‘Be careful,or you'll act corruptly and make a carved image for yourselves,in the form of a figure,the likeness male or female’ (Deut. 4:16): A commentary on Norenzayan's Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict (2013)

Norenzayan's book is an ambitious attempt to integrate recent research from behavioral economics and social psychology, particularly priming studies, into a book about religion. If the account is meant as an explanation of religion or big religion, it does not succeed. If it has more modest aims, namely to describe how surveillance institutions, of which big religion is one important class, can sometimes lead to cooperation and conflict, then it is quite successful in doing so.     

Neighborhood Crime and School Climate as Predictors of Elementary School Academic Quality: A Cross-Lagged Panel Analysis

Past research has found negative relationships between neighborhood structural disadvantage and students’ academic outcomes. Comparatively little work has evaluated the associations between characteristics of neighborhoods and schools themselves. This study explored the longitudinal, reciprocal relationships between neighborhood crime and school-level academic achievement within 500 urban schools. Results revealed that higher neighborhood crime (and particularly violent crime) predicted decreases in school academic achievement across time. School climate emerged as one possible mechanism within this relationship, with higher neighborhood crime predicting decreases in socioemotional learning and safety, but not academic rigor. All three dimensions of school climate were predictive of changes in academic achievement. Although this research supports a primarily unidirectional hypothesis of neighborhoods’ impacts on embedded settings, additional work is needed to understand these relationships using additional conceptualizations of neighborhood climate.     

Recent frege studies

MICHAEL D. RESNIK, Frege and the philosophy of mathematics. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1980. 244 pp. $16.50.

HANS D. SLUGA, Gottlob Frege. London, Boston and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980. xi + 203 pp. £ 12.95.     

Categoricity Theorems and Conceptions of Set

Two models of second-order ZFC need not be isomorphic to each other, but at least one is isomorphic to an initial segment of the other. The situation is subtler for impure set theory, but Vann McGee has recently proved a categoricity result for second-order ZFCU plus the axiom that the urelements form a set. Two models of this theory with the same universe of discourse need not be isomorphic to each other, but the pure sets of one are isomorphic to the pure sets of the other.This paper argues that similar results obtain for considerably weaker second-order axiomatizations of impure set theory that are in line with two different conceptions of set, the iterative conception and the limitation of size doctrine.     

Mental maps in memory retrieval and comprehension.

How do people use spatial information stored in maps? This question has been explored in a number of domains, such as memory and language comprehension, with differing results. Some studies of how experimentally learned maps are organised in memory, using primed recognition, have found temporal information to influence mental map organisation. In contrast, studies of narrative comprehension, using probe identification and anaphoric reading times, have observed spatial effects. This study combines these two research traditions and shows that the organisation observed in long-term memory differs from the organisation in narrative comprehension, even when both tasks refer to the same map.     

The Role of School-based Group Mentoring in Promoting Resilience among Vulnerable High School Students

This study examined the role of participation in a year-long school-based group mentoring program, Project Arrive (PA), on increasing resilience during the first year of high school among students identified as being at high risk for school dropout. Participants were 114, ninth grade students taking part in one of 32 PA mentoring groups, and 71 statistically matched comparison students (53% male, 75% eligible for free/reduced-price lunch, 62% Latinx). Using a propensity score with inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW) to reduce selection bias, and a multi-level model to account for non-independence of data within mentoring groups, we examined changes from pre-test to program exit on seven external resilience resources (developmental supports and opportunities) and four internal resilience assets (personal strengths). At program exit, PA participants had higher adjusted means than comparisons on six external resources, including school support, school belonging, school meaningful participation, peer caring relationships, prosocial peers, and home meaningful participation. PA participants also had higher adjusted means on one internal asset, problem solving. Results point to the promise of group mentoring as an approach for increasing resilience among academically vulnerable adolescents.     

Development of species identification in ducklings: II. Experimental prevention of perceptual deficit caused by embryonic auditory deprivation.

Devocalized-isolated ducklings are relatively insensitive to the higher frequencies in their species' maternal call 24 hr after hatching. To assess the efficacy of various sounds in preventing this high-frequency perceptual deficit, devocalized-isolated embryos were exposed to one of three calls and tested with normal versus high-frequency attenuated maternal calls 24 hr after hatching. The embryonic vocalization (contact-contentment call) that most closely matched the region of the devocalized ducklings' greatest insensitivity (1,500-2,500 Hz) proved most efficacious in remedying (preventing) the high-frequency perceptual deficit. Exposure to the embryonic alarm-distress call was somewhat effective, whereas exposure to low-frequency white noise was not effective at all. This finding suggests that the normal development of innate behavior is partially dependent upon prior experience as well as upon intrinsic processes of neural maturation. Although normally occurring embryonic auditory experience does not induce the preference for the maternal call in this species, such experience does contribute to the sharpness of the discriminative basis of the preference 24 hr after hatching.