Transcendence Matters: Do the Ways Family Members Experience God Meaningfully Relate to Family Life?

As more Americans continue to move away from an institutional approach to religion and spirituality to a more personal approach, it is important to explore the ways that personal perspectives about God influence various aspects of life including family life. This study explored how participants viewed and experienced God as an authority figure (Directive Transcendence), as a close confidant (Intimate Transcendence), or as both (Authoritative Transcendence). In-depth interviews with 198 religious families from across America were analyzed using a team-based qualitative approach. These analyses revealed that participants experienced God as both an authority figure and as a close confidant. Both types of experiences are associated with family relationships in different ways. Concepts relating to ideas of authority, parenting styles, and attachment theory are used to help understand familial impacts from how one experiences God.     

Early group bias in the Faroe Islands: Cultural variation in children's group-based reasoning

Recent developmental research demonstrates that group bias emerges early in childhood. However, little is known about the extent to which bias in minimal (i.e., arbitrarily assigned) groups varies with children's environment and experience, and whether such bias is universal across cultures. In this study, the development of group bias was investigated using a minimal groups paradigm with 46 four- to six-year-olds from the Faroe Islands. Children observed in-group and out-group members exhibiting varying degrees of prosocial behaviour (egalitarian or stingy sharing). Children did not prefer their in-group in the pretest, but a pro-in-group and anti-out-group sentiment emerged in both conditions in the posttest. Faroese children's response patterns differ from those of American children [Schug, M. G., Shusterman, A., Barth, H., & Patalano, A. L. (2013). Minimal-group membership influences children's responses to novel experience with group members. Developmental Science, 16(1), 47–55], suggesting that intergroup bias shows cultural variation even in a minimal groups context.     

Effects of Gender and Dominance on Leadership Emergence: Incentives Make a Difference

Several decades of laboratory research have shown that high-dominant women, when paired with low-dominant men, are less likely than expected to emerge as leaders on gender-neutral tasks. The current study was designed to investigate the impact of an incentive on leadership emergence in mixed-gender pairs in which one member was high in personality dominance and one was low. Across incentive conditions, men high in personality dominance were more likely than women to emerge as leaders. Under the no-incentive condition, personality dominance relative to men did not significantly improve women’s leadership likelihood; men were more likely to emerge as leaders regardless of personality dominance. However, under the incentive condition, high-dominant women were significantly more likely to emerge as leaders than were their low-dominant male counterparts, and high-dominant men were also more likely than low-dominant women to emerge as leaders.     

Infant information processing and family history of specific language impairment: converging evidence for RAP deficits from two paradigms

An infant's ability to process auditory signals presented in rapid succession (i.e. rapid auditory processing abilities [RAP]) has been shown to predict differences in language outcomes in toddlers and preschool children. Early deficits in RAP abilities may serve as a behavioral marker for language-based learning disabilities. The purpose of this study is to determine if performance on infant information processing measures designed to tap RAP and global processing skills differ as a function of family history of specific language impairment (SLI) and/or the particular demand characteristics of the paradigm used. Seventeen 6- to 9-month-old infants from families with a history of specific language impairment (FH+) and 29 control infants (FH-) participated in this study. Infants' performance on two different RAP paradigms (head-turn procedure [HT] and auditory-visual habituation/recognition memory [AVH/RM]) and on a global processing task (visual habituation/recognition memory [VH/RM]) was assessed at 6 and 9 months. Toddler language and cognitive skills were evaluated at 12 and 16 months. A number of significant group differences were seen: FH+ infants showed significantly poorer discrimination of fast rate stimuli on both RAP tasks, took longer to habituate on both habituation/recognition memory measures, and had lower novelty preference scores on the visual habituation/recognition memory task. Infants' performance on the two RAP measures provided independent but converging contributions to outcome. Thus, different mechanisms appear to underlie performance on operantly conditioned tasks as compared to habituation/recognition memory paradigms. Further, infant RAP processing abilities predicted to 12- and 16-month language scores above and beyond family history of SLI. The results of this study provide additional support for the validity of infant RAP abilities as a behavioral marker for later language outcome. Finally, this is the first study to use a battery of infant tasks to demonstrate multi-modal processing deficits in infants at risk for SLI.     

Work Values, Gender, and Expectations About Work Commitment and Pay: Laying the Groundwork for the “Motherhood Penalty”?

The gender pay gap most seriously affects women with children—a situation labeled the motherhood penalty. One common explanation is that mothers value family more than employment, leading to reduced work commitment and hence to lower pay. Using a questionnaire, we examined the relationship between endorsement of two work-related values (family and power), anticipated work commitment, and expected peak pay among 229 undergraduates at a southeastern U.S. university. Men expected higher peak salaries, valued power more and family less than women. For both genders, valuing power predicted higher expected peak salary and valuing family predicted lower anticipated work commitment. For women, reduced work commitment, in turn, predicted lower anticipated peak pay. For men, valuing family predicted higher peak pay expectations.     

Development of predictive responses in theory of mind brain regions

When we watch movies, we consider the characters’ mental states in order to understand and predict the narrative. Recent work in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) uses movie‐viewing paradigms to measure functional responses in brain regions recruited for such mental state reasoning (the theory of mind [“ToM”] network). Here, two groups of young children (n = 30 3–4 years old, n = 26 6–7 years old) viewed a short animated movie twice while undergoing fMRI. As children get older, ToM brain regions were recruited earlier in time during the second presentation of the movie. This “narrative anticipation” effect is specific: there was no such effect in a control network of brain regions that responds just as robustly to the movie (the “Pain Matrix”). These results complement prior studies in adults that suggest that ToM brain regions play a role not just in inferring, but in actively predicting, other people's thoughts and feelings, and provide novel evidence that as children get older, their ToM brain regions increasingly make such predictions.     

Problems With Formal Models Of Epistemic Entrenchment As Applied To Scientific Theories

Formal models of theory contraction entered the philosophicalliterature with the prototype model by Alchourrón, Gärdenfors,and Makinson (Alchourrón et al. 1985). One influential modelinvolves theory contraction with respect to a relation calledepistemic entrenchment which orders the propositions of a theoryaccording to their relative degrees of theoretical importance.Various postulates have been suggested for characterizingepistemic entrenchment formally. I argue here that threesuggested postulates produce inappropriately bizarre results whenapplied to scientific theories. I argue that the postulates callednoncovering, continuing up, and continuing down, implyrespectively that, (i) no scientific law is more epistemicallyentrenched than any of its instances, (ii) two distinct instances ofthe same scientific law must have different degrees of epistemicentrenchment, and (iii) any two scientific laws must have differentdegrees of epistemic entrenchment. I also argue that continuingup and continuing down each lead to incoherency.