The role of religion in moderating the impact of life events on material life goals: some evidence in support of terror management theory

How would religion and a life event carrying an existential threat (LEET) jointly impact a person's life goals of becoming wealthy and successful in one's career? Goal reprioritisation, socioemotional selectivity, and gerotranscendence theories predict a shift away from material goals following a LEET, independent of the effect of religion. However, terror management theory (TMT) predicts that the effect of death thoughts depends on one's prevailing cultural values. As religion can be regarded as a culture, it is possible that Christians' and non-believers' material life goals would be differentially altered by LEET. Data from 1259 young Chinese adults reveal no main effect of LEET, but a strong effect of religion. Moreover, there was an interaction effect between LEET and religion on material life goals: LEET weakened material goals for Christians but not for non-believers. These findings suggest that TMT is more suitable than the other theories for predicting life goal changes.     

The Effectiveness of a Spiritually-Based Intervention to Alleviate Subsyndromal Anxiety and Minor Depression Among Older Adults

The purpose of this study was to test the effectiveness of a spiritually-based intervention in the alleviation of subsyndromal anxiety and minor depression in an elderly population. Twenty-two residents of six continuing care communities diagnosed with minor depression participated in this study. There was a significant decrease in anxiety and a trend toward decreased depression. In addition, participants who continued to use the Prayer Wheel had a decrease in depression scores, while those who did not had an increase in depression scores. These findings suggest that use of the Prayer Wheel may promote psychological well-being among older adults.     

Visual attention in infants with perinatal brain damage: Evidence of the importance of anterior lesions

Shifts of visual attention can be studied in adults and infants by cueing responses to a particular spatial location. Earlier studies have shown that by seven months of age normal infants show a similar pattern of facilitation and inhibition to a cued spatial location as adults. In this study we report data from infants with perinatal lesions that include or exclude the left anterior quadrant. Results indicate that infants with left anterior lesions do not show facilitation to a cued spatial location in this task. In contrast, infants with posterior lesions showed the same pattern of performance as healthy subjects. While these findings differ from those obtained with adults, they are consistent with previous studies of children with perinatal lesions, and with findings from ERP studies with normal infants.     

Stimulus factors and listening strategies in auditory memory: A theoretical analysis

A theory for the temporal course of perceptual coding during auditory short-term memory tasks is described. A low-level “sensor” and a high-level “identifier” process item and order information from stimulus word-strings. Both word durations and interword pauses are needed for this processing, and if adequate processing time is unavailable, perceptual delays will lead to degraded recall performance. Stimulus parameters and subject strategies interact to determine the quality and the order in which stimulus items are coded. These hypotheses are supported both by experiments using grammatical sentences and those using lists of unrelated words.     

Perception and immediate recall of normal and “compressed” auditory sequences

For a fixed presentation rate, the ratio of speech-to-pause time was varied in three experiments. Ss recalled seven-digit sequences or monitored for item or order information in addition to recall. Removing 33% of the speech and substituting pause time improved recall accuracy and monitoring reaction times. The data suggest that loss of order information in recall may result from cumulative perceptual delays when adequate pause time is unavailable.