The Minority-Majority Conundrum in Northern Ireland: An Orange Order Perspective

Researchers have argued that, depending on the framing of the Northern Ireland conflict, each group could either be a minority or a majority relative to the other. This complicates macrosocial explanations of the conflict which make specific predictions on the basis of minority or majority positions. The present paper argues that this conundrum may have arisen from the inherent variability in microidentity processes that do not fit easily with macroexplanations. In this paper the rhetoric of relative group position is analysed in political speeches delivered by leading members of an influential Protestant institution in Northern Ireland. It is apparent that minority and majority claims are not fixed but are flexibly used to achieve local rhetorical goals. Furthermore, the speeches differ before and after the Good Friday Agreement, with a reactionary "hegemonic" Unionist position giving way to a "majority-rights power sharing" argument and a "pseudo-minority" status giving way to a "disempowered minority" argument. These results suggest a view of the Northern Ireland conflict as a struggle for "symbolic power," i.e., the ability to flexibly define the intergroup situation to the ingroup's advantage.     

Non-native language exposure promotes children’s willingness to accept labels in two languages

Bilingualism has been associated with a range of cognitive and language-related advantages, including the recognition that words can have different labels across languages. However, most previous research has failed to consider heterogeneity in the linguistic environments of children categorized as monolingual. Our study assessed the influence of non-native language experience on children’s acceptance of labels in 2 languages. In a continuous measure of language exposure, parents reported the number of hours during which their children heard non-English languages from different sources. English-speaking 5-year-olds (N = 73) were presented with novel labels in English and Spanish for unfamiliar objects and were asked to endorse either or both labels. Children with greater exposure to non-English languages were more likely than less-exposed children to endorse both the English and Spanish labels. The findings suggest that monolingual children’s willingness to learn non-native vocabulary can be enhanced by exposure to non-native languages.     

Infants' understanding of false labeling events: the referential roles of words and the speakers who use them

The four studies reported here examine whether 16-month-old infants' responses to true and false utterances interact with their knowledge of human agents. In Study 1, infants heard repeated instances either of true or false labeling of common objects; labels came from an active human speaker seated next to the infant. In Study 2, infants experienced the same stimuli and procedure; however, we replaced the human speaker of Study 1 with an audio speaker in the same location. In Study 3, labels came from a hidden audio speaker. In Study 4, a human speaker labeled the objects while facing away from them. In Study 1, infants looked significantly longer to the human agent when she falsely labeled than when she truthfully labeled the objects. Infants did not show a similar pattern of attention for the audio speaker of Study 2, the silent human of Study 3 or the facing-backward speaker of Study 4. In fact, infants who experienced truthful labeling looked significantly longer to the facing-backward labeler of Study 4 than to true labelers of the other three contexts. Additionally, infants were more likely to correct false labels when produced by the human labeler of Study 1 than in any of the other contexts. These findings suggest, first, that infants are developing a critical conception of other human speakers as truthful communicators, and second, that infants understand that human speakers may provide uniquely useful information when a word fails to match its referent. These findings are consistent with the view that infants can recognize differences in knowledge and that such differences can be based on differences in the availability of perceptual experience.     

Reconstructing the Sacred: Evolving Conceptualizations of Religious Faith in Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice

Freud's original understanding of religion was categorically depreciative, and tended to portray religious faith in exclusively western and patriarchal terms (S. Freud, 1913/1989, 1927/1989). More recently, many of Freud's assertions about religion have been questioned. The psychoanalytic contributions of W. D. Fairbairn (1954), and D. W. Winnicott (1971) as well as the work of feminist scholars (N. Chodorow, 1974, 1989; C. Gilligan, 1993) and multicultural theorists (A. Roland, 1996) have profoundly shaken the metapsychological substructure upon which Freud rested his critique of spiritual faith. This paper describes how a gradual historical evolution has occurred in psychoanalytic theory, so that the work of such theorists as A. M. Rizutto (1979), M. H. Spero (1992), and H. Kohut (1984, 1985) now delineates the adaptive and creative place that religious experience can have in human development and psychological life.     

Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy Successes and Failures: Eight Personal Perspectives

Eight experts in Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) provided personal examples of their own successes and failures in applying REBT to themselves. The experts actively talked to themselves both rationally and irrationally. Understandably, there were far more shoulds, oughts, musts, and have to's in the narratives in which the experts described when they failed to use REBT than when they succeeded in using REBT. Rational self‐talk was more prevalent in the examples of how REBT was successfully used by the experts.     

The differential contribution of executive functions to temporal generalisation,reproduction and verbal estimation

Evidence from dual-task studies suggests that executive resources are recruited during timing. However, there has been little exploration of whether executive recruitment is universal across temporal tasks, or whether different temporal tasks recruit different executive resources. The current study explored this further by examining how individual differences in updating, switching, inhibition and access affected performance on temporal generalisation, reproduction and verbal estimation tasks. It was found that temporal tasks differentially loaded onto different executive resources. Temporal generalisation performance was related to updating and access ability. Reproduction performance was related to updating, access and switching. Verbal estimation performance was only related to access. The results suggest that executive resources may be recruited when monitoring and maintaining multiple durations in memory at the same time, and when retrieving duration representations from long-term memory. The findings emphasise the need to consider timing behaviour as the product of a wide range of complex, integrated, cognitive systems, rather than as the output of a clock in isolation.     

Beyond Harm and Fairness: A Study of Deviance and Morality

Using data from 1,429 students, we test whether a moral foundations approach focusing on both individual- and group-oriented measures of morality improves our ability to predict deviant behavior over and above the effects of individual-oriented measures alone. Results show that the emphasis individuals place on group-oriented moral concerns is inversely associated with a range of deviant behaviors. Moreover, these associations are stronger and more pervasive than the emphasis placed on individual-level moral concerns. Additionally, we find that a recently developed “moral identity” measure does not add to the prediction of deviant behavior over and above group-oriented measures.     

Recruiting and Retaining High-Risk Adolescents into Family-Based HIV Prevention Intervention Research

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of evidence-based recruitment and retention strategies for a longitudinal, family-based HIV prevention intervention study targeting adolescents in psychiatric care by (1) determining consent rate (recruitment), rate of participation at the first intervention session (retention), and follow-up attendance rate (retention); and (2) examining socio-demographic factors, family-level processes, sexual risk-related indices, and intervention factors (i.e., treatment arm) associated with study retention. Only one-third of the families contacted ultimately enrolled in the study. 81% of those enrolled participated in the workshop and 72% attended the booster sessions with no significant differences between families on any variable based on attendance. Retention over 1?year was 85% and did not differ by treatment arm. Strategies employed were successful at retaining families once they were enrolled. Findings highlight barriers to enrollment for adolescents in psychiatric care and suggest that it may be critical to integrate HIV prevention programs within community-based mental health services in order to counteract recruitment challenges.