Doing Pentecostal Civic Engagement in the Squatter Area of Lower Rock Quarry,Baguio City,Philippines

Pentecostals are frequently placed on the sidelines of civic engagement, seen as participating less in public life because of their preoccupation with other‐worldly eschatology and their one‐way‐ticket evangelistic efforts. This study does not share the above view, but argues that Pentecostal civic engagement 1 has been increasingly recognized as resource capital that empowers the lives of the poor. This paper investigates the impact of Pentecostal/charismatic religion on civil society, asking what contribution the study of “spirit empowered” religion can make to our understanding of the role of religion in human society. Using a quantitative and qualitative approach to flesh out empirical evidence, this study reveals what Filipino Pentecostals believe and practise with regard to civic engagement. It provides a case study of findings to further point out that Pentecostals in the Philippines are not on the sidelines of civic engagement, but are one of the religious players in the creation of a just and loving society.     

Psychometric assessment of the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS) among Chinese adolescents

The Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS) has the longest empirical track record as a valid measure of trait mindfulness. Most of what is understood about trait mindfulness comes from administering the MAAS to relatively homogenous samples of Caucasian adults. This study rigorously evaluates the psychometric properties of the MAAS among Chinese adolescents attending high school in Chengdu, China. Classrooms from 24 schools were randomly selected to participate in the study. Three waves of longitudinal data (N = 5,287 students) were analyzed. MAAS construct, nomological, and incremental validity were evaluated as well as its measurement invariance across gender using latent factor analyses. Participants' mean age was 16.2 years (SD = 0.7), and 51% were male. The 15-item MAAS had adequate fit to the one-dimensional factor structure at Wave 1, and this factor structure was replicated at Wave 2. A 6-item short scale of the MAAS fit well to the data at Wave 3. The MAAS maintained reliability (Cronbach's α = .89-.93; test-restest r = .35-.52), convergent/discriminant validity, and explained additional variance in mental health measures beyond other psychosocial constructs. Both the 15- and 6-item MAAS scales displayed at least partial factorial invariance across gender. The findings suggest that the MAAS is a sound measure of trait mindfulness among Chinese adolescents. To reduce respondent burden, the MAAS 6-item short-scale provides an option to measure trait mindfulness.     

A latent profile analysis of Asian American men's and women's adherence to cultural values

The goal of this study was to identify diverse profiles of Asian American women's and men's adherence to values that are salient in Asian cultures (i.e., conformity to norms, family recognition through achievement, emotional self-control, collectivism, and humility). To this end, the authors conducted a latent profile analysis using the 5 subscales of the Asian American Values Scale-Multidimensional in a sample of 214 Asian Americans. The analysis uncovered a four-cluster solution. In general, Clusters 1 and 2 were characterized by relatively low and moderate levels of adherence to the 5 dimensions of cultural values, respectively. Cluster 3 was characterized by the highest level of adherence to the cultural value of family recognition through achievement, whereas Cluster 4 was typified by the highest levels of adherence to collectivism, emotional self-control, and humility. Clusters 3 and 4 were associated with higher levels of depressive symptoms than Cluster 1. Furthermore, Asian American women and Asian American men had lower odds of being in Cluster 4 and Cluster 3, respectively. These findings attest to the importance of identifying specific patterns of adherence to cultural values when examining the relationship between Asian Americans' cultural orientation and mental health status.     

Assuming too much from 'familiar' brain potentials

Familiarity is sometimes associated with midfrontal old/new (FN400) signals, but investigators assume too much by inferring familiarity whenever they identify these signals. We describe how Rosburg and colleagues (2011) made this assumption, yielding potentially faulty conclusions about the recognition heuristic. We provide an alternative interpretation emphasizing implicit processing that can underlie decision-making.     

Personality and Legislative Politics: The Big Five Trait Dimensions Among U.S. State Legislators

The impact of personality traits on people's attitudes and behaviors is widely recognized, yet systematic attention to personality in large‐N research on elected officials has been rare. Among psychologists, five‐factor frameworks that focus on openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability have gained tremendous prominence in the past two decades. Applications of these frameworks to the study of mass political behavior have been highly fruitful, but corresponding applications in the study of legislators have been rare. In an effort to assess the utility of a Big Five approach in the study of legislative politics, this article addresses three questions: whether elected officials will be willing to provide personality self‐assessments, whether any data they do provide will exhibit meaningful variance, and whether the Big Five trait dimensions will correspond with patterns in respondents' attitudes and behaviors. These questions are addressed using data from members of the state legislatures in Arizona, Connecticut, and Maine. Results provide considerable grounds for optimism regarding the likely utility of more extensive applications of the Big Five in research on elected officials.     

Boundaries of reciprocity: Incompleteness of information undermines cooperation

Past research has revealed that people have a strong tendency to respond to others' cooperative behavior with cooperation and to others' noncooperative behavior with noncooperation. Yet it is unclear whether or not this tendency still holds when people have only incomplete information about their interaction partner's past behavior. To address this question, we designed a new paradigm - a coin allocation paradigm - in which participants were provided with incomplete information about another person's degree of cooperative behavior (i.e., coin allocations to the participant). Consistent with our hypotheses, two experiments revealed that incompleteness of information undermines both expectations about another person's cooperation as well as one's own cooperation. Moreover, complementary analyses indicated that the detrimental effects of incompleteness of information on cooperation were mediated by expectations of other's cooperation. We suggest that a relatively strong belief in self-interest serves to fill in the blanks when information is incomplete, which undermines expectations of other's cooperation as well as one's own cooperative behavior.     

Modeling the effect of reward amount on probability discounting

The present study with college students examined the effect of amount on the discounting of probabilistic monetary rewards. A hyperboloid function accurately described the discounting of hypothetical rewards ranging in amount from $20 to $10,000,000. The degree of discounting increased continuously with amount of probabilistic reward. This effect of amount was not due to changes in the rate parameter of the discounting function, but rather was due to increases in the exponent. These results stand in contrast to those observed with the discounting of delayed monetary rewards, in which the degree of discounting decreases with reward amount due to amount-dependent decreases in the rate parameter. Taken together, this pattern of results suggests that delay and probability discounting reflect different underlying mechanisms. That is, the fact that the exponent in the delay discounting function is independent of amount is consistent with a psychophysical scaling interpretation, whereas the finding that the exponent of the probability-discounting function is amount-dependent is inconsistent with such an interpretation. Instead, the present results are consistent with the idea that the probability-discounting function is itself the product of a value function and a weighting function. This idea was first suggested by Kahneman and Tversky (1979), although their prospect theory does not predict amount effects like those observed. The effect of amount on probability discounting was parsimoniously incorporated into our hyperboloid discounting function by assuming that the exponent was proportional to the amount raised to a power. The amount-dependent exponent of the probability-discounting function may be viewed as reflecting the effect of amount on the weighting of the probability with which the reward will be received.     

Introduction: the human sciences and Cold War America

Studies of the history of the human sciences during the Cold War era have proliferated over the past decade--in JHBS and elsewhere. This special issue focuses on the connections between the behavioral sciences and the culture and politics of the Cold War in the United States. In the recent literature, there is a tendency to identify the Cold War human sciences with two main paradigms: that of psychocultural analysis, on the one hand, and of the systems sciences, on the other. The essays in the special issue both extend understanding of each of these interpretive frameworks and help us to grasp their interconnection.