Religion and mental health among Hindu young people in England

The aim of this study was to explore the relationship between mental health and attitude toward their religious tradition among a sample of 330 young people attending the Hindu Youth Festival in London. The participants completed the Santosh–Francis Scale of Attitude toward Hinduism together with the abbreviated form of the Revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire which provides measures of neuroticism and psychoticism. The data indicated that a more positive attitude toward Hinduism was associated with lower psychoticism scores but unrelated to neuroticism scores. There is no evidence, therefore, to associate higher levels of religiosity with poorer mental health among young people within the Hindu community.     

The development of the Meaning in Life Index (MILI) and its relationship with personality and religious behaviours and beliefs among UK undergraduate students

The scales available for assessing meaning in life appear to be confounded with several related constructs, including purpose in life, satisfaction with life, and goal-directed behaviour. The Meaning in Life Index (MILI), a new instrument devised as a specific measure of meaning in life, was developed from responses to a pool of 22 items rated by a sample of 501 undergraduate students in Wales. The nine-item scale demonstrated sufficient face validity, internal consistency, and scale reliability to commend the instrument for future use. With respect to personality, the MILI scores were most strongly predicted by neuroticism (negatively), and less strongly by extraversion (positively) and psychoticism (negatively). With respect to several religious behavioural variables, those who attended church at least weekly returned significantly higher MILI scores than those who attended church less frequently. Intrinsic religiosity was the only orientation to be significantly associated with the MILI scale scores, although the magnitude of the association was smaller than anticipated. These results suggest that meaning in life is associated more strongly with individual differences in personality than with specific religious behaviours and attitudes. The implications of these results are discussed in terms of individual's personal values and attitudes that might underlie their experience of a meaning in life.     

Repetition priming within and between languages in semantic classification of concrete and abstract words

Although concrete nouns are generally agreed to have shared core conceptual representations across languages in bilinguals, it has been proposed that abstract nouns have separate representations or share fewer semantic components. Conceptual repetition priming methodology was used to evaluate whether translation equivalents of abstract nouns have shared conceptual representations and compare the degree of conceptual overlap for concrete and abstract nouns. Here 72 Spanish–English bilinguals made concrete–abstract decisions on English and Spanish nouns. Both concrete and abstract nouns elicited substantial between-language priming and these effects were of equivalent size, indicating that translation equivalents of both concrete and abstract nouns have shared conceptual representations and that abstract words do not share fewer components. The between-language priming effects and their attenuation relative to within-language priming indicate that the within-language effect is based on facilitation of both word comprehension and semantic decision processes.     

When the Sales Manager is a Woman: An Exploration into the Relationship Between Salespeople's Gender and their Responses to Leadership Styles

This paper reports the results of an exploratory study comparing the responsiveness of male versus female salespersons to differing leadership styles of female sales managers. Responding triads, made up of one female sales manager and two subordinate salespersons (one male and one female), completed questionnaires assessing the managers' leadership style, the salespersons' satisfaction with supervision, and the salespersons' selling performance. Partial correlational analysis revealed gender differences in the way satisfaction with supervision and performance effectiveness related to the female managers' leadership styles. Male sales force members were most responsive to leaders who displayed individualized consideration and used a transactional style (contingent rewards or management by exception). Saleswomen preferred charismatic leaders and those who were capable of intellectually stimulating methods. The results are discussed and recommendations made for future research.     

Rape,money, and the psychology of taboo

Policy and legal decision making sometimes requires difficult assessments about how to translate the harm of sexual assault into dollar amounts. A web‐based experiment (n = 743) was designed to test the psychology of taboo theory in this important context. The experiment included two unique features. First, subjects were randomly assigned to assess vignettes in either a dollar metric, a 7‐point harm scale metric, or a years‐in‐jail metric. Second, subjects were given the opportunity, but not required, to provide a comment when making their assessment. Assignment to the dollar metric treatment group resulted in subjects freely expressing significantly more constitutive incommensurability comments. The effect was most pronounced when the level of sexual assault in the vignette was greatest.     

Bible Study and Character

Abstract

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Three types of freedom 1

Freedom interpreted as absence of restraints, as such, is a vacuous ideal. It requires reference to some setting and course of action in order to distinguish those restraints that block human effort from those, say, that support it. More broadly, this notion of freedom has little meaning and less value without some external criterion for evaluating human action and its conditions. Many thinkers have argued that the. criterion must be the absolute Truth — truth that is unconditioned, indubitable, and imperative. They have often argued that there is no freedom of error, and that the many persons who do not know such Truth are free only in obeying the few who do. This concept of freedom is often regarded as intolerable. A third possibility is to interpret freedom as a name for a range of significant alternatives for thought and action. Freedom, here, is compatible with truth interpreted in terms of the process of inquiry, rather than as substantive possession. It is a necessary condition for judging which restraints are real obstacles and which courses of action may be harmless, legitimate or good. The third meaning, especially, is illustrated with reference to the freedoms of utterance (expression) and speech (communication).     

A generalized linear factor model approach to the hierarchical framework for responses and response times

We show how the hierarchical model for responses and response times as developed by van der Linden (2007), Fox, Klein Entink, and van der Linden (2007), Klein Entink, Fox, and van der Linden (2009), and Glas and van der Linden (2010) can be simplified to a generalized linear factor model with only the mild restriction that there is no hierarchical model at the item side. This result is valuable as it enables all well‐developed modelling tools and extensions that come with these methods. We show that the restriction we impose on the hierarchical model does not influence parameter recovery under realistic circumstances. In addition, we present two illustrative real data analyses to demonstrate the practical benefits of our approach.