THEOLOGY AND PHYSICS FORTY YEARS LATER

Abstract. Almost forty years later I look back on a 1966 article on theology and physics by Sanford Brown and my response published with it. I reflect on his hope that theological seminaries would give attention to the methods used in scientific inquiry. I compare our comments with subsequent thought on three issues: (1) the role of models in science and religion; (2) the relation of wholes to parts in physics and other sciences and the debate over reductionism and emergence; and (3) the implications of quantum physics for theology, including the possibility of divine action at the quantum level.     

Affect and automatic mood maintenance

The hedonic contingency model (HCM; Wegener & Petty, 1994) states that individuals have learned to seek out positive activities while in a happy mood in order to maintain or elevate that mood. We argue that this tendency may become overlearned and, thus, automated. More specifically, the experience of a happy mood was predicted to automatically activate the mood-maintenance tendency proposed by the HCM. Participants induced into happy, sad, or neutral moods ranked their preferences for future activities that were nonconsciously associated with either a positive or negative valence. Supporting the notion of automatic mood maintenance, happy participants appeared to evaluate the affective qualities of the future activities and base their preferences on this evaluation without realizing that they were doing so. Theoretical implications of this finding are discussed.     

Sustained attention, attentional selectivity, and attentional capacity across the lifespan

Changes in sustained attention, attentional selectivity, and attentional capacity were examined in a sample of 113 participants between the ages of 12 and 75. To measure sustained attention, we employed the sustained-attention-to-response task (Robertson, Manly, Andrade, Baddeley, & Yiend, Neuropsychologia 35:747?C58, 1997), a short continuous-performance test designed to capture fluctuations in sustained attention. To measure attentional selectivity and capacity, we employed a paradigm based on the theory of visual attention (Bundesen, Psychological Review 97:523?C547, 1990), which enabled the estimation of parameters related to attentional selection, perceptual threshold, visual short-term memory capacity, and processing capacity. We found evidence of age-related decline in each of the measured variables, but the declines varied markedly in terms of magnitude and lifespan trajectory. Variables relating to attentional capacity showed declines of very large effect sizes, while variables relating to attentional selectivity and sustained attention showed declines of medium to large effect sizes, suggesting that attentional control is relatively preserved in older adults. The variables relating to sustained attention followed a U-shaped, curvilinear trend, and the variables relating to attentional selectivity and capacity showed linear decline from early adulthood, providing further support for the differentiation of attentional functions.     

The validity of composite photographs for assessing masculinity preferences

Among non-human animals, exaggerated male traits may signal immunocompetence and are often attractive to females. This finding has not been reliably replicated in human populations, however, where preferences for feminised male faces are often observed in experiments. Some authors have suggested that certain experimental approaches, and in particular the use of 'composite', or averaged, photographs, may lack ecological validity and elicit misleading responses. This may account for reports of preferences for femininity. To date, however, experiments have varied on numerous, often confounded, methodological dimensions, making the contribution of different factors difficult to assess. To address this, we conducted an experiment to examine the influence of stimulus type on participant responses. Masculinity preferences were measured using both composite photographs and the photographs from which they were composed, while all other methodological variables were held constant. In contrast to predictions by previous authors, composites elicited significantly stronger overall preferences for masculinity, especially when textural information was reduced during the averaging process. The existence of preferences for feminised male faces is unlikely to be explained by the use of composite photographs alone.     

Sticky thoughts: depression and rumination are associated with difficulties manipulating emotional material in working memory

Cognitive inflexibility may play an important role in rumination, a risk factor for the onset and maintenance of depressive episodes. In the study reported here, we assessed participants' ability to either reverse or maintain in working memory the order of three emotion or three neutral words. Differences (or sorting costs) between response latencies in backward trials, on which participants were asked to reverse the order of the words, and forward trials, on which participants were asked to remember the words in the order in which they were presented, were calculated. Compared with control participants, depressed participants had higher sorting costs, particularly when presented with negative words. It is important to note that rumination predicted sorting costs for negative words but not for positive or neutral words in the depressed group. These findings indicate that depression and rumination are associated with deficits in cognitive control.     

Age-related positivity effects and autobiographical memory detail: evidence from a past/future source memory task

This study investigated whether the age-related positivity effect strengthens specific event details in autobiographical memory. Participants retrieved past events or imagined future events in response to neutral or emotional cue words. Older adults rated each kind of event more positively than younger adults, demonstrating an age-related positivity effect. We next administered a source memory test. Participants were given the same cue words and tried to retrieve the previously generated event and its source (past or future). Accuracy on this source test should depend on the recollection of specific details about the earlier generated events, providing a more objective measure of those details than subjective ratings. We found that source accuracy was greater for positive than negative future events in both age groups, suggesting that positive future events were more detailed. In contrast, valence did not affect source accuracy for past events in either age group, suggesting that positive and negative past events were equally detailed. Although ageing can bias people to focus on positive aspects of experience, this bias does not appear to strengthen the availability of details for positive relative to negative past events.     

Structure and measurement of depression in youths: applying item response theory to clinical data

Our goals in this article were to use item response theory (IRT) to assess the relation of depressive symptoms to the underlying dimension of depression and to demonstrate how IRT-based measurement strategies can yield more reliable data about depression severity than conventional symptom counts. Participants were 3,403 children and adolescents from 12 contributing clinical and nonclinical samples; all participants had received the Kiddie Schedule of Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia for School-Aged Children. Results revealed that some symptoms reflected higher levels of depression and were more discriminating than others. Furthermore, use of IRT-based information about symptom severity and discriminability in the measurement of depression severity was shown to reduce measurement error and increase measurement fidelity.     

The role of faith in intuition, need for cognition and method of attitude formation in implicit–explicit brand attitude relationship strength

We tested the hypothesis that Faith in Intuition (FI) would moderate implicit–explicit attitude relationship strength for attitudes formed via associative processes, but not propositional processes. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that FI moderated I–E relationship strength for attitudes formed via evaluative conditioning. High FI people had stronger I–E correlations. Experiment 2 showed that FI did not moderate I–E relationship strength for attitudes formed via propositional reasoning. Those low in Need for Cognition (NC), however, showed stronger I–E correlations than those high in NC. The importance of considering trait variables in combination with the method of attitude formation is discussed.     

Sleep and the Brain

Sleep is a fundamental behavior ubiquitous in the animal kingdom, necessary for the support of physical health and in humans for the maintenance of cognitive function. While it influences all body systems, it is particularly important for the brain and is typically characterized using measures of brain electrical activity. Sleep undergoes predictable changes across the lifespan, with notably dramatic alterations occurring during adolescence and with old age. Over and above the normal development changes, however, upwards of a third of the adult population experience some form of insomnia on a regular basis. This issue’s special section on “Sleep through the Ages” contains papers addressing the neurological and neuropsychological implications of sleep in adolescents, older adults and insomnia sufferers, highlighting relations of sleep with brain structure and function.     

Is more always better? Effects of semantic richness on lexical decision, speeded pronunciation, and semantic classification

Evidence from large-scale studies (Pexman, Hargreaves, Siakaluk, Bodner, & Pope, 2008) suggests that semantic richness, a multidimensional construct reflecting the extent of variability in the information associated with a word's meaning, facilitates visual word recognition. Specifically, recognition is better for words that (1) have more semantic neighbors, (2) possess referents with more features, and (3) are associated with more contexts. The present study extends Pexman et al. (2008) by examining how two additional measures of semantic richness, number of senses and number of associates (Pexman, Hargreaves, Edwards, Henry, & Goodyear, 2007), influence lexical decision, speeded pronunciation, and semantic classification performance, after controlling for an array of lexical and semantic variables. We found that number of features and contexts consistently facilitated word recognition but that the effects of semantic neighborhood density and number of associates were less robust. Words with more senses also elicited faster lexical decisions but less accurate semantic classifications. These findings point to how the effects of different semantic dimensions are selectively and adaptively modulated by task-specific demands.