Second special section on religion and territorial politics in southern Europe

The three articles included in this second special section devoted to the interactions between religion and territorial politics in southern Europe continue the underlying research questions about the multiscalar interactions between religious mobilisation and policymaking, focusing on different denominations and scales of observations. The three articles point out three relevant elements for the analysis of religion and local politics. First, they show how contextualised exogenous factors influence the structures of opportunities for religions in the public and the political spheres. Second, they inchoately reveal the weakness of simplistic readings of the secularisation thesis. Third, they evidence the importance of a local and localised approach in analysing the relationships between religion and politics.     

Tool use in left brain damage and Alzheimer's disease: What about function and manipulation knowledge?

Tool use disorders are usually associated with difficulties in retrieving function and manipulation knowledge. Here, we investigate tool use (Real Tool Use, RTU), function (Functional Association, FA) and manipulation knowledge (Gesture Recognition, GR) in 17 left‐brain‐damaged (LBD) patients and 14 AD patients (Alzheimer disease). LBD group exhibited predicted deficit on RTU but not on FA and GR while AD patients showed deficits on GR and FA with preserved tool use skills. These findings question the role played by function and manipulation knowledge in actual tool use.     

Local pragmatics: reply to Mandy Simons

In response to Mandy Simons’ defence of a classical Gricean approach to pragmatic enrichment in terms of conversational implicature, I emphasize the following contrast. Conversational implicatures are generated by a global inference which uses as a premise the fact that the speaker has said that p, but only the triggering inference is global in cases of pragmatic enrichment. What generates the correct interpretation is a process of reconstrual, which locally maps the literal meaning of a constituent to a modulated meaning and composes that meaning with that of the other constituents. That process is constrained by Gricean considerations (in the broad sense) but that is true of all pragmatic aspects of interpretation, whether pre-propositional or post-propositional. Just as indexical resolution, though pragmatic and constrained by Gricean considerations, does not fit the two-stage model through which Grice accounts for conversational implicatures, so pragmatic modulation can’t be accounted for in terms of that model despite the fact that, like conversational implicatures and unlike indexical resolution, modulation is pragmatically rather than semantically triggered.     

Psychopathology and behavior problems in children and adolescents with Williams syndrome: Distinctive relationships with cognition

Several studies have documented the high prevalence of psychopathology and behavior problems in Williams syndrome (WS). However, the links between cognitive development and such symptoms need further clarification. Our study aims to expand current knowledge on levels of behavior problems and its links to cognition in a sample of Brazilian individuals with WS. A total of 25 children and adolescents with WS and their parents participated in this study. The participants’ IQs were assessed with the Wechsler Scales of Intelligence (for children or adults) and parental reports of psychopathology/behavior problems were collected using the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL). The presence of clinically significant attention problems was a main feature in our sample of children and adolescents with WS. In the children, higher IQ scores were found to be significantly associated with less externalizing problems, while in the adolescents cognitive abilities were found to be associated with less internalizing symptoms. These results provide further insight into the links between psychopathology and behavior problems and cognitive abilities in WS, and suggest the need to take age into consideration when analyzing such relationships.     

Divided attention enhances explicit but not implicit conceptual memory: an item-specific account of the attentional boost effect

The Attentional Boost Effect (ABE) refers to the counterintuitive finding that words encoded with to-be-responded targets in a divided-attention condition are remembered better than words encoded with distractors. Previous studies suggested that the ABE-related enhancement of verbal memory depends upon the activation of abstract lexical representations. In the present study, we extend this hypothesis by embedding it in the context of a broader perspective, which proposes that divided attention in the ABE paradigm affects item-specific, but not relational, processing. To this purpose, we examined the ABE in the matched tasks of category-cued recall (CCRT: explicit memory) and category exemplar generation (CEGT: implicit memory). In addition, study time was varied (500, 1500 or 4000?ms), to further determine whether the attentional boost manipulation could influence late-phase elaborative processing. In agreement with the predictions of the item-specific account, the results showed that exemplars encoded with targets were recalled better than exemplars encoded with distractors in the CCRT, but not in the CEGT. Moreover, performance in the CCRT increased with study time, whereas the size of the ABE-related enhancement tended to decrease, further confirming that this effect hinges upon early phase encoding processes.     

Gender,Sacrifices, and Variability in Commitment: A Daily Diary Study of Pregnant Heterosexual Cohabitors and their Partners

We use interdependence theory and the inertia model to examine how gender and daily relational sacrifices predict daily variability in relationship commitment across a week in 43 U.S. couples who are unmarried cohabitors expecting their first child together (total of 455 days of data). We examined three variants of daily relational sacrifices: frequency, ease, and awareness for both individuals and partners, and we tested for gender differences. Using an Actor Partner Interdependence Model (APIM), we found that both women and men reported lower variability in commitment when men were perceived as highly aware of the sacrifices made for them. Additionally, women experienced lower variability in commitment when their male partners reported engaging in easier sacrifices. In contrast, women reported higher variability in commitment when they reported greater frequency of sacrifices for their partner. The results can be of practical use for practitioners working with expectant cohabitors and their partners given the unique role gender plays relative to how sacrifices shape variability in daily commitment.     

Auditory attentional blink: masking the second target is necessary, delayed masking is sufficient.

When two target items (T1 and T2) are presented in rapid succession among fillers, processing T2 is often impaired. This phenomenon is known as the attentional blink (AB). Within the visual modality, this second-target deficit generally occurs only if T2 is masked by a trailing item. The current study was designed to examine whether masking of T2 also plays a critical role in the auditory AB. Results showed a reliable AB effect even when the item following T2 was replaced by silence. However, the AB deficit was abolished when T2 was the last presented stimulus. Our results suggest that, as in vision, T2 masking is necessary for the AB to take place in audition, but that masking is effective even when delayed, providing evidence that the phenomenon shares some functional mechanisms across sensory modalities.