Feeling Good,but Lacking Autonomy: Closed-Mindedness on Social and Moral Issues in New Religious Movements

According to previous research, New Religious Movements (NRMs) seem to have a positive effect on the mental health of members who join NRMs with some previous affective, cognitive or other vulnerabilities. The present study investigates the other, less positive, side of the psychology of NRMs, i.e. elements that may be an obstacle to optimal development, such as rigidity and low autonomy. In comparison to non-NRM members, members of various NRMs in Belgium (N = 120) were found to be low in quest religious orientation (Altemeyer and Hunsberger, Int J Psychol Religion 2:113–133, 1992), to privilege conservation values to the detriment of openness to change values (Schwartz, Advances in experimental social psychology (vol 25, pp. 1–65). Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1992), to show submissiveness to authority in hypothetical situations (projective measure), and to highly moralize judgments of transgression relative to conventional domains (Turiel, The development of social knowledge: Morality and social convention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Discussion points out the idea that rigidity and restriction of autonomy may be the price to be paid for the structuring role NRMs play with regard to previous vulnerabilities.

The limits of newborn's grasping to detect texture in a cross-modal transfer task

Three experiments were conducted to investigate human newborns’ ability to perceive texture property tactually, either in a cross-modal transfer task or in an intra-modal tactual discrimination task. In Experiment 1, newborns failed to tactually recognize the texture (smooth vs. granular) of flat objects that they had previously seen, when they held flat objects. This failure was mainly due to a lack of intra-modal tactual discrimination between the two objects (Experiment 2). In contrast, Experiment 3 showed that newborns were able to tactually recognize the texture of previously seen surfaces when they held volumetric objects. Taken together, the results suggest that cross-modal transfer of texture from vision to touch stem from a peripheral mechanism, not a central mechanism. Grasping only allows newborns to perceive the texture of volumetric but not flat objects. As a consequence, this study reveals the limits of newborns’ grasping to detect and process information about texture. The results also suggest that more mature exploratory procedures, such as the “lateral motion” procedure exhibited by adults [Lederman, S. J., & Klatzky, R. (1987). Hand movements: A window into haptic object recognition. Cognitive Psychology, 19, 342–368], might be necessary for detecting the texture of flat objects in newborn infants.     

Making disjunctions exclusive

This work examines how people interpret the sentential connective "or", which can be viewed either inclusively (A or B or both) or exclusively (A or B but not both). Following up on prior work concerning quantifiers (Bott & Noveck, 2004; Noveck, 2001; Noveck & Posada, 2003), which shows that the common pragmatic interpretation of "some", some but not all, is conveyed as part of an effortful step, we investigate how extra effort applied to disjunctive statements leads to a pragmatic interpretation of "or", or but not both. Experiment 1 compelled participants to wait for three seconds before answering, hence giving them the opportunity to process the utterance more deeply. Experiments 2 and 3 emphasized "or", either by visual means ("OR") or by prosodic means (contrastive stress) as another way to encourage participants to apply more effort. Following a relevance-theoretic line of argument, we hypothesized that conditions encouraging more processing effort would give rise to more pragmatic inferences and hence to more exclusive interpretations of the disjunction. This prediction was confirmed in the three experiments.     

Effects of aging on absolute identification of duration

Experiments to examine the effects of aging on the ability to identify temporal durations in an absolute identification task are reported. In Experiment 1, older adults were worse than younger adults in identifying a tone's position within a series of 6 tones of varied durations. In Experiment 2, participants were required to identify a tone's position in 9 tones of varied durations. Older adults' performance was again worse than that of younger adults; moreover, they showed a qualitatively different pattern of errors than younger adults. In Experiment 3, in which the tones varied in pitch, the performance of older adults was worse than that of younger adults, but the error patterns of the 2 groups were similar. The results suggest that older adults have distorted memory representations for durations but not for pitch.     

A timing-specific memory distortion effect in young children

It has been suggested that there are systematic distortions in children's memory for temporal durations, such that children's memory is not just less accurate than that of adults but qualitatively different. Experiment 1 replicated the memory distortion effect by demonstrating developmental change in the tendency to confuse a reference duration with one that is shorter rather than longer than it. When the long-term memory demands of the task were reduced by providing reminders of the reference duration on every trial, there were no such qualitative changes in error patterns (Experiment 2). Further evidence for developmental changes in memory distortion was found in the temporal generalization task of Experiment 3, in which stimuli were spaced logarithmically rather than linearly. In Experiment 4, a similar distortion pattern was absent in a task in which children made judgments about the pitch rather than the duration of stimuli, suggesting the effect may be specific to time estimation.     

Knowing when to hold ‘em: regret and the relation between missed opportunities and risk taking in children,adolescents and adults

Regret over missed opportunities leads adults to take more risks. Given recent evidence that the ability to experience regret impacts decisions made by 6-year-olds, and pronounced interest in the antecedents to risk taking in adolescence, we investigated the age at which a relationship between missed opportunities and risky decision-making emerges, and whether that relationship changes at different points in development. Six- and 8-year-olds, adolescents and adults completed a sequential risky decision-making task on which information about missed opportunities was available. Children also completed a task designed to measure their ability to report regret when explicitly prompted to do so. The relationship between missed opportunities and risky decision-making did not emerge until 8 years, at which age it was associated with the ability to explicitly report regret, and was stronger in adults than in adolescents. These novel results highlight the potential importance of the ability to experience regret in children and adolescents’ risky decision-making.     

Perception of object shape and texture in human newborns: evidence from cross-modal transfer tasks

The present research investigates newborn infants' perceptions of the shape and texture of objects through studies of the bi-directionality of cross-modal transfer between vision and touch. Using an intersensory procedure, four experiments were performed in newborns to study their ability to transfer shape and texture information from vision to touch and from touch to vision. The results showed that cross-modal transfer of shape is not bi-directional at birth. Newborns visually recognized a shape previously held but they failed to tactually recognize a shape previously seen. In contrast, a bi-directional cross-modal transfer of texture was observed. Taken together, the results suggest that newborn infants, like older children and adults, gather information differently in the visual and tactile modes, for different object properties. The findings provide evidence for continuity in the development of mechanisms for perceiving object properties.