (T1), child expressive vocabulary (T2), and child EF (T3). The results suggested that child language played a mediating role in the relation between maternal autonomy support and child performance on EF tasks entailing a strong impulse control component above and beyond child previous EF and family socioeconomic status (SES). In contrast, no such mediating role of language was found with EF tasks tapping mostly into working memory and set shifting. Thus, this study highlights one pathway through which parenting can affect child executive control.     

ENFRANCHISING INCOMPETENTS: SURETYSHIP AND THE JOINT AUTHORSHIP OF LAWS

Proposals to lower the age of voting, to 15 for example, are regularly met with worries that people that age are not sufficiently ‘competent’. Notice however that we allow people that age to sign binding legal contracts, provided that those contracts are co‐signed by their parents. Notice, further, that in a democracy voters are collectively ‘joint authors’ of the laws that they enact. Enfranchising some less competent voters is no worry, the Condorcet Jury Theorem assures us, so long as the electorate's competence averaging across all voters remains better‐than‐random.     

Behavioral and social cognitive processes in preschool children's social dominance

This longitudinal, naturalistic study addressed behavioral and social cognitive processes implicated in preschool children's social dominance. In the first objective, we examined the degree to which peer aggression, affiliation, and postaggression reconciliation predicted social dominance across a school year. Consistent with predictions, all three predicted dominance early in the year while only affiliation predicted dominance later in the year, suggesting that aggression, affiliation, and reconciliation were used to establish social dominance where affiliation was used to maintain it. In the second, exploratory, objective we tested the relative importance of social dominance and reconciliation (the Machiavellian and Vygotskian intelligence hypotheses, respectively) in predicting theory of mind/false belief. Results indicated that social dominance accounted for significant variance, beyond that related to reconciliation and affiliation, in predicting theory of mind/false belief status. Results are discussed in terms of specific behavioral and social cognitive processes employed in establishing and maintaining social dominance.