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.     

The role of attention in processing configural and shape information in 3-D novel objects

Recent research suggests that there is an advantage for processing configural information in scenes and objects. The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which attention may account for this configural advantage. In Experiment 1, we found that cueing the location of change in single object displays improved detection performance for both configural and shape changes, yet cueing attention away from the location of change was detrimental only for shape change detection. A configural advantage was present for each cueing condition. Experiments 2A and 2B examined whether the configural advantage persisted in conditions where attention was distributed more widely, using a visual search paradigm. Although searches for configural changes were faster than those for shape changes across all set sizes, both types of information appeared to be processed with similar efficiency. Overall, these results suggest that the configural advantage is independent of the location or distribution of visual attention.     

The other-race effect: Holistic coding differences and beyond

We evaluate claims that the other-race effect in face memory reflects stronger holistic coding of own-race than other-race faces. Considering evidence from a range of paradigms, including the inversion effect, part–whole effect, composite effect, and the scrambled/blurred task, we find considerable inconsistency, both between paradigms and between participant ethnicities. At the same time, however, studies that isolate configural and component feature processing consistently show better featural, as well as better configural, processing of own-race faces, for both Caucasian and Asian participants. These results raise the possibility that the key feature of own-race face processing is not stronger holistic processing per se, but rather more effective processing of all types of face information (featural as well as holistic).     

Dual-target search for high and low prevalence X-ray threat targets

Recent studies have shown that the prevalence of target presentation in visual search has an impact on target detection rates, and also that searching for two targets leads to a decrement in performance (the “dual-target cost”). In the present experiments, we added to previous work that has examined the interaction between the prevalence effect and dual-target cost, and also to previous work that has examined a full range of prevalence levels. We found no interaction between the dual-target cost and prevalence effect, though the response criterion in dual-target search did interact with target prevalence in an unexpected manner. Furthermore, we detected anasymmetry in the prevalence effect: It was more marked for high than low prevalence. Implications for real-world tasks are discussed.     

Focusing on fear: attentional disengagement from emotional faces

Evidence suggests that anxiety is associated with a shift of visual attention toward threatening stimuli in the environment, such as facial expressions (Mogg & Bradley, 1999). More recent evidence, however, indicates that anxiety may be better characterized by a failure to rapidly disengage the visual attention system away from threat-related facial expressions (Fox, Russo, Bowles, & Dutton, 2001). The present study further investigates this delayed disengagement hypothesis. Results show that high trait-anxious individuals, in contrast to low trait-anxious individuals, take longer to classify peripheral target letters when fearful facial expressions were presented at fixation relative to sad, happy, or neutral expressions. These findings demonstrate a specific tendency to dwell on fear-relevant stimuli, as opposed to negative information in general. These findings are considered from an evolutionary perspective and the possible role of delayed disengagement from threat in the maintenance of anxiety states is also discussed.