The Effect of Religiosity on Life Satisfaction in a Secularized Context: Assessing the Relevance of Believing and Belonging

The positive relationship between religiosity and life satisfaction is well-established. This relationship is, however, likely to vary across cultural contexts and different religious affiliations. Furthermore, research is needed to uncover why religion is relevant for life satisfaction. Addressing these issues, we investigate what dimensions of being religious play a role in the life satisfaction of individuals with different religious affiliations, including the understudied Muslim category, in the highly secularized Dutch context. We examine ‘believing’, which captures how religion provides meaning and a coherent worldview, and ‘belonging’, which comprises both cultural benefits of being embedded in a congregation with a shared framework of meaning and structural benefits due to more social ties. Analyses of the NEtherlands Longitudinal Lifecourse Study (n = 5312) first indicate that Muslims display significantly lower life satisfaction than the non-religious, which appears to be due to their underprivileged social position rather than intra-religious factors of believing and belonging. Second, we find that Catholics experience significant life satisfaction benefits compared to those who are not religious, and that only belonging plays a role in this association. Next to the beneficial effect of the structural aspect of belonging, which revolves around social ties, a cultural aspect of religious belonging appears to be salient, suggesting that an important life satisfaction advantage of religious communities lies in their ability to foster a sense of solidarity and commitment through a shared framework of meaning. We make several recommendations for further research based on these findings.     

Crossover between work and home in dyadic partner relationships

This study aimed at providing insight into the processes underlying crossover between "work" and "home" in dyadic partner relationships. Specifically, we examined to what extent husbands' work demands (work load and overtime hours) and psychological health (fatigue and depressive symptoms) "cross over" to their wives' home demands (home load) and psychological health. These associations were investigated among three couple groups, based on wives' working hours (i.e., more than 20 hours per week, from 1 to 20 hours per week, and not engaged in paid work) (253 couples in total). All husbands worked for at least 35 hours a week. Three possible crossover mechanisms were hypothesized: (i) time-based, (ii) strain-based, and (iii) empathy-based crossover. The results partially supported mechanisms (i) and (ii): when husbands reported higher work load (mechanism i) and more psychological health complaints (mechanism ii), their wives experienced higher home load. The results further supported mechanism (iii) that wives' and husbands' psychological health were associated. It is concluded that crossover from husbands to wives may occur through various mechanisms.     

Loneliness in the Daily Lives of Young Adults: Testing a Socio‐cognitive Model

A socio‐cognitive model of loneliness states that lonely people are characterized by two characteristics, hypersensitivity to social threat and hyposensitivity to social reward. However, these characteristics have not yet been examined in the daily lives of young adults. Therefore, the main aim of the present study was to examine these two characteristics in young adults and whether relationship status, living situation, and type of company moderated the relationship between sensitivity to threat and reward and feelings of loneliness. The Experience Sampling Method was used, and data were collected among 219 first‐year college students (M age = 19.60, 91% female). Participants filled out questionnaires on their smartphone at five random time points per day, on 11 consecutive days. Multilevel analyses showed support for hypersensitivity to social threat, in that students high in loneliness were more negatively affected by negative perceptions of company. Results for hyposensitivity to social reward were in the opposite direction; students high in loneliness were more positively affected by positive perceptions of company than students low in loneliness. These relations were not moderated by relationship status or living situation. Our findings may indicate that loneliness serves as a motivational state that increases susceptibility to the environment in order to restore social relationships. Copyright © 2015 European Association of Personality Psychology     

How to quantify the evidence for the absence of a correlation

We present a suite of Bayes factor hypothesis tests that allow researchers to grade the decisiveness of the evidence that the data provide for the presence versus the absence of a correlation between two variables. For concreteness, we apply our methods to the recent work of Donnellan et al. (in press) who conducted nine replication studies with over 3,000 participants and failed to replicate the phenomenon that lonely people compensate for a lack of social warmth by taking warmer baths or showers. We show how the Bayes factor hypothesis test can quantify evidence in favor of the null hypothesis, and how the prior specification for the correlation coefficient can be used to define a broad range of tests that address complementary questions. Specifically, we show how the prior specification can be adjusted to create a two-sided test, a one-sided test, a sensitivity analysis, and a replication test.     

Justified ex nihilo: Retrieving Creation for Theological Anthropology with Luther and Bonhoeffer

This article seeks to articulate a framework for theological anthropology that takes seriously the doctrine of creation, while also remaining christologically grounded and soteriologically informed. Toward this end, I will look briefly at how Martin Luther understands the relationship between justification, anthropology and creation, before turning to the way in which Dietrich Bonhoeffer picks up on Luther’s tripartite, justification‐based definition of the human being. In doing so, Bonhoeffer will help to clarify the essential role that creation plays in grounding and orienting a theological anthropology which seeks to take seriously the soteriological realities of sin and reconciliation.     

Effects of Bilingual Language Use and Language Proficiency on 24-month-olds’ Cognitive Control

ABSTRACT

Although a bilingual advantage has been reported for various measures of cognitive control, most previous studies have looked at a limited range of cognitive control measures. Furthermore, they typically leave unaddressed whether positive effects of bilingualism hold for all bilinguals or whether these are modulated by differences in bilingual language use and proficiency of children and their parents. This study reports on tasks of selective attention and inhibitory control from 24-month-old bilinguals (n = 37) and monolinguals (n = 58). Their parents completed a Dutch vocabulary checklist assessing receptive and productive vocabulary as well as questionnaires on children’s attentional focusing, attention shifting and inhibitory control, and language background. Linear mixed-effect regressions showed no differences on cognitive control between the monolinguals and bilingual groups. However, analyses taking into account differences in children’s bilingual language use and proficiency and of their parents revealed a more nuanced picture. Specifically, children’s degree of balanced language usage predicted parent-rated cognitive control. Furthermore, bilingual toddlers who had parents were low proficient in one of the home languages showed significantly better performance on a selective attention task than toddlers whose parents were both proficient in both home languages. These findings suggest that both children’s active usage of two languages and their experience with switching depending on their interlocutor are related to cognitive control performance in young bilingual children. As such, they add to a growing body of evidence that the bilingual advantage in cognitive control is tied to specific conditions of bilingualism, already at a young age.     

Robustness of the cognitive gains in 7-month-old bilingual infants: A close multi-center replication of Kovács and Mehler (2009)

We present an exact replication of Experiment 2 from Kovács and Mehler's 2009 study, which showed that 7-month-old infants who are raised bilingually exhibit a cognitive advantage. In the experiment, a sound cue, following an AAB or ABB pattern, predicted the appearance of a visual stimulus on the screen. The stimulus appeared on one side of the screen for nine trials and then switched to the other side. In the original experiment, both mono- and bilingual infants anticipated where the visual stimulus would appear during pre-switch trials. However, during post-switch trials, only bilingual children anticipated that the stimulus would appear on the other side of the screen. The authors took this as evidence of a cognitive advantage. Using the exact same materials in combination with novel analysis techniques (Bayesian analyses, mixed effects modeling and cluster based permutation analyses), we assessed the robustness of these findings in four babylabs (N = 98). Our results did not replicate the original findings: although anticipatory looks increased slightly during post-switch trials for both groups, bilingual infants were not better switchers than monolingual infants. After the original experiment, we presented additional trials to examine whether infants associated sound patterns with cued locations, for which we did not find any evidence either. The results highlight the importance of multicenter replications and more fine-grained statistical analyses to better understand child development.

Highlights

• We carried out an exact replication across four baby labs of the high-impact study by Kovács and Mehler (2009).
• We did not replicate the findings of the original study, calling into question the robustness of the claim that bilingual infants have enhanced cognitive abilities.
• After the original experiment, we presented additional trials to examine whether infants correctly associated sound patterns with cued locations, for which we did not find any evidence.
• The use of novel analysis techniques (Bayesian analyses, mixed effects modeling and cluster based permutation analyses) allowed us to draw better-informed conclusions.