Contemplative Meditation and Neuroscience: Prospects for Mental Health

Numerous studies show that personal spirituality developed through prayer positively influences mental health. Phenomenological and neuroscientific studies of mindfulness, an Eastern meditative prayer form, reveal significant health benefits now yielding important insights useful for guiding treatment of psychological disorders. By contrast, and despite its practice for millennia, Christian meditation is largely unrepresented in studies of clinical efficacy. Resemblances between mindfulness and disciplinary acts in Christian meditation taken from the ancient Greek practice of askesis suggest that Christian meditation will prove similarly beneficial; furthermore, psychological and neuroscientific studies suggest that its retention of a dialogical and transcendent praxis will additionally benefit social and existential psychotherapy. This paper thus argues that study of contemplative meditation for its therapeutic potential is warranted.     

Reading sentences of uniform word length – II: Very rapid adaptation of the preferred saccade length

In the current study we investigated whether readers adjust their preferred saccade length (PSL) during reading on a trial-by-trial basis. The PSL refers to the distance between a saccade launch site and saccade target (i.e., the word center during reading) when participants neither undershoot nor overshoot this target (McConkie, Kerr, Reddix, & Zola in Vision Research, 28, 1107-1118, 1988). The tendency for saccades longer or shorter than the PSL to under or overshoot their target is referred to as the range error. Recent research by Cutter, Drieghe, and Liversedge (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2017) has shown that the PSL changes to be shorter when readers are presented with 30 consecutive sentences exclusively made of three-letter words, and longer when presented with 30 consecutive sentences exclusively made of five-letter words. We replicated and extended this work by this time presenting participants with these uniform sentences in an unblocked design. We found that adaptation still occurred across different sentence types despite participants only having one trial to adapt. Our analyses suggested that this effect was driven by the length of the words readers were making saccades away from, rather than the length of the words in the rest of the sentence. We propose an account of the range error in which readers use parafoveal word length information to estimate the length of a saccade between the center of two parafoveal words (termed the Centre-Based Saccade Length) prior to landing on the first of these words.     

Geographical offender profiling: Dragnet's applicability on a Brazilian sample

Even though geographical offender profiling is already widely used and researched in countries such as England, Canada, and United States, it is still severely overlooked in Brazil, as there are no researches on the subject using a Brazilian sample. Therefore, the present paper aims to start filling this gap by analysing the applicability of the geographical offender profiling and Dragnet on a sample of Brazilian serial killers. In order to achieve this objective, the authors collected data through police records on 15 serial killers that were active between June 2009 and June 2015, in the city of Campina Grande, Paraíba, Brazil. As a result, the circle hypothesis was confirmed, considering that 66.7% of the sample fell into the marauder category. Interestingly, the Dragnet's result accurately informed the area that contained the offender's base in the same cases in which the offender acted according to the marauder model. Also, other important correlations were found such as the influence of age, intelligence, resourcefulness, and method of approach on the distance travelled to commit a murder. Those results show that the geographical offender profiling can be effectively applied in Brazil and thus is a valid investigative tool to aid police officers in serial crimes investigations.