Between God and self: exploring the attachment to God and authenticity/inauthenticity tendencies of South African Christian youths

The paper explores the relationship between attachment to God (AG) and authenticity/inauthenticity among Christian youths in relation to a range of socio-demographic variables. Cross-sectional data were collected from 100 South African Christian youths using measures of AG and authenticity/inauthenticity. The correlation results reveal that feelings of insecurity in terms of having anxiety in a relationship with God is positively related to self-alienation (feeling out of touch with oneself) and accepting external influences (conforming to the standards and expectations of others), but negatively correlated to authentic living (being in tune with one’s self). Feelings of insecurity in terms of avoidant God-attachment was also related to self-alienation. In addition, demographic differences were observed for gender and church denomination. These results suggest that insecurity with God may either be linked to feelings of authenticity or self-estrangement among Christian youths and have broad implications, both for clinical usage and further cross-cultural research.     

Differentiating emotional processing and attention in psychopathy with functional neuroimaging

Individuals with psychopathy are often characterized by emotional processing deficits, and recent research has examined the specific contexts and cognitive mechanisms that underlie these abnormalities. Some evidence suggests that abnormal features of attention are fundamental to emotional deficits in persons with psychopathy, but few studies have demonstrated the neural underpinnings responsible for such effects. Here, we use functional neuroimaging to examine attention–emotion interactions among incarcerated individuals (n = 120) evaluated for psychopathic traits using the Hare Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (PCL-R). Using a task designed to manipulate attention to emotional features of visual stimuli, we demonstrate effects representing implicit emotional processing, explicit emotional processing, attention-facilitated emotional processing, and vigilance for emotional content. Results confirm the importance of considering mechanisms of attention when evaluating emotional processing differences related to psychopathic traits. The affective-interpersonal features of psychopathy (PCL-R Factor 1) were associated with relatively lower emotion-dependent augmentation of activity in visual processing areas during implicit emotional processing, while antisocial-lifestyle features (PCL-R Factor 2) were associated with elevated activity in the amygdala and related salience network regions. During explicit emotional processing, psychopathic traits were associated with upregulation in the medial prefrontal cortex, insula, and superior frontal regions. Isolating the impact of explicit attention to emotional content, only Factor 1 was related to upregulation of activity in the visual processing stream, which was accompanied by increased activity in the angular gyrus. These effects highlight some important mechanisms underlying abnormal features of attention and emotional processing that accompany psychopathic traits.     

Open-minded cognition: The attitude justification effect

Abstract

Although open-mindedness is generally valued, people are not equally open-minded in all situations. Open-mindedness is viewed as socially desirable when individuals encounter viewpoints that are compatible with conventional social norms. However, open-mindedness is viewed in less desirable terms when individuals encounter viewpoints that undermine these norms. The perceived desirability of open-mindedness is also influenced by the individual’s personal attitudinal convictions. Individuals ‘inflate’ the normative appropriateness of open-mindedness when it serves to reinforce their convictions, but devalue the normative appropriateness of open-mindedness when it serves to contradict these convictions. Conversely, normative prohibition of closed-mindedness is exaggerated when a closed-minded orientation threatens the individual’s personal attitudinal convictions, but is minimized (or reversed) when a closed-minded orientation reinforces these convictions. Paradoxically, the perceived appropriateness of open-mindedness is engendered (at least in part) by the motivation to confirm one’s prior attitudinal convictions. Evidence of this attitude justification effect is obtained in two experiments.     

Does direction of walking impact binocular rivalry between competing patterns of optic flow?

When dissimilar monocular images are viewed simultaneously by the two eyes, stable binocular vision gives way to unstable vision characterized by alternations in dominance between the two images in a phenomenon called binocular rivalry. These alternations in perception reveal the existence of inhibitory interactions between neural representations associated with conflicting visual inputs. Binocular rivalry has been studied since the days of Wheatstone, but one recent strategy is to investigate its susceptibility to influences caused by one’s own motor activity. This paper focused on the activity of walking, which produces an expected, characteristic direction of optic flow dependent upon the direction of one’s walking. In a set of experiments, we employed virtual reality technology to present dichoptic stimuli to observers who walked forward, backward, or were sitting. Optic flow was presented to a given eye, and was sometimes congruent with the direction of walking, sometimes incongruent, and sometimes random, except when the participant was sitting. Our results indicate that, while walking had a reliable influence on rivalry dynamics, the predominance of congruent or incongruent motion did not.     

Perceiving a calling and well-being: Motivation and access to opportunity as moderators

The current study examined moderator variables that may accentuate the effect of perceiving a calling on well-being amongst a large and diverse sample of working adults (N = 746). Drawing from Self Determination Theory (SDT; Deci & Ryan, 2000) and the Psychology of Working Theory (PWT: Duffy, Blustein, Diemer, & Autin, 2016), perceiving a calling was hypothesized to have greater effects on wellbeing for individuals with greater calling motivation and access to vocational opportunity, as assessed by income and work volition. Three moderated, multiple mediator models using structural equation modeling were run to test these hypotheses. Specifically, life meaning and living a calling were positioned as mediator variables in the relation of perceiving a calling to life satisfaction and the paths from perceiving a calling to the mediators were proposed to be significantly moderated. Calling motivation was found to be a significant moderator for both paths, supporting propositions of SDT. As the motivation to pursue one's calling increased, the direct effects on life meaning and living a calling and the indirect effects on life satisfaction were stronger. Income was also found to be a significant moderator, supporting propositions of the PWT, but only in the relation of perceiving a calling to living a calling. It was proposed that work volition—a variable related to the perception of vocational opportunity—may be better positioned as correlate of calling variables versus a moderator variable affecting the impact of having a calling. Practical implications are discussed.     

No evidence for binding of items to task-irrelevant backgrounds in visual working memory

When representing visual features such as color and shape in visual working memory (VWM), participants also represent the locations of those features as a spatial configuration of the locations of those features in the display. In everyday life, we encounter objects against some background, yet it is unclear whether the configural representation in memory obligatorily constitutes the entire display, including that (often task-irrelevant) background information. In three experiments, participants completed a change detection task on color and shape; the memoranda were presented in front of uniform gray backgrounds, a textured background (Exp. 1), or a background containing location placeholders (Exps. 2 and 3). When whole-display probes were presented, changes to the objects’ locations or feature bindings impacted memory performance—implying that the spatial configuration of the probes influenced participants’ change decisions. Furthermore, when only a single item was probed, the effect of changing its location or feature bindings was either diminished or completely extinguished, implying that single probes do not necessarily elicit the entire spatial configuration. Critically, when task-irrelevant backgrounds were also presented that may have provided a spatial configuration for the single probes, the effect of location or bindings was not moderated. These findings suggest that although the spatial configuration of a display guides VWM-based recognition, this information does not necessarily always influence the decision process during change detection.     

Suppressing the negative effect of devaluation on group identification: The role of intergroup differentiation and intragroup respect

We examined (N = 76) how social creativity strategies such as intergroup differentiation and intragroup respect suppress the negative impact of threat to an ingroup’s value on group identification. Threat was manipulated through false feedback concerning how other groups perceived an ingroup. Both intergroup differentiation and intragroup respect were higher when participants learned that the ingroup was devalued compared to when it was valued. Mediational analyses demonstrated that these factors suppressed the direct negative relationship between value threat and group identification. Discussion focused on the consequences of these social creativity strategies for group identification and collective action.     

Early Examples of Resource-Consciousness

As with the development of several logical notions, it is shown that the concept of resource-consciousness, i. e. the concern over the number of times that a given sentence is used in the proof of another sentence, has its origin in the foundations of geometry, pre-dating its appearence in logical circles as BCK-logic or affine logic.