MENTAL WELL‐BEING,NEUROSCIENCE, AND RELIGION: CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE SCIENCE AND RELIGION FORUM

The Science and Religion Forum (SRF) seeks to be the premier organization promoting the discussion between science and religion in the United Kingdom. Each year, the SRF holds a conference tackling a topical issue, and in 2017 focused on mental well‐being, neuroscience, and religion. This article introduces the thematic section which is made up of five papers from that conference. As a new field within the science and religion academy, these articles are both wide‐ranging and detailed. This introductory article locates this section within the academy and argues that its place is not only valid but vital, given the increase of mental health problems and the need for medicine, church, and society to answer this problem and present ways to help.     

Limiting Time for Responding Enhances Behavior Corresponding to the Merits of Compliance Appeals: Refutations of Heuristic‐Cue Theory in Service and Consumer Settings

Scarcity has been widely assumed (e.g., Cialdini, 1993) to function as a cue and thereby hinder evaluative scrutiny of compliance‐gaining requests (appeals). In contrast, liberalized commodity theory (Brock & Brannon, 1992) postulated that scarcity should augment evaluative scrutiny of requests and thereby enhance behavioral correspondence to the merits of requests. In natural‐setting tests, 143 telephone operators and 305 fast‐food customers complied more with a request in response to strong than to weak reasons and did so especially when the request was accompanied by scarcity information, operationalized as a time restriction on responding. Thus, restriction did not function as a cue. Rather, in both service and consumer settings, scarcity enhanced behavior that corresponded to the merits of requests. Compliance theorists and practitioners should reconsider the cue claim for compliance appeals and should weigh the implications of bidirectional responding to compliance appeals.     

Cultural Variations in Reasons for Advice Seeking

Five studies examined cultural differences in reasons for advice‐seeking behaviors. Content analyses in Study 1A and self‐ratings in Study 1B consistently revealed that Euro‐Canadians were more likely than East Asians (mainly Chinese) to seek advice for informational reasons, whereas East Asians were more likely than Euro‐Canadians to seek advice for relational reasons. Study 2A showed that Chinese displayed a higher level of relationship concern than Euro‐Canadians in deciding from whom to seek advice in a decision dilemma. Study 2B found that, although Chinese and Euro‐Canadians did not differ from each other on willingness to pay for informational advice, Chinese were willing to pay more for building a relationship with the advisor through advice seeking than Euro‐Canadians were. Study 3 explored how the advice giver might perceive an advice seeker in terms of their competence and the closeness of their relationship after advice was sought for various reasons. We found that relationally oriented advice seeking increased the perceived competence of the advice seeker among Chinese more than among Euro‐Canadians. Information‐oriented advice seeking increased the perceived closeness between the advice seeker and advice giver among Chinese more than among Euro‐Canadians. Implications for other aspects of advice exchange are discussed. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Emotional exhaustion and reduced self-efficacy: The mediating role of deep and surface learning strategies

Motivation and Emotion - Integrating conservation of resources theory and students’ approaches to learning, we consider the relationship between emotional exhaustion and self-efficacy as a...     

Anxiety management: Developing effective strategies

This paper focuses on three aspects of generalised anxiety; anxious cognitions, avoidance behaviour and the efforts made to cope with symptoms. It presents information from structured interviews and informal observations which were collected during a clinical trial of anxiety management for generalised anxiety disorder. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for future modifications of anxiety management.     

Identification and ratings of caricatures: Implications for mental representations of faces

S. Brennan (1985, Leonardo, 18, 170–178) has developed a computer-implemented caricature generator based on a holistic theory of caricature. A face is represented by 37 lines, based on a fixed set of 169 points. Caricatures are produced by exaggerating all metric differences between a face and a norm. Anticaricatures can be created by reducing all the differences between a face and a norm. Caricatures of familiar faces were identified more quickly than veridical line drawings, which were identified more quickly than anticaricatures. There was no difference in identification accuracy for the three types of representation. The best likeness was considered to be a caricature. We discuss the implications of these results for how faces are mentally represented. The results are consistent with a holistic theory of encoding in which distinctive aspects of a face are represented by comparison with a norm. We suggest that this theory may be appropriate for classes of visual stimuli, other than faces, whose members share a configuration definable by a fixed set of points.     

Subjective cognitive effort: a model of states, traits, and time

Self-regulation theories were used to develop a dynamic model of the determinants of subjective cognitive effort. The authors assessed the roles of malleable states and stable individual differences. Subjective cognitive effort and perceived difficulty were measured while individuals performed an air traffic control task. As expected, Conscientiousness moderated the effort trajectory. Individuals with high Conscientiousness maintained subjective cognitive effort at high levels for longer than their counterparts. There were also individual differences in reactions to perceptions of task difficulty. The intra-individual relationship between perceived difficulty and subjective cognitive effort was stronger for individuals with low ability or low Conscientiousness than for their counterparts. A follow-up study showed that the measures of perceived difficulty and subjective cognitive effort were sensitive to a task difficulty manipulation as well as that the relationship between perceived difficulty and subjective cognitive effort held after controlling for self-set goal level. These findings contribute to the self-regulation literature by identifying factors that influence changes in subjective cognitive effort during skill acquisition.