Pathways of Religious Assimilation: Second‐Generation Asian Americans’ Religious Retention and Religiosity

We explore the religious assimilation of different Asian American second‐generation religious groups by examining their rates of religious retention and levels of religiosity relative to the first generation and the general American population. In general, Asian Americans exhibit a pattern of generational religious decline: the second generation tend to have lower levels of both religious retention and religiosity compared to the immigrant generation. The second generation do not necessarily conform to the religious patterns of the general population. Rather, they follow different trajectories of retention and religiosity depending on the religion. We identify four different pathways of religious change among the second generation, and discuss how racial and religious differences mediate assimilation into American religion.     

Influencing Republicans’ and Democrats’ attitudes toward Obamacare: Effects of imagined vicarious cognitive dissonance on political attitudes

The field of experimental social psychology is appropriately interested in using novel theoretical approaches to implement change in the social world. In the current study, we extended cognitive dissonance theory by creating a new framework of social influence: imagined vicarious dissonance. We used the framework to influence attitudes on an important and controversial political attitude: U.S. citizens’ support for the Affordable Care Act (ACA). 36 Republicans and 84 Democrats were asked to imagine fellow Republicans and Democrats, respectively, making attitude discrepant statements under high and low choice conditions about support for the ACA. The data showed that vicarious dissonance, established by imagining a group member make a counterattitudinal speech under high-choice conditions (as compared to low-choice conditions), resulted in greater support for the Act by Republicans and marginally diminished support by Democrats. The results suggest a promising role for the application of vicarious dissonance theory to relevant societal issues and for further understanding the relationship of dissonance and people’s identification with their social groups.     

Le TASC200, une épreuve d’attention et de saillance visuelle : fidélité, validité et normes préliminaires

In the clinical setting, attention is classically assessed by tasks that do not take into account theoretically important aspects, such as the salience-based guidance of visual search. The aim of this study was to develop a paced paper-and-pencil task for clinical use based on strong theoretical accounts that would assess salience-based visual search and that would meet the psychometric requirements for the assessment of attention. Participants were required to search and cancel targets of varying visual saliences as quickly and as accurately as possible during a predefined short period of time. The targets were intermixed with distractors. In agreement with theories of salience-based visual search, the results showed that the most salient targets were detected more easily than less salient targets. The task exhibited a quite acceptable test-retest reliability, and two construct validity studies showed that different scores involve different processes. This new task fully complies with the major theories of salience-based guidance of attention during visual search. It also meets the requirements of a plausible clinical task since its psychometric qualities are quite good. Preliminary normative data (n = 863) are presented for clinical use.     

Age-related changes in task-switching components: the role of task uncertainty

The present study examined age differences in executive functioning, using an externally cued task-switching paradigm. Two components of task switching were assessed: the ability to maintain and select among task sets (general switch costs) and the ability to switch between task sets (specific switch costs). In contrast to previous findings, we found large age-related differences in specific switch costs, especially when the number of potentially relevant task sets is increased from two to four. Age-related differences in general switch costs were absent when external task cues subserved executive processing in task switching. Generally, the findings suggest that age-related impairments in task-switching components vary as a function of task uncertainty, such as the presence of environmental prompts to behavior.     

A frequent misunderstanding associated with point biserial and phi coefficients

The label "Pearson r" is legitimately used both for the standard Pearson r calculated on continuous variables and for its other varieties in the form of the point biserial or the phi coefficient. This fact is often ignored by psychologists and psychiatrists.     

Sociodemographic correlates of assimilation of refugees from Kurdistan

Successful assimilation of refugees in their host country is an important prerequisite of psychological well-being. Refugees' satisfaction in the new country is one of key indicators of their assimilation. The satisfaction with their host country was assessed for 54 Kurdish refugees of mean age of 35.8 yr. (SD= 10.9) via an 8-item rating scale partly based on Cernovsky's Assimilation Scale. The 36 men and 18 women had resided in the host country for a mean of 4.5 yr. (SD=4.0). An overall score was calculated from ratings of satisfaction with personal safety, health, employment, food, financial security, social life, and entertainment. This overall score was unrelated to age, sex, and employment status. Those who emigrated at a younger age (r = -.28, p = .03) and those with lower education reported more satisfaction with their host country (r = -.28, p = .03) perhaps because they could more easily and rapidly re-establish social status comparable to what they had in their homeland than could older refugees from Kurdistan's higher educational strata.