The plausibility of spiritual intelligence: spiritual experience,problem solving and neural sites

Australian teachers in Church related schools have begun to use the term ‘spiritual intelligence’ in their educational discourse. Is it accurate to describe spirituality as a form of intelligence? This paper explores whether the notion of spiritual intelligence is plausible. It addresses this firstly by discussing the notion of spiritual experience as a mechanism for problem solving—one of the central themes that underlies the concept of intelligence. Secondly, it examines some of the neural sites of the human brain that have been found to be active in those who apperceive spiritual experience. In light of this discussion, this paper argues that although some concerns prevail in considering spirituality as a form of intelligence, the concept of spiritual intelligence may nonetheless be rendered as plausible.     

Resilience-Based Intervention with Underserved Children: Impact on Self-Regulation in a Randomized Clinical Trial in Schools

Resilience and emotion regulation are crucial for optimal psychosocial functioning in children. This study assessed whether a group-based intervention, the Resilience Builder Program (RBP), improved student report of emotion regulation when administered in elementary schools. Sixty-seven students aged 9–12 years (M = 10.50, SD =.74; 82.1% male, 98.5% ethnic/racial minority) were randomly assigned to receive the RBP intervention immediately or following a semester delay. Participants reported their emotional control using the How I Feel scale. Students who received the RBP reported a significant increase in their emotional control and a significant decrease in negative emotion compared to those students in the delayed treatment sample who had not yet received the intervention. Further, students indicated a strongly positive perception of the therapy.     

Impact of Child and Parent Motivation on Social Skills Training Outcome

This study explores child and parent motivation at the start of a social skills training group program and its relationship with treatment outcome. A total of 59 children (aged 7–12) participated. Parents were more aware of, distressed by, and motivated to change the presenting problem than were their children. Greater parent awareness of their child’s difficulty making and keeping friends and perceived importance of their child learning ways to make and keep more friends significantly predicted more improved social skills. Increasing parents’ awareness and perceived importance of treating the presenting problem at the start of therapy may increase treatment effectiveness.     

Using experiential optimization to build lexical representations

To account for natural variability in cognitive processing, it is standard practice to optimize a model’s parameters by fitting it to behavioral data. Although most language-related theories acknowledge a large role for experience in language processing, variability reflecting that knowledge is usually ignored when evaluating a model’s fit to representative data. We fit language-based behavioral data using experiential optimization, a method that optimizes the materials that a model is given while retaining the learning and processing mechanisms of standard practice. Rather than using default materials, experiential optimization selects the optimal linguistic sources to create a memory representation that maximizes task performance. We demonstrate performance on multiple benchmark tasks by optimizing the experience on which a model’s representation is based.

     

Emotional conditioning to masked stimuli and modulation of visuospatial attention

Two studies investigated the effects of conditioning to masked stimuli on visuospatial attention. During the conditioning phase, masked snakes and spiders were paired with a burst of white noise, or paired with an innocuous tone, in the conditioned stimulus (CS)+ and CS- conditions, respectively. Attentional allocation to the CSs was then assessed with a visual probe task, in which the CSs were presented unmasked (Experiment 1) or both unmasked and masked (Experiment 2), together with fear-irrelevant control stimuli (flowers and mushrooms). In Experiment 1, participants preferentially allocated attention to CS+ relative to control stimuli. Experiment 2 suggested that this attentional bias depended on the perceived aversiveness of the unconditioned stimulus and did not require conscious recognition of the CSs during both acquisition and expression.     

Extraversion and emotional reactivity

Six mood induction studies and a meta-analysis were conducted to test 2 models of the extraversion-pleasant affect relation. The affect-level model suggests that extraverts should be happier than introverts in both neutral and positive mood conditions. The reactivity model posits that extraverts react particularly strongly to pleasant stimuli and that they should be happier than introverts only in positive conditions. In all studies, extraverts failed to exhibit greater emotional reactivity when pleasantness items were analyzed. When activated positive affect items were analyzed, results were mixed. The meta-analysis confirmed that there is only a slight reactivity effect overall, and this effect emerges only in activated positive affect items. Furthermore, the meta-analysis showed that the correlation in neutral conditions is strong enough to support the affect-level model.     

Dissociated developmental trajectories for semantic and phonological false memories

False recognition following presentation of semantically related and phonologically related word lists was evaluated in 8-, 11-, and 13-year-olds. Children heard lists of words that were either semantic (e.g., bed, rest, wake ...) or phonological associates (e.g., pole, bowl, hole ...) of a critical unpresented word (e.g., sleep, roll), respectively. A semantic false memory was defined as false recognition of a semantically related but unpresented word. A phonological false memory was defined as false recognition of a phonologically related but unpresented word. False memories in the two tasks showed opposite developmental trends, increasing with age for semantic relatedness and decreasing with age for phonological relatedness.     

Fear-relevant selective associations and social anxiety: absence of a positive bias

An illusory correlation paradigm was used to compare high and low socially anxious individuals' initial, on-line and a posteriori covariation estimates between emotional faces and aversive, pleasant and neutral outcomes. Overall, participants demonstrated an initial expectancy bias for aversive outcomes following angry faces, and pleasant outcomes following happy faces. On-line expectancy biases indicated that initial biases were extinguished during the task, with the exception of low socially anxious individuals who continued to over-associate positive social cues with pleasant outcomes. In addition to lacking this protective positive on-line bias, the high social anxiety group reported retrospectively more negative social cues than the low socially anxious group. Findings are discussed in relation to similar evidence from recent interpretive and memory paradigms.