New Mutations of the Protestant Ethic among Latin American Pentecostals

This article argues that there is a partial consonance between the ‘inner-worldly asceticism’ of the fast-growing Protestant movement in Latin America and the economic imperatives of the global capitalism into which Latin America has been progessively incorporated since the 1960s.This consonance stops short of being an unequivocal ‘elective affinity’ since there are also points of tension between the new Protestant ethic and the spirit of contemporary capitalism. It is argued that such consonance as exists arises out of a complex symbiosis rather than a simple one-way causal relationship. The article outlines the range of views among Latin American Pentecostal Protestants about the implications of their faith for economic behaviour, and relates these views to current economic conditions. It suggests that certain Protestant habits and values minimally assist economic survival and can even lead to modest success. Particular attention is paid to recent developments in the Pentecostal movement in Latin America which diverge from the classic Protestant ethic of the West, notably the emergence of an indigenous prosperity gospel and a selective acceptance of consumerism.     

Reframing Medicine’s Publics: The Local as a Public of Vaccine Refusal

Although medical and public health practitioners aim for high rates of vaccination, parent vaccination concerns confound doctors and complicate doctor-patient interactions. Medical and public health researchers have studied and attempted to counter antivaccination sentiments, but recommended approaches to dispel vaccination concerns have failed to produce long-lasting effects. We use observations made during a small study in a rural area in a southeastern state to demonstrate how a shift away from analyzing vaccination skepticism as a national issue with a global remedy reveals the nuances in vaccination sentiments based on locality. Instead of seeing antivaccinationists as a distinct public based on statistical commonalities, we argue that examining vaccination beliefs and practices at the local level offers a fuller picture of the contextualized nature of vaccination decisions within the psychosocial spaces of families. A view of vaccination that emphasizes the local public, rather than a globally conceived antivaccination public, enables medical humanists and rhetoricians to offer important considerations for improving communications about vaccinations in clinical settings.     

Can a mind have two time lines? Exploring space-time mapping in Mandarin and English speakers

Spatial representations of time are a ubiquitous feature of human cognition. Nevertheless, interesting sociolinguistic variations exist with respect to where in space people locate temporal constructs. For instance, while in English time metaphorically flows horizontally, in Mandarin an additional vertical dimension is employed. Noting that the bilingual mind can flexibly accommodate multiple representations, the present work explored whether Mandarin–English bilinguals possess two mental time lines. Across two experiments, we demonstrated that Mandarin–English bilinguals do indeed employ both horizontal and vertical representations of time. Importantly, subtle variations to cultural context were seen to shape how these time lines were deployed.     

Colour-identification of differentially valenced words in anxiety

Abstract

Two groups of individuals, one high in trait anxiety and the other low in trait anxiety, performed a Stroop task in which threat, neutral, and pleasant words were presented. The results indicated clear differences between the high- and low-trait groups in their performance on this task. The low-trait group's performance was similar for all three types of sitmuli, whereas the high-trait group's responses were fastest for pleasant stimuli and slowest for threat-related stimuli. A recognition task to examine incidental learning of the “irrelevant” Stroop words showed that whilst the high-trait group had a stronger tendency to respond positively to all trials (critical and distractor) than the low-trait group, there were no differences in sensitivity between the two groups.