The semiotics of religion: Reflections from a semanticist

Robert Yelle's The Semiotics of Religion makes important contributions on two fronts. First, it offers powerful and compelling analyses of a considerable range of religious phenomena. Second, it advances significant theoretical and meta-theoretical frameworks that underpin those analyses. The theoretical framework is semiotic in its broad outlines, but the meta-theoretical one is more pragmatically oriented: i.e., don't be dogmatically committed to any particular theoretical doctrine, but rather use whatever resources help to shed more light on the subject matter. Despite that meta-theoretical positioning, several of Yelle's analyses remain stubbornly committed to a set of core doctrines that limit the extent of his investigations and lead to questions about the persuasiveness of certain details of his analyses. In other words, Yelle does not always follow his own meta-theoretical recommendations. The author diagnoses the source of those limiting assumptions and suggests some perspectives from within the philosophy of language more generally that might potentially serve to bring his method closer to his meta-theoretical ideals.     

Level of processing and age affect involuntary conceptual priming of weak but not strong associates

Memory for weak and strong semantic associates was compared in intentional associate-cued-recall and incidental free-association tests. This design yielded four conditions (weak/intentional, strong/intentional, weak/incidental, and strong/ incidental) on which younger and older adults were compared. Level of processing (LOP) and age effects occurred for the weak/intentional, strong/intentional, and weak/incidental conditions, but not for the strong/incidental condition. Because participants could not distinguish weak from strong associates during the memory tests, these results suggest that free-association priming was involuntary and was not contaminated by voluntary retrieval strategies. Instead, they suggest that encoding deficits related to shallower LOP and older age reduce involuntary free-association priming mainly for associates without cohesive preexperimental representations.     

Level of processing and the process-dissociation procedure: elusiveness of null effects on estimates of automatic retrieval

We describe two experiments that used the process-dissociation procedure to investigate the effects of level of processing on estimates of controlled and automatic retrieval processes in word-stem completion tasks. Despite our best endeavours, we found the null effect of level of processing on estimates of automatic retrieval reported by Toth, Reingold, and Jacoby (1994) elusive. Estimates of automatic retrieval were not independent of level of processing but inversely related to it. In part, the reason was that, following deeper levels of processing, instructions to exclude recollected words led to floor effects. But the inverse relationship persisted even when floor effects were avoided. Only participants who were not given strict instructions in the exclusion task-and who also qualified as lax responders based on answers in a structured post-test interview-showed no effect of level of processing on estimates of automatic retrieval. This null effect apparently occurred because these participants failed to exclude words that they in fact recollected from the study list. This finding violates the critical assumption that in this task participants exclude recollected words. The results are therefore paradoxical. Successful replication of the null effect occurred only under conditions that preclude the very use of the procedure. This paradox has important implications for views on how consciousness should be conceived in relation to memory.     

Forgetting in recognition memory with and without recollective experience

Retention interval was manipulated in two recognition-memory experiments in which subjects indicated when recognizing a word whether its recognition was accompanied by some recollective experience ("remember") or whether it was recognized on the basis of familiarity without any recollective experience ("know"). Experiment 1 showed that between 10 min and 1 week, "remember" responses declined sharply from an initially higher level, whereas "know" responses remained relatively unchanged. Experiment 2 showed that between 1 week and 6 months, both kinds of responses declined at a similar, gradual rate and that despite quite low levels of performance after 6 months, both kinds of responses still gave rise to accurate discrimination between target words and lures. These findings are discussed in relationship to current ideas about multiple memory systems and processing accounts of explicit and implicit measures of retention.     

Modality and phonological similarity effects in serial recall: Does one’s own voice play a role?

Results of two experiments showed that the modality effect in serial recall of word lists is sharply reduced by high interitem phonological similarity and that the extent of this reduction is much the same irrespective of whether the lists are spoken by the subject or the experimenter. These findings contradict an account of the modality effect recently proposed by Richardson (1979), but the data are entirely consistent with the belief that the effect originates in echoic memory.     

A feasibility study of the systematic evaluation of client outcomes in a voluntary sector counselling agency

There is an increasing demand on voluntary sector counselling agencies to evaluate the effectiveness of their work with clients. A pilot study was carried out in a voluntary sector counselling agency to assess the feasibility of adopting a well‐established evaluation system (CORE) designed to measure client outcomes. The paper describes the issues and complexities involved in introducing such a system, and explores the impact of the evaluation on counsellors, staff and users of the service. It is suggested that evaluation can play an important role within voluntary organisations in enabling counsellors and staff to reflect on their work.     

Feel good now or regret it later? The respective roles of affective attitudes and anticipated affective reactions for explaining health‐promoting and health risk behavioral intentions

Evidence supporting the incorporation of affective constructs, such as affective attitudes and anticipated regret, into theoretical models of health behavior has been mounting in recent years; however, the role of positive anticipated affective reactions (e.g., pride) has been largely unexplored. The purpose of the present investigation was to assess how affective attitudes and anticipated affective reactions (both pride and regret for performing a behavior or not) may provide distinct utility for understanding intentions to perform health‐promoting and health risk behaviors over and above cognitive attitudes and other established theoretical constructs from the theory of planned behavior (TPB). Participants (N = 210) were recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to complete a one‐time online battery assessing TPB and affective constructs. Self‐reported intentions served as the main outcome measure, and hierarchical linear modeling was used to examine the effects of TPB and affective constructs across behaviors. Controlling for TPB constructs, more positive affective attitudes and greater anticipated regret, but not anticipated pride, predicted intentions to engage in future health behaviors. Anticipated affective reactions contributed explanatory variance for intentions to perform health risk behaviors, but anticipated pride and regret were not associated with intentions to perform health risk behaviors. Contributions made via the inclusion of both positively and negatively valence anticipated affective reactions for both action and inaction (performing a behavior or not) across a range of health promoting and health risk behaviors are discussed, as well as implications for future intervention work.     

A microcomputer-based tracking task for examination of the spatial and temporal organization of perceptual motor skill

A microcomputer-based tracking task is described in detail. The program that controls this task was written in Pascal and 6502 assembler language and was designed to run on an Apple IIe computer. The program was designed to allow the experimenter to vary such parameters as the velocity of the stimulus signal. In addition, several indicants of performance are recorded simultaneously and are averaged over selected time intervals during each trial. The paper also illustrates the applications of this particular computer program in the study of motor control and learning.