Trust-Based Prayer Expectancies and Health Among Older Mexican Americans

This study assesses the health-related effects of trust-based prayer expectancies, which reflect the belief that God answers prayers at the right time and in the best way. The following relationships are evaluated in our conceptual model: (1) older Mexican Americans who attend worship services more often tend to develop a closer relationship with God; (2) people who feel close to God will be more likely to develop trust-based prayer expectancies; (3) people who endorse trust-based prayer expectancies will have greater feelings of self-esteem; and (4) higher self-esteem is associated with better self-rated health. The data support each of these relationships.     

Cross-National Analysis of the Influence of Cultural Norms and Government Restrictions on the Relationship Between Religion and Well-Being

This study examines the interaction between cultural religious norms and governmental restrictiveness as country-level moderators of the relationship between individual religiousness and well-being, including both happiness and physical health. Data come from five waves of World Values survey data from 221 separate surveys conducted in 88 countries, with data from 317,109 individuals. Three dimensions of individual religiousness were assessed, along with corresponding country-level norms aggregated from these measures. Three-way cross-level interactions were tested to examine whether the extent of government restriction modified the relationship between national religious norms and the individual-level association between religious factors and well-being outcomes. Results supported the hypothesis that self-reported religion is most strongly related to greater happiness and better self-reported health in societies where it is freely and widely practiced. In contrast, religiousness may be harmful when it is relatively deviant, and restrictions of freedom may serve to further exacerbate this effect. These results suggest that the positive association between religion and well-being is not universal, but depends upon the right to express religion freely and the opportunity to practice with like-minded others.     

Assessing Stability and Change in a Second-Order Confirmatory Factor Model of Meaning in Life

Research indicates that meaning in life is an important correlate of health and well-being. However, relatively little is known about the way a sense of meaning may change over time. The purpose of this study is to explore two ways of assessing change in meaning within a second-order confirmatory factor analysis framework. First, tests are conducted to see if the first and second-order factor loadings and measurement error terms are invariant over time. Second, a largely overlooked technique is used to assess change and stability in meaning at the second-order level. Findings from a nationwide survey reveal that the first and second-order factor loadings are invariant of time. Moreover, the second-order measurement error terms, but not the first-order measurement error terms, are invariant, as well. The results further reveal that standard ways of assessing stability mask significant change in meaning that is due largely to regression to the mean.     

Visual similarity is stronger than semantic similarity in guiding visual search for numbers

Using a visual search task, we explored how behavior is influenced by both visual and semantic information. We recorded participants’ eye movements as they searched for a single target number in a search array of single-digit numbers (0–9). We examined the probability of fixating the various distractors as a function of two key dimensions: the visual similarity between the target and each distractor, and the semantic similarity (i.e., the numerical distance) between the target and each distractor. Visual similarity estimates were obtained using multidimensional scaling based on the independent observer similarity ratings. A linear mixed-effects model demonstrated that both visual and semantic similarity influenced the probability that distractors would be fixated. However, the visual similarity effect was substantially larger than the semantic similarity effect. We close by discussing the potential value of using this novel methodological approach and the implications for both simple and complex visual search displays.     

Anxious Attachment to God,Spiritual Support,and Obesity: Findings from a Recent Nationwide Survey

Some researchers report that people who are more deeply involved in religion may be more obese, but other investigators have been unable to replicate these findings. The purpose of the current study was to examine the relationship between religious life and obesity with data from a recent nationwide survey, the Landmark Spirituality and Health Survey (N = 1,497). The core measure of religion is an anxious or insecure attachment to God. It is hypothesized that study participants with a more anxious attachment to God are more likely to be obese. However, it is further proposed that this relationship will only hold for study participants who receive little spiritual or emotional support from fellow church members. Spiritual support is assistance that is provided with the explicit purpose of bolstering the religious beliefs and behaviors of the recipient. The findings reveal that having an anxious attachment to God is associated with a greater risk of being obese, but this relationship becomes progressively weaker as the level of spiritual and emotional support increases.     

Searching for two categories of target in dynamic visual displays impairs monitoring ability

Target onsets in dynamically changing displays can be predicted when contingencies exist between different stimulus states over time. In the present study, we examined predictive monitoring when participants searched dynamically changing displays of numbers and colored squares for a color target, a number target, or both. Stimuli were presented in both contiguous and discrete spatial configurations. Response time (RT) and accuracy were recorded, and evidence of predictive monitoring was assessed via first fixations and refixations of target‐predictive stimuli. RTs to target onsets and evidence of predictive monitoring were reduced in dual‐target, relative to single‐target, conditions. Further, predictive monitoring did not speed RTs but was influenced by display configuration. In particular, discrete displays impaired monitoring for number targets in the dual‐target condition. Implications exist for real‐world visual tasks involving multiple target categories and for visual display design.     

After the viewpoint debate: where next in object recognition?

A debate on whether object representations capture isolated viewpoints or ranges of views has dominated research in object recognition in recent years, but now seems to be waning. Rather than assume a narrow model in which either structural or view information is used to recognize an object, researchers have begun to examine how these properties might be used cooperatively. A recent paper by Foster and Gilson confirms sensitivity to both types of information, which combine in an additive framework to predict recognition performance.     

The effects of voluntary movements on auditory-haptic and haptic-haptic temporal order judgments

In two experiments we investigated the effects of voluntary movements on temporal haptic perception. Measures of sensitivity (JND) and temporal alignment (PSS) were obtained from temporal order judgments made on intermodal auditory-haptic (Experiment 1) or intramodal haptic (Experiment 2) stimulus pairs under three movement conditions. In the baseline, static condition, the arm of the participants remained stationary. In the passive condition, the arm was displaced by a servo-controlled motorized device. In the active condition, the participants moved voluntarily. The auditory stimulus was a short, 500Hz tone presented over headphones and the haptic stimulus was a brief suprathreshold force pulse applied to the tip of the index finger orthogonally to the finger movement. Active movement did not significantly affect discrimination sensitivity on the auditory-haptic stimulus pairs, whereas it significantly improved sensitivity in the case of the haptic stimulus pair, demonstrating a key role for motor command information in temporal sensitivity in the haptic system. Points of subjective simultaneity were by-and-large coincident with physical simultaneity, with one striking exception in the passive condition with the auditory-haptic stimulus pair. In the latter case, the haptic stimulus had to be presented 45ms before the auditory stimulus in order to obtain subjective simultaneity. A model is proposed to explain the discrimination performance.     

Religion, Meaning in Life, and Change in Physical Functioning During Late Adulthood

This study has two primary goals. The first is to see whether select aspects of religion are associated with meaning in life. The second goal is to see whether change in meaning in life is associated with change in physical functioning. Data from a nationwide longitudinal survey of older people provide support for the following relationships: (1) older adults who attend church services more often tend to develop a closer relationship with God; (2) older people who have a closer relationship with God are more likely to provide emotional support to others; (3) elders who give emotional support to their social network members are more likely to have a stronger sense of meaning in life; and (4) older individuals who have a deeper sense of meaning in life are less likely to experience a decline in their physical functioning over time.     

The Influence of Expertise on Maritime Driving Behaviour

We compared expert and novice behaviour in a group of participants as they engaged in a simulated maritime driving task. We varied the difficulty of the driving task by controllling the severity of the sea state in which they were driving their craft. Increases in sea severity increased the size of the upcoming waves while also increasing the length of the waves. Expert participants drove their craft at a higher speed than novices and decreased their fixation durations as wave severity increased. Furthermore, the expert participants increased the horizontal spread of their fixation positions as wave severity increased to a greater degree than novices. Conversely, novice participants showed evidence of a greater vertical spread of fixations than experts. By connecting our findings with previous research investigating eye movement behaviour and road driving, we suggest that novice or inexperienced drivers show inflexibility in adaptation to changing driving conditions. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.