Religious Ethics and the Environment

This essay discusses three recent books which each offer an integrative account of religious ethics and the environment. Religious environmental ethics is an area of inquiry within the larger field of religion and ecology. After a narrative that contextualizes the development of religious environmental ethics in relation to the environmental social movement, I describe the formation of the field including its focus on worldview, the “cosmological turn,” and its engagement with science, the “cosmic turn.” Elizabeth Johnson exemplifies the cosmic turn by developing a Christian theology of life in nature which explicitly accepts Darwin's theory of evolution. Willis Jenkins advocates a prophetic pragmatism and critiques a focus on worldview that is abstracted from practice and defers moral responsibility. Larry Rasmussen joins analysis of worldview with reflection on cross‐cultural resources for “anticipatory communities” of moral formation to catalyze change. I argue with Rasmussen that religious environmental ethics needs multiple approaches and should allow room for methodological pluralism.     

Self-Determination in Intervention With Battered Arab Women in Community Health Clinics in Israel

Many abused women from patriarchal collectivistic societies that are subjected to social control seek help in community health clinics. The article is based on a qualitative study, which consisted of 24 interviews with 12 abused Israeli Arab women who sought the help of social workers in community health clinics. A central theme that emerged from the interviews was the women’s wish to maintain their self-determination in retaining the power to determine the boundaries of the intervention within the professional relationship. The discussion focuses on the dialectical consequences of maintaining the women’s self-determination—empowering them, on one hand, and limiting them, on the other.     

Investigating cognitive transfer within the framework of music practice: genetic pleiotropy rather than causality

The idea of far transfer effects in the cognitive sciences has received much attention in recent years. One domain where far transfer effects have frequently been reported is music education, with the prevailing idea that music practice entails an increase in cognitive ability (IQ). While cross‐sectional studies consistently find significant associations between music practice and IQ, randomized controlled trials, however, report mixed results. An alternative to the hypothesis of cognitive transfer effects is that some underlying factors, such as shared genes, influence practice behaviour and IQ causing associations on the phenotypic level. Here we explored the hypothesis of far transfer within the framework of music practice. A co‐twin control design combined with classical twin‐modelling based on a sample of more than 10,500 twins was used to explore causal associations between music practice and IQ as well as underlying genetic and environmental influences. As expected, phenotypic associations were moderate (r = 0.11 and r = 0.10 for males and females, respectively). However, the relationship disappeared when controlling for genetic and shared environmental influences using the co‐twin control method, indicating that a highly practiced twin did not have higher IQ than the untrained co‐twin. In line with that finding, the relationship between practice and IQ was mostly due to shared genetic influences. Findings strongly suggest that associations between music practice and IQ in the general population are non‐causal in nature. The implications of the present findings for research on plasticity, modularity, and transfer are discussed.     

Behavioral Genetics, Health, and Aging

A recurring observation from studies of health in the elderly is the pervasiveness of individual differences. For many health-related endpoints, total variation appears to increase across age group; however, few longitudinal studies have reported whether these age differences reflect true age-related changes. There are a growing number of twin studies of aging that provide some insight, at least cross-sectionally, into the nature of individual differences in health. Increases in total variance most often reflect increases in environmental sources of variance. Covariation among traits reflects both genetic and environmental mediation, dependent on the sex of the sample and the measures of interest. Co-twin control approaches have been successful in exploring the role of environmental influences as risk factors for poor health. The most serious limitation to these studies is the lack of longitudinal information to disentangle survival and selection effects from aging.     

Recent trends in cultural theories

Multiculturalism is probably the most important and most misunderstood psychological construct of this decade. This article identifies specific and uniquely valuable contributions of a multicultural perspective and demonstrates the importance of multicultural awareness training as a primary prevention strategy, directed toward preventing multicultural misunderstandings before they happen by training mental health providers to become more aware of their culturally learned assumptions and the contrasting cultural contexts of their clients. The development of recent multicultural theories will be reviewed to demonstrate how the definition of cultural theories have changed over time toward a broader and more complicated perspective. Finally practical applications of culture-centered theories will be reviewed through the presentation of a Cultural Grid for separating behaviors from expectations in each cultural context.     

Does Cooperation in the Laboratory Reflect the Operation of a Broad Trait?

The Dictator Game, a face valid measure of altruism, and the Trust Game, a face valid measure of trust and trustworthiness, are among the most widely used behavioural measures in human cooperation research. Researchers have observed considerable covariation among these and other economic games, leading them to assert that there exists a general human propensity to cooperate that varies in strength across individuals and manifests itself across a variety of social settings. To formalize this hypothesis, we created an S‐1 bifactor model using 276 participants' Dictator Game and Trust Game decisions. The general factor had significant, moderate associations with self‐reported and peer‐reported altruism, trust, and trustworthiness. Thus, the positive covariation among economic games is not reducible to the games' shared situational features. Two hundred participants returned for a second session. The general factor based on Dictator Game and Trust Game decisions from this session did not significantly predict self‐reported and peer‐reported cooperation, suggesting that experience with economic games causes them to measure different traits from those that are reflected in self‐assessments and peer‐assessments of cooperativeness. © 2018 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Porn Sex Versus Real Sex: How Sexually Explicit Material Shapes Our Understanding of Sexual Anatomy,Physiology, and Behaviour

Given that consumption of sexually explicit material (SEM) and sexual behaviour are inextricably linked, the purpose of this study was to determine whether the frequency of SEM consumption predicts knowledge of sexual human anatomy, physiology, and typically practiced sexual behaviour. A secondary purpose was to investigate self-perceived effects of SEM consumption and whether participants report SEM as a positive or negative contributor to various aspects of life. Using a modified version of the Pornography Consumption Questionnaire and the Falsification Anatomy Questionnaire, we determined that contrary to expectations, frequency of SEM exposure did not contribute to inaccurate knowledge of sexual anatomy, physiology, and behaviour. Rather, the opposite relationship was found. However, in concert with previous literature, participants reported greater positive self-perceived effects of SEM consumption than negative effects.