Choosing Across Cultures: The Effect of Choice Complexity on Treatment Outcomes

Prior research has revealed that having choice over treatments can improve their efficacy. However, it is currently unknown if the benefits of treatment choice hold for complex decisions and different cultures. The effects of differing numbers of treatment options were explored across two cultural contexts: United States and Japan. Participants were exposed to an uncomfortable stimulus and provided with up to 15 placebo treatment options they believed would reduce discomfort. There was a significant interaction such that participants from Japan benefited most from fewer treatment options (2 and 5) compared with more treatment options (10 and 15). Participants from the United States, however, showed either no change in discomfort or less discomfort as the number of choices increased. Additionally, participants from Japan reported less satisfaction with the decision process when they had more treatment options to choose from whereas U.S. participants reported similar, if not slightly higher, satisfaction with more treatment options. Further, a second study indicated that a positive experience with the decision process mediated the relationship between choice complexity and treatment efficacy for Japanese participants. These data demonstrate the importance of culture and choice complexity when discussing treatment choice and resulting outcomes in the medical context. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

FAITH AND COMPASSION IN AN UNFINISHED UNIVERSE

The theme of compassion is prominent in the work of Christopher Southgate. This scientist and theologian is deeply affected by Charles Darwin's nineteenth century disclosure of the long, previously unknown, history of life's suffering. Southgate is also aware of the many unsuccessful attempts by Christian theologians to make sense of it all. Here I build on Southgate's work. I note, first, that both the suffering of life and the protest against it by compassionate human beings are integral parts of a single cosmic drama; second, that the drama is still far from finished; and, third, that the suffering of innocent life remains unintelligible and unredeemed apart from faith's anticipation of a fulfillment that awaits the entire cosmic drama.     

SCIENCE AND SCIENTISM: THE IMPORTANCE OF A DISTINCTION

Abstract. John Caiazza's interesting argument is an important one and deserves a close hearing. However, his article could be more forceful if he would distinguish more carefully between science on the one hand and “scientific secularism” and “materialism” on the other.     

Search of a God for Evolution: Paul Tillich and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin challenged theology to reach for an understanding of God that would take into account the reality of evolution. Paul Tillich's notion of New Being goes a long way toward meeting this challenge, and a theology of evolution can gain a great deal from Tillich's religious thought. But Teilhard would still wonder whether the philosophical notion of being , even when qualified by the adjective new , is itself adequate to contextualize evolution theologically. To Teilhard a theology attuned to a post–Darwinian world requires nothing less than a revolution in our understanding of what is ultimately real. It is doubtful that Tillich's rather classical theological system is radical enough to accommodate this requirement. For Teilhard, on the other hand, a metaphysics grounded in the biblical vision, wherein God is understood as the future on which the world rests as its sole support, can provide a more suitable setting for evolutionary theology.     

Can Florida become like the next Florida? When metaphoric comparisons fail

Metaphors can be understood in either of two ways: via a comparison process or via a categorization process. What determines which process will be used? According to a recent variant of comparison theory, novel metaphors must be processed as comparisons; only conventional metaphors can be processed as categorizations. We argue that choice of process is determined not by conventionality, but instead by the semantic and referential properties of the metaphor itself. We identified a type of novel metaphor that is indeed understood more quickly as a comparison than as a categorization. We then generated variants of such metaphors to make comparison difficult and found that these new novel metaphors were understood more quickly as categorizations than as comparisons. We conclude that metaphors can be processed as categorizations from the start, depending on their semantic and referential properties.     

Subjective Social Status and Well-Being: The Role of Referent Abstraction

Subjective social status (SSS) has been shown to predict well-being and mental health, above and beyond objective social status (OSS). However, little is known about the factors that moderate this relationship. Two studies explored whether the link between SSS and well-being varied depending upon the referent used for comparison in SSS judgments. Participants judged their well-being and SSS in comparison to referents that varied in abstraction. A confirmatory factor analysis on SSS judgments yielded two factors: (a) SSS perceptions toward global referents and (b) SSS perceptions toward local referents. SSS relative to a global referent was a better predictor of depression (Studies 1 and 2), life satisfaction (Studies 1 and 2), and self-esteem (Study 2) than SSS relative to a local referent. These findings have theoretical implications for understanding how people differentiate between local vs. global referents and practical implications for status-related health disparities.     

Spain is Not Greece: How Metaphors are Understood

Metaphoric expressions are pervasive and powerful communication tools. The present report sheds light on two questions: how do we extract meaning from metaphors and similes, and are these two tropes interchangeable? Existing models propose different mechanisms for metaphor comprehension: comparison, categorization, and a shift from comparison to categorization as metaphors become conventionalized. While the categorization model allows for the possibility that metaphors and similes are not always interchangeable, all the variants of the comparison model assume equivalence of meaning between the two tropes. The findings reported here rule out this assumption: they show that metaphors and similes may express different, and even incompatible meanings. Aptness, rather than conventionalization, seems to determine processing mechanisms: apt metaphors, both novel and conventionalized, are understood as categorizations, while similes and inapt metaphors are understood as comparisons.