AN AUGUSTINIAN PHILOSOPHER BETWEEN DUALISM AND MATERIALISM: ERNAN MCMULLIN ON HUMAN EMERGENCE

In claiming the independence of theology from science, Ernan McMullin nevertheless saw the danger of separating these disciplines on questions of mutual significance, as his accompanying article “Biology and the Theology of the Human” in this edition of Zygon shows. This paper analyzes McMullin's adoption of emergence as a qualified endorsement of a view that avoids the excesses of both dualism and materialism. I argue that McMullin's distinctive contribution is the conceptual clarification of emergence in the light of a precise understanding of matter, in light of Aristotelian metaphysics and Darwinian theory. As applied to human nature, McMullin retains an Augustinian outlook that sees spirit as emergent in the human body and which posits a credible biblical hermeneutic. I indicate briefly how McMullin's perspective could be fortified by a fuller natural theology.     

STUDENTS' APPLICATIONS OF SELF‐QUESTIONING STUDY TECHNIQUES: AN INVESTIGATION OF THEIR EFFICACY

This article describes the results of a study in which college developmental reading students were taught how to use study techniques which involved self‐questioning. Over a nine‐week period, subjects were trained in the application of SQ3R (Robinson, 1961), REAP (Eanet & Manzo, 1976), and self‐questioning (Andre & Anderson, 1978‐79) to content area prose materials. Quantitative results indicated that the SQ3R group significantly outperformed the REAP group on a posttest measure of comprehension. No other significant differences were found. In addition, a qualitative analysis was conducted to determine how well subjects processed information during the application of their specific study techniques. These findings indicated that: (1) structured study techniques may be more effective for aiding students' retention of content area prose materials; (2) students are more concerned with detail or factual information than “higher level” forms of information; and (3) instructors of college developmental reading students need to instruct their students as to how to generate questions at all levels of comprehension.     

Reactions to Others' Selfish Actions in the Absence of Tangible Consequences

This research assessed the role of perceived selfishness in people's reactions to events without tangible consequences. In Experiment 1, participants were assigned to complete a boring task by another person who gave a selfish, legitimizing, or exculpatory explanation for the decision. However, half of the participants knew that the other's decision was irrelevant and that they would complete the task regardless of the person's decision. In a second experiment, participants were told that the decision was irrelevant either before or after learning that the other person assigned them to do the boring task. Both studies showed that participants who received a selfish explanation responded strongly to the other person whether or not the person's decision had tangible consequences for them.     

Impacto del consenso de grupo y el apoyo social en el significado del estímulo: Mediación de la reestructuración cognitiva en la conformidad

RESUMEN

Los autores realizan tres experimentos para probar la explicación de la conformidad basada en la reestructuración cognitiva. La hipótesis es que las personas reinterpretan el significado del objeto estimular cuando se enfrentan a respuesta impopulares de un grupo unánime, y que éste cambio en el significado lleva a un cambio de la respuesta hacia la postura del grupo. En la discusión se concluye que, en conjunto, los resultados de los tres experimentos proporcionan un fuerte apoyo a la hipótesis de que la reestructuración cognitiva del estímulo es uno de los mecanismos que determina el grado de desplazamiento de una persona hacia la postura de un grupo unánime (es decir, conformidad). El trabajo finaliza exponiendo la sospecha de los autores de que una interpretación de reestructuración cognitiva puede aplicarse genéricamente a muchas situaciones de influencia social más allá del paradigma de conformidad examinado en sus estudios.     

Self-presentational persona: simultaneous management of multiple impressions

Most research on self-presentation has examined how people convey images of themselves on only 1 or 2 dimensions at a time. In everyday interactions, however, people often manage their impressions on several image-relevant dimensions simultaneously. By examining people's self-presentations to several targets across multiple dimensions, these 2 studies offer new insights into the nature of self-presentation and provide a novel paradigm for studying impression management. Results showed that most people rely on a relatively small number of basic self-presentational personas in which they convey particular profiles of impressions as a set and that these personas reflect both normative influences to project images that are appropriate to a particular target and distinctive influences by which people put an idiosyncratic spin on these normative images. Furthermore, although people's self-presentational profiles correlate moderately with their self-views, they tailor their public images to specific targets. The degree to which participants' self-presentations were normative and distinctive, as well as the extent to which they reflected their own self-views, were moderated by individual differences in agreeableness, self-esteem, authenticity, and Machiavellianism.     

Neural responses to meaningless pseudosigns: evidence for sign-based phonetic processing in superior temporal cortex

To identify neural regions that automatically respond to linguistically structured, but meaningless manual gestures, 14 deaf native users of American Sign Language (ASL) and 14 hearing non-signers passively viewed pseudosigns (possible but non-existent ASL signs) and non-iconic ASL signs, in addition to a fixation baseline. For the contrast between pseudosigns and baseline, greater activation was observed in left posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS), but not in left inferior frontal gyrus (BA 44/45), for deaf signers compared to hearing non-signers, based on VOI analyses. We hypothesize that left STS is more engaged for signers because this region becomes tuned to human body movements that conform the phonological constraints of sign language. For deaf signers, the contrast between pseudosigns and known ASL signs revealed increased activation for pseudosigns in left posterior superior temporal gyrus (STG) and in left inferior frontal cortex, but no regions were found to be more engaged for known signs than for pseudosigns. This contrast revealed no significant differences in activation for hearing non-signers. We hypothesize that left STG is involved in recognizing linguistic phonetic units within a dynamic visual or auditory signal, such that less familiar structural combinations produce increased neural activation in this region for both pseudosigns and pseudowords.     

Personality and the prediction of team performance

Although much is known about personality and individuals' job performance, only a few studies have considered the effects of team‐level personality on team performance. Existing research examining the effects of personality on team performance has found that, of the Big Five factors of personality, Conscientiousness is often the most important predictor. Accordingly, we investigated the criterion validity of lower‐level Conscientiousness traits to determine whether any one trait is particularly predictive of team performance. In addition to Conscientiousness, we examined the criterion validity of the other Big Five personality factors. We found that Conscientiousness and its facets predicted team performance. Agreeableness, Extraversion and Neuroticism were not predictive of team performance, whereas Openness had a modest negative relation with team performance. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A functional neuroimaging analysis of the Trail Making Test-B: implications for clinical application

Recent progress has been made using fMRI as a clinical assessment tool, often employing analogues of traditional "paper and pencil" tests. The Trail Making Test (TMT), popular for years as a neuropsychological exam, has been largely ignored in the realm of neuroimaging, most likely because its physical format and administration does not lend itself to straightforward adaptation as an fMRI paradigm. Likewise, there is relatively more ambiguity about the neural systems associated with this test than many other tests of comparable clinical use. In this study, we describe an fMRI version of Trail Making Test-B (TMTB) that maintains the core functionality of the TMT while optimizing its use for both research and clinical settings. Subjects (N=32) were administered the Functional Trail Making Test-B (f-TMTB). Brain region activations elicited by the f-TMTB were consistent with expectations given by prior TMT neurophysiological studies, including significant activations in the ventral and dorsal visual pathways and the medial pre-supplementary motor area. The f-TMTB was further evaluated for concurrent validity with the traditional TMTB using an additional sample of control subjects (N=100). Together, these results support the f-TMTB as a viable neuroimaging adaptation of the TMT that is optimized to evoke maximally robust fMRI activation with minimal time and equipment requirements.     

CHRM2, parental monitoring, and adolescent externalizing behavior: evidence for gene-environment interaction

Psychologists, with their long-standing tradition of studying mechanistic processes, can make important contributions to further characterizing the risk associated with genes identified as influencing risk for psychiatric disorders. We report one such effort with respect to CHRM2, which codes for the cholinergic muscarinic 2 receptor and was of interest originally for its association with alcohol dependence. We tested for association between CHRM2 and prospectively measured externalizing behavior in a longitudinal, community-based sample of adolescents, as well as for moderation of this association by parental monitoring. We found evidence for an interaction in which the association between the genotype and externalizing behavior was stronger in environments with lower parental monitoring. There was also suggestion of a crossover effect, in which the genotype associated with the highest levels of externalizing behavior under low parental monitoring had the lowest levels of externalizing behavior at the extreme high end of parental monitoring. The difficulties involved in distinguishing mechanisms of gene-environment interaction are discussed.