Good fortune but bad luck? Predictable versus unpredictable gains and losses in risky choice

This study examines the effects of two different types of good and bad experiences on risk‐taking preferences: fortune and luck. We define fortune as a relatively stable positive or negative context within which choices are made and luck as a more unpredictable series of better or worse outcomes. With the use of a lottery‐based paradigm, fortune was operationalized as a preponderance of all‐gain or all‐loss two‐outcome option pairs within a larger set of mixed‐outcome control lotteries. Luck was operationalized as the experienced frequency of better versus worse outcomes when playing the lotteries. We predicted that fortune and luck would lead to opposite risk‐taking tendencies within control lotteries. An assimilation effect of fortune was predicted, with risk‐averse preferences for control lotteries when surrounded by good fortune and risk‐seeking preferences when surrounded by bad fortune. In contrast, we expected that high rates of success with good luck would lead to risk‐seeking preferences, whereas low rates of success with bad luck would yield risk‐averse preferences. Our predictions for fortune were confirmed; however, there was no evidence of any effect on risk taking based on experiencing good versus bad luck. Moreover, we observed a striking disconnect between impressions of the experience and risk‐taking behavior. Both identification and attributions of luck and fortune were highly correlated with the number of gain outcomes that participants experienced but were uncorrelated with risk taking. We review these surprising findings considering several prominent theories of risk‐taking behavior, particularly drawing attention to the differential roles of predecisional and postdecisional information in choice.     

DARWIN AND CHRISTIANITY: TRUTH AND MYTH

In recent years many historical myths about the relations between science and religion have been corrected but not always with sensitivity to different types and functions of “myth.” Correcting caricatures of Darwin's religious views and of the religious reaction to his theory have featured prominently in this myth‐busting. With the appearance in 2017 of A. N. Wilson's depiction of Darwin himself as a “mythmaker,” it is appropriate to reconsider where the myths lie in discourse concerning Darwin and Christianity. Problems with Wilson's account are identified and his provocative demeaning of Darwin is contrasted with an image gleaned from Darwin's friend and colleague George Romanes. The article concludes with a brief reference to the problem of suffering and to the work of Christopher Southgate.     

Time Costs for Genetic Counseling in Preconception Carrier Screening with Genome Sequencing

Advances in technology and the promise of personalized health care are driving greater use of genome sequencing (GS) for a variety of clinical scenarios. As health systems consider adopting GS, they need to understand the impact of GS on the organization and cost of care. While research has documented a dramatic decrease in the cost of sequencing and interpreting GS, few studies have examined how GS impacts genetic counseling workloads. This study examined the time needed to provide genetic counseling for GS in the context of preconception carrier screening. Genetic counselors prospectively reported on the time spent in the results disclosure process with 107 study participants who were part of the NextGen study. We found that the median time for results disclosure was 64 min (ranged from 5 to 229 min). Preparation work was the most time-consuming activity. Qualitative data from journal entries, debrief interviews with genetic counselors, and detailed case conference notes provided information on factors influencing time for results disclosure and implications for practice. Results suggest that expanded carrier screening could require significant increases in genetic counseling time, unless we are able to generate new resources to reduce preparation work or develop other strategies such as the creation of new models to deliver this type of service.     

Must God Be Dead? Reinventing the Sacred

Newton became a death knell for a theistic God and for a non-epiphenominal mind. The culprit is the deterministic causal closure of classical physics. Two major revolutions are taking us beyond this closure. The first is Quantum Mechanics, which is non-deterministic. The second revolution may just be happening. The emergence and evolution of life in our or any biosphere is governed by no law at all. This freedom suggests one sense of God as the natural creativity of the Universe.     

Thin Is In? Think Again: The Rising Importance of Muscularity in the Thin Ideal Female Body

Research has documented an increased emphasis on fitness in media targeting women. However, it is unclear whether this emphasis has resulted in increased muscularity in the perceived ideal female body shape. We sought to evaluate whether the ideal female figure has incorporated increased muscularity into the existing ideal body type that already emphasizes thinness. In Study 1, 78 female undergraduates evaluated images of U.S. beauty pageant winners over the past 15 years on dimensions of thinness, muscularity, and attractiveness. Results indicated that muscularity and thinness ratings of pageant winners significantly increased over time. In Study 2, 64 female undergraduates evaluated two different versions of the same image of a model: a Thin Muscular image and a Thin Only image in which the appearance of muscularity was removed through digital editing. When images were presented in pairs, results indicated that participants found the Thin Muscular image more attractive than the Thin Only image. These results suggest that the current perceived ideal female figure includes both extreme thinness and muscularity and that women prefer this muscular thin figure to a solely thin figure. These findings have implications for clinical treatments related to body image, compulsive exercise, and media literacy.     

Do readers make inferences about conversational topics?

When we read that two protagonists in a story chatted together for a couple of minutes, do we draw inferences about the topic of the conversation on the basis of information presented earlier in the text? Participants read passages in which protagonists part and later reunite; the passages ended with a sentence either that implied conversation or did not. In Experiment 1, participants' continuation sentences indicated that inferences about the topic of conversation were drawn. Recognition probe data in Experiment 2 provided more immediate evidence of such inferences. Experiment 3 addressed a possible confound in Experiment 2 and again provided evidence that readers inferred the continuation of the conversation. In Experiments 4 and 5, we investigated the effect of having the targeted conversational topic be a secret that should not be shared between the protagonists. The results are discussed in terms of the collaboration between passive, memory-based text processing and schema-driven comprehension processes.     

Individual differences in musical training and executive functions: A latent variable approach

Learning and performing music draw on a host of cognitive abilities, and previous research has postulated that musicians might have advantages in related cognitive processes. One such aspect of cognition that may be related to musical training is executive functions (EFs), a set of top-down processes that regulate behavior and cognition according to task demands. Previous studies investigating the link between musical training and EFs have yielded mixed results and are difficult to compare. In part, this is because most studies have looked at only one specific cognitive process, and even studies looking at the same process have used different experimental tasks. Furthermore, most correlational studies have used different “musician” and “non-musician” categorizations for their comparisons, so generalizing the findings is difficult. The present study provides a more comprehensive assessment of how individual differences in musical training relate to latent measures of three separable aspects of EFs. We administered a well-validated EF battery containing multiple tasks tapping the EF components of inhibition, shifting, and working memory updating (Friedman et al. in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 137, 201–225, 2008), as well as a comprehensive, continuous measure of musical training and sophistication (Müllensiefen et al., in PLoS ONE, 9, e89642, 2014). Musical training correlated with some individual EF tasks involving inhibition and working memory updating, but not with individual tasks involving shifting. However, musical training only predicted the latent variable of working memory updating, but not the latent variables of inhibition or shifting after controlling for IQ, socioeconomic status, and handedness. Although these data are correlational, they nonetheless suggest that musical experience places particularly strong demands specifically on working memory updating processes.