Intrafamilial similarities and cross-generational differences in the earliest childhood memories of daughters,mothers, and grandmothers

This study aimed to examine how daughters, mothers, and grandmothers from the same families resembled each other and how these three generations differed from each other in narrating their earliest childhood memories. Fifty-nine triads from the same families filled out a memory questionnaire and were asked to narrate their earliest childhood memories. Results revealed both intrafamilial similarities and cross-generational difference on characteristics of triads’ earliest childhood memories. After earliest childhood memories were coded for memory characteristics, we measured intrafamilial similarities using intra-class correlation coefficients across three generations for each memory characteristic. Results revealed that the earliest childhood memories of members of the same family were significantly similar in terms of level of detail and volume. Although similar patterns among members of the same families were observed in self-related and other-related words, the other/self ratio did not display an intrafamilial similarity. We also measured cross-generational differences and found that daughters’ reported age of their earliest childhood memories was dated significantly earlier compared to their grandmothers. Results revealed predominant intrafamilial similarities among the members of the same family and cross-generational differences in terms of the age of the earliest childhood memory.     

Abortion in Islamic Ethics,and How it is Perceived in Turkey: A Secular,Muslim Country

Abortion is among the most widely discussed concepts of medical ethics. Since the well-known ethical theories have emerged from Western world, the position of Islamic ethics regarding main issues of medical ethics has been overlooked. Muslims constitute a considerable amount of world population. Turkish Republic is the only Muslim country ruled with secular democracy and one of the three Muslim countries where abortion is legalized. The first aim of this paper is to present discussions on abortion in Islamic ethics in the context of major ethical concepts; the legal status of the fetus, respect for life and the right not to be born. The second aim is to put forth Turkey’s present legislation about abortion in the context of Islamic ethical and religious aspects.     

Memory for product sounds: the effect of sound and label type

The (mnemonic) interactions between auditory, visual, and the semantic systems have been investigated using structurally complex auditory stimuli (i.e., product sounds). Six types of product sounds (air, alarm, cyclic, impact, liquid, mechanical) that vary in spectral-temporal structure were presented in four label type conditions: self-generated text, text, image, and pictogram. A memory paradigm that incorporated free recall, recognition, and matching tasks was employed. The results for the sound type suggest that the amount of spectral-temporal structure in a sound can be indicative for memory performance. Findings related to label type suggest that 'self' creates a strong bias for the retrieval and the recognition of sounds that were self-labeled; the density and the complexity of the visual information (i.e., pictograms) hinders the memory performance ('visual' overshadowing effect); and image labeling has an additive effect on the recall and matching tasks (dual coding). Thus, the findings suggest that the memory performances for product sounds are task-dependent.     

Are your cross‐ethnic friends ethnic and/or national group identifiers? The role of own and perceived cross‐ethnic friend's identities on outgroup attitudes and multiculturalism

We investigated how own ethnic and national identities and perceived ethnic and national identities of close cross‐ethnic friends may predict outgroup attitudes and multiculturalism among Turkish (majority status, N = 197) and Kurdish (minority status, N = 80) ethnic group members in Turkey (M_age = 21.12, SD = 2.59, 69.7% females, 30.3% males). Compared with Turkish participants, Kurdish participants were more asymmetrical in rating their cross‐ethnic friend's identities relative to their own, reporting higher ethnic identity, but lower national identity for themselves. Own ethnic identity was negatively associated with attitudes and multiculturalism, whereas own national identity was positively associated with only attitudes. Perceived cross‐ethnic friend's national identity was positively related to both outgroup attitudes and multiculturalism. Shared national identification (high levels of own and friend's national identity) led to most positive outgroup attitudes and highest support for multiculturalism. Findings were discussed in the light of social identity and common ingroup identity models.     

Evidence for indirect loss of significance effects on violent extremism: The potential mediating role of anomia

Psychological research suggests that violent extremism (e.g., terrorism) stems partly from existential motives, such as individuals’ need to achieve significance in life after experiencing failure, ostracism, or humiliation (Significance Quest Theory; SQT). Parallel investigations from sociology and criminology established similar findings by linking anomia—a syndrome including feelings of meaninglessness, powerlessness, isolation, self-estrangement, and normlessness—with violent behavior. In line with SQT, this contribution tested if anomia could mediate Loss of Significance effects on violent extremism. Accordingly, three studies conducted in France highlight indirect effects of exposure to discrimination on legitimation of political violence (Study 1, cross-sectional, minority population sample, N = 110), violent behavioral intentions (Study 2, experimental, undergraduate sample, N = 249), and support for ISIS fighters (Study 3, experimental, undergraduate sample, N = 221) through anomia. A subsequent study shows this indirect effect to be robust when controlled for Social Dominance Orientation and Political Extremism (Study 4, cross-sectional, undergraduate sample, N = 279). A final investigation re-analyzing data collected in Turkey highlights a reverse effect when the independent variable tapped into social inclusion (rather than exclusion; Study 5, cross-sectional, undergraduate sample, N = 321). This indirect effect was also robust to Political Extremism and Intolerance as control variables. These results support the usefulness of considering anomia as a proximal predictor of violent extremism in a SQT perspective.     

The evil eye effect: vertical pupils are perceived as more threatening

Popular culture has many examples of evil characters having vertically pupilled eyes. Humans have a long evolutionary history of rivalry with snakes and their visual systems were evolved to rapidly detect snakes and snake-related cues. Considering such evolutionary background, we hypothesised that humans would perceive vertical pupils, which are characteristics of ambush predators including some of the snakes, as threatening. In seven studies (aggregate N?=?1458) conducted on samples from American and Turkish samples, we found that vertical pupils are perceived as more threatening on both explicit (Study 1) and implicit level (Studies 2–7) and they are associated with physical, rather than social, threat (Study 4). Findings provided partial support regarding our hypothesis about the relevance of snake detection processes: Snake phobia, and not spider phobia, was found to be related to perceiving vertical pupils as threatening (Study 5), however an experimental manipulation of saliency of snakes rendered no significant effect (Study 6) and a comparison of fears of snakes, alligators, and cats did not support our prediction (Study 7). We discuss the potential implications and limitations of these novel findings.     

The Effect of Social Networks on the Quality of Political Thinking

In this article we investigate the effect of social networks on the quality of political thinking. First, the article introduces new social network concepts into the literature and develops the corresponding measures. Second, the article explores the quality of political thinking as a concept and develops its measures based on the volume and the causality of thoughts, and their integrative complexity. We make use of a survey to collect information on social networks and the experimental manipulation controls for the effect of policy frames. Our findings consistently show the significant negative impact of cohesive social networks on the quality of policy‐relevant thinking. We conclude that close‐knit social networks could create “social bubbles” that would limit how one communicates with others and reasons about politics.     

Functional and anatomical profile of visual motion impairments in stroke patients correlate with fMRI in normal subjects

We used six psychophysical tasks to measure sensitivity to different types of global motion in 45 healthy adults and in 57 stroke patients who had recovered from the initial results of the stroke, but a large subset of them had enduring deficits on selective visual motion perception tasks. The patients were divided into four groups on the basis of the location of their cortical lesion: occipito-temporal, occipito-parietal, rostro-dorsal parietal, or frontal-prefrontal. The six tasks were: direction discrimination, speed discrimination, motion coherence, motion discontinuity, two-dimensional form-from-motion, and motion coherence – radial. We found both qualitative and quantitative differences among the motion impairments in the four groups: patients with frontal lesions or occipito-temporal lesions were not impaired on any task. The other two groups had substantial impairments, most severe in the group with occipito-parietal damage. We also tested eight healthy control subjects on the same tasks while they were scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging. The BOLD signal provoked by the different tasks correlated well with the locus of the lesions that led to impairments among the different tasks. The results highlight the advantage of using psychophysical techniques and a variety of visual tasks with neurological patients to tease apart the contribution of different cortical areas to motion processing.