The over-claiming technique: measuring self-enhancement independent of ability

Over-claiming is a concrete operalization of self-enhancement based on respondents' ratings of their knowledge of various persons, events, products, and so on. Because 20% of the items are nonexistent, responses can be analyzed with signal detection formulas to index both response bias (over-claiming) and accuracy (knowledge). Study 1 demonstrated convergence of over-claiming with alternative measures of self-enhancement but independence from cognitive ability. In Studies 2-3, the validity of the over-claiming index held even when respondents were (a) warned about the foils or (b) asked to fake good. Study 3 also showed the utility of the over-claiming index for diagnosing faking. In Study 4, the over-claiming technique was applied to the debate over the adaptive value of positive illusions.     

Neither public nor private religion: the Russian Orthodox Church in the public sphere of contemporary Russia

Cross-country comparative studies of religion (e.g. the Religion Monitor) do not cover some important issues regarding the religious situation in Russia. The problem of contemporary Russian religiosity is beyond individual religiosity or religiosity as a spiritual phenomenon. In Russia—one of the countries which experienced Communism as a period of enforced secularization, there are very few people who have had any religious socialization or who have the experience of belonging to the Christian Church or to any religion. The main point of this article is that what is happening with religion in post-Soviet Russia cannot be adequately explained by the concept of ‘public religion’ and the dichotomy of public vs. private religion, due to the practices of private religion manifesting at a very low level among the Russian population, despite the fact that a large number of Russians consider themselves to be Orthodox Christians. However, the representation of the Church in the public sphere has little to do with what concerns Russians who are in some way involved in parishes. As an alternative tool we propose to describe the religiosity of Russians through the methods of network analysis. Results of a content analysis of contemporary Russian and Soviet media, survey data of the Russian population, and data obtained in a network analysis of parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church are used for substantiating this conclusion.     

Distinct Pathways From Parental Beliefs and Practices to Children’s Numeric Skills

It is imperative to identify contextual factors contributing to the development of early math skills, considering their role in later academic achievement. To pursue this goal, the present study investigated the paths connecting parental beliefs and practices during the preschool years to children’s numeric skills at the end of kindergarten (N = 98). Results were consistent with theoretical predictions of specific relations between particular types of parental input and different aspects of number knowledge. Direct math learning activities mediated the relation between parental beliefs and children’s number identification skills. Daily activities involving quantitative components mediated the relation between parental beliefs and children’s numerical magnitude understanding. Both types of activities predicted arithmetic skills that integrate the basic aspects of symbolic number knowledge. These findings contribute to developmental theory by specifying how characteristics of children’s environments are related to particular aspects of their development, which is critical for informing intervention work to improve early math skills.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">StimulStat</Emphasis>: A lexical database for Russian

In this article, we present StimulStat – a lexical database for the Russian language in the form of a web application. The database contains more than 52,000 of the most frequent Russian lemmas and more than 1.7 million word forms derived from them. These lemmas and forms are characterized according to more than 70 properties that were demonstrated to be relevant for psycholinguistic research, including frequency, length, phonological and grammatical properties, orthographic and phonological neighborhood frequency and size, grammatical ambiguity, homonymy and polysemy. Some properties were retrieved from various dictionaries and are presented collectively in a searchable form for the first time, the others were computed specifically for the database. The database can be accessed freely at http://stimul.cognitivestudies.ru.     

Is desynchrony tolerance adaptable in the perceptual organization of speech?

Speech signal components that are desynchronized from the veridical temporal pattern lose intelligibility. In contrast, audiovisual presentations with large desynchrony in visible and audible speech streams are perceived without loss of integration. Under such conditions, the limit of desynchrony that permits audiovisual integration is also adaptable. A new project directly investigated the potential for adaptation to consistent desynchrony with unimodal auditory sine-wave speech. Listeners transcribed sentences that are highly intelligible, with veridical temporal properties. Desynchronized variants were created by leading or lagging the tone analog of the second formant relative to the rest of the tones composing the sentences, in 50-msec steps, ranging from 250-msec lead to 250-msec lag. In blocked trials, listeners only tolerated desynchronies <50 msec, and exhibited no gain in intelligibility to consistent desynchrony. Unimodal auditory and bimodal audiovisual forms of perceptual integration evidently exhibit different temporal characteristics, an indication of distinct perceptual functions.     

Sex differences in developmental trends of suicide ideation, plans, and attempts among European American adolescents

Although suicide ideation, plans, and attempts increase during adolescence, it remains unclear whether boys' and girls' risk for these outcomes peaks at different ages. We used longitudinal categorical data (never, once, 2+ times) from the Family Transitions Project (N = 1,248 rural European Americans, ages 11-19) to investigate whether yearly prevalence rates of adolescent suicidal episodes follow different patterns by sex. Multiple-group growth models revealed that peak levels of past-year ideation and plans occurred during mid adolescence for girls, but slowly increased through late adolescence for boys. We found that prevalence patterns for attempts were very similar for boys and girls, with both increasing through mid adolescence and then declining, although girls' risk declined slightly more rapidly. This information may help alert gatekeepers to developmental periods during which boys and girls are particularly vulnerable to suicide-related experiences, and also may help inform the timing of preventive efforts.     

Motivating minority older adults to exercise

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore with minority older adults their experience in the Senior Exercise Self-Efficacy Pilot Program (SESEP) and establish what aspects of the SESEP helped the participants engage in exercise and what decreased their willingness to exercise. A total of 148 older adults from 12 Senior Centers participated. The majority of the participants were African American (77%), and female (79%) and the average age was 72.9+/-8.0. Analysis of the semi-structured interviews revealed 36 codes which were categorized and reduced to 13 major themes. Eleven of these themes focused on factors that facilitated participation in exercise and two themes included factors that decreased willingness to participate in exercise. Findings support the use of the theory of self-efficacy to change behavior among minority older adults, and future research should focus on identifying culturally specific interventions that will strengthen these beliefs and thereby increase exercise behavior.     

Psychoanalysis and the Catholic Church in Italy: the role of Father Agostino Gemelli, 1925-1953

Agostino Gemelli, a Catholic priest, psychiatrist, administrator, and educator, was an important figure in the early history of psychoanalysis in Italy. He was one of the few establishment figures to grapple with Freud's ideas in Italy during the first half of the twentieth century, a period during which Italy, compared to the rest of Europe and to the United States, was relatively impermeable to psychoanalysis. One of the factors that contributed to this was the opposition of the powerful Catholic Church, which identified in psychoanalysis a challenge to its authority. The author argues that Father Gemelli's shifting positions about psychoanalysis between 1925 and 1953 reflected the exigencies of his historical circumstances. Gemelli was able to identify in psychoanalysis an integrated view of the human condition in stark opposition to the brutal reductionism of psychiatry in Italy at that time, but also encountered in it elements intolerable to the Church. Examining specifically what it is that Gemelli could accept of psychoanalysis, and what needed to be rejected, between 1925 and 1953, illustrates the particular challenge posed by psychoanalysis to Catholicism in Italy.