“Four Gods” in Maximum Security Prison: Images of God,Religiousness, and Worldviews Among Inmates

This paper extends research on images of God, which prior researchers based mostly on national survey data, to a study of offenders in prison. We first explore whether the distribution of Froese and Bader’s (America’s four gods: What we say about god–& what that says about us, Oxford University Press, New York 2010) four images of God among prison inmates is similar to that in the general population. We then examine whether an inmate’s image of God is associated with the inmate’s worldviews: beliefs and attitudes toward the law, other inmates, moral responsibility, and ultimate meaning and purpose in life. Finally, we test whether an inmate’s belief in a forgiving God and religiousness explain the association. We analyzed data from a survey of 2249 inmates at America’s largest maximum-security prison, the Louisiana State Penitentiary. We found the distribution of God-images among inmates was the same as that in national samples in terms of rank order. As hypothesized, we also found inmates with an image of an engaged God tended to report lower levels of legal cynicism and sense of illegitimacy of punishment and higher levels of collective efficacy, existential belief, and moral responsibility than those with images of a disengaged God or no God. Finally, we found an inmate’s belief in a forgiving God and religiousness to mediate partly relationships between images of God and the inmate’s worldviews.     

Sex differences in adolescent ethanol drinking to behavioral intoxication

Rodent models have been especially useful for investigating adolescent ethanol exposure. However, there is a paucity of studies examining sex differences in behavioral intoxication from adolescent ethanol drinking. Here, we used an ethanol drinking model to investigate if adolescent rats of both sexes readily drink ethanol to measurable behavioral intoxication, indicated by increased impulsive action and motor incoordination. Beginning on postnatal day (P) 28, male and female Long‐Evans rats were given 30‐min access to a solution of sucrose (20%) or sweetened ethanol (20% sucrose +15% ethanol) every other day until P60 and once after 2 weeks of forced abstinence (on P75). On alternate (nondrinking) days, rats were reinforced with a food pellet for making a cued nosepoke response. Beginning on P56, rats were tested in this task after drinking sessions to assess ethanol‐induced changes in impulsive action, defined as premature responding prior to cue presentation. Motor coordination was assessed before and after drinking sessions using an incline plane test. Adolescent male and female rats readily consumed ethanol to behavioral intoxication, measured as reduced motor coordination. Following forced abstinence, females displayed greater ethanol‐induced impulsive action. These studies provide evidence for sex differences in behavioral intoxication following adolescent ethanol drinking.     

Screening for and Preventing Perinatal Depression

New York City (NYC) public hospitals recently mandated that all pregnant women be screened for depression, but no funds were allocated for screening or care coordination/treatment, and research suggests that unfunded mandates are not likely to be successful. To address this, we implemented an on-site depression prevention intervention (NYC ROSE) for positive depression screens among pregnant, mostly Black and Hispanic, lower-income women in one public hospital. In this paper, we used Aarons’ implementation model to describe the successes and challenges of screening and intervention. Patient tracking sheets and electronic medical records were abstracted. Key informant interviews and an informal focus group were conducted, and staff observations were reviewed; common implementation themes were identified and fit into Aarons’ model. We found that a lack of funding and staff training, which led to minimal psychoeducation for patients, were outer context factors that may have made depression screening difficult, screening results unreliable, and NYC ROSE enrollment challenging. Although leadership agreed to implement NYC ROSE, early involvement of all levels of staff and patients would have better informed important inner context factors, like workflow and logistical/practical challenges. There was also a mismatch between the treatment model and the population being served; patients often lived too far away to receive additional services on site, and economic issues were often a higher priority than mental health services. Screening and interventions for perinatal depression are essential for optimal family health, and a detailed, thoughtful and funded approach can help ensure effectiveness of such efforts.     

Home-Based vs. Clinic-Based Parent–Child Interaction Therapy: Comparative Effectiveness in the Context of Dissemination and Implementation

Disruptive child behavior disorders remain a major public health issue despite the proliferation of several strong Evidence-Based Practices (EBPs) for these children and their families. This may stem from barriers to treatment facing many families in need, particularly families with low resources. Home-based treatment may be best suited for this population; however, EBPs are not always available or tested as home-based interventions. The current study compares an intensive home-based adaptation of Parent Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) to the standard clinic-based model in the context of a statewide implementation. As part of the statewide implementation, therapists entered archival data into an online system. Data was gathered for 314 families receiving PCIT, with 181 children in clinic-based PCIT and 133 in intensive home-based PCIT. Consistent with other trials of PCIT, results of the current study indicate that both versions of the therapy were effective in reducing child-behavior problems and increasing parenting skills; however, there were marked differences in attrition. Intensive home-based participants were twice as likely to complete treatment (64.66%) compared to clinic-based participants (33.15%) despite facing more adversity. These results underscore the importance of scientifically-sound adaptations of EBPs, as well as the role of comparative effectiveness studies as a critical tool in the integrative model of intervention science.     

Changing minds: Children's inferences about third party belief revision

By the age of 5, children explicitly represent that agents can have both true and false beliefs based on epistemic access to information (e.g., Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001). Children also begin to understand that agents can view identical evidence and draw different inferences from it (e.g., Carpendale & Chandler, 1996). However, much less is known about when, and under what conditions, children expect other agents to change their minds. Here, inspired by formal ideal observer models of learning, we investigate children's expectations of the dynamics that underlie third parties’ belief revision. We introduce an agent who has prior beliefs about the location of a population of toys and then observes evidence that, from an ideal observer perspective, either does, or does not justify revising those beliefs. We show that children's inferences on behalf of third parties are consistent with the ideal observer perspective, but not with a number of alternative possibilities, including that children expect other agents to be influenced only by their prior beliefs, only by the sampling process, or only by the observed data. Rather, children integrate all three factors in determining how and when agents will update their beliefs from evidence.     

Priming students for whole-class interaction: using interdependence to support behavioral engagement

Student interaction at a whole-class level is tied to learning outcomes, but encouraging students to engage with their peers at a whole-class level is difficult. While little research has sought to promote student engagement with one another at this level, one factor that has been shown to increase student interaction in pairs and small groups is student–student interdependency. Yet, to date, no studies have attempted to examine the impact of prior interdependency at this smaller scale on students’ interactions as a whole-class. The current study tested this relationship in an undergraduate class learning science content (n?=?19) through structuring interdependency (task and resource) during science learning. Students completed six science learning sessions each of which included a science learning activity followed by a whole-class concept mapping task. Students were audio and video recorded during the whole-class task, and then individual student behavior was coded in 10 s intervals during the first 10 min of each session. Generalized regression results showed that adding small group interdependency during learning predicted significantly more student science discussion (R²?=?.05) and supportive interactions (R²?=?.16), while predicting decreased expressions of science misunderstanding (R²?=?.07) during the whole-class task. Additionally, the combination of task and resource interdependency predicted a further decrease in student expressions of misunderstanding (R²?=?.07), but also increased student social distraction in comparison to task interdependency alone (R²?=?.28). Together these findings suggest that prior interdependency can be leveraged to increase student behavioral engagement at the whole-class level.     

Generalizations,Cultural Essentialism,and Metaphorical Gulfs

An ongoing debate in comparative research is about whether we should see cultural diversities as manifestations of essential differences or as superficial variations on a universal blueprint. Edward Slingerland has pointed to cognitive science and the use of embodied metaphors to emphasize the universality of concept formation and cognition across cultures. He suggests that this should quiet the “cultural essentialists” who take fundamental differences in Eastern and Western thinking as their starting points. Michael Puett has also leveled a critique of cultural essentialism in support of a presuppositionless approach, and Slingerland’s conclusions seem to offer him support. However, I will argue that even if all modern humans are broadly similar in metaphor use and cognitive processes, research in the humanities must continue to account for the differences implied by the particular metaphors employed and emphasized in diverse traditions. I contend that responsible hermeneutic practice does this through provisional, yet indispensable, generalizations.     

The subjective quality of episodic future thought and the experience of meaning in life

Two studies assessed whether mentally simulating specific future events to occur in familiar (vs. unfamiliar) settings indirectly increases meaning life via the subjective quality of the simulations. Participants in both studies (N = 344) were randomly assigned to visualize themselves doing something in familiar (e.g. home) or unfamiliar (e.g. fantasy world) settings in the future. They then rated the subjective quality of these visualizations and completed a measure of meaning in life. We replicated previous findings by showing that mental simulations involving familiar settings were of greater subjective quality than simulations involving unfamiliar settings. However, we also found that simulating future events in familiar (vs. unfamiliar) settings indirectly increased the perceived meaningfulness of life. These findings integrate research in cognitive psychology with research on the psychology of well-being and reveal how mental time travel contributes to the perception that one’s life has meaning.     

Effect of stimulus configuration on spatial judgments in search tasks

Although children over one year of age are able to code spatial information with respect to objects other than the self, there are many instances in which the self is inappropriately used as a spatial referent by children between 2 and 4 years of age. L. G. Braine and R. A. Eder (1983, Developmental Psychology, 19, 45-55) found that, in a search task, the nature of the array influenced the spatial referent used by 2-year-old children. The present work investigated the effect of varying the number, size, and arrangement of boxes in the array. It was found that only the number of boxes defining the left and right sides of the array influenced performance; that is, multiple boxes were associated with the use of external objects as spatial referents. These results were interpreted as stemming from the tendency of young children to code the location of an object with respect to nearby objects. This tendency would lead to the use of adjacent boxes and environmental objects as spatial referents for the multiple-box side, and the use of the self as a spatial referent for the single-box side.