Learning About Teaching from the Traditions We Teach: Reflections on an Undergraduate Buddhism Course

Abstract. Can one engage in pedagogical reflection from within the worldviews and practices of the religious traditions that one teaches? This essay explores the possibility of generating comparative models for teaching and learning via the Buddhist concepts of no‐self (anātman), skilful means (upāya‐kau?alya), and awakening (bodhi).     

Parenthood Residency Status and Criminal Desistance across Neighborhood Contexts

Research on desistance and parenthood has yielded mixed results bringing into question whether, and for whom, parenthood matters. Scholarship has not fully explored the importance of residency status or patterns of desistance across a full range of neighborhood contexts, nor examined distinctions between temporary and long-term desistance. Our study uses data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) to examine the association between parenthood residence and criminal desistance across levels of adolescent neighborhood poverty. Our findings demonstrate that parenthood has different meanings for desistance, depending on its duration, residency status, and neighborhood context.     

State orientation and memory load impair prospective memory performance in older compared to younger persons

A modified event-based paradigm of prospective memory was applied to investigate intention initiation in older and younger participants under high versus low memory load (subsequent episodic word recall vs. recognition). State versus action orientation, a personality dimension related to intention enactment, was also measured. State-oriented persons show a superiority effect for the storage of intentions in an explicit format but have a paradoxical deficit in their actual enactment. We predicted an interaction between aging, personality, and memory load, with longer intention-initiation latencies and higher omission rates for older state-oriented participants under high memory load. Results were consistent with predictions and are interpreted according to current personality and prospective memory models of aging.     

More is not always better: paradoxical effects of repetition on semantic accessibility

Repetition normally enhances memory. While in some cases the benefit of added repetition may be incremental, few would expect that massed repetition could actually reverse the benefits of brief repetition. Here we report two experiments that document a clear example of a paradoxical effect of massed repetition. Subjects first repeated words (e.g., "sheep") aloud one at a time for 0, 5, 10, 20, or 40 s. A free association phase followed in which cues could be completed with repeated words (e.g., "herd s___" for "sheep") or with semantically associated words (e.g., "fabric w___" for "wool"). Brief periods of repetition (5-10 s) resulted in priming, as would be expected based on research on repetition priming and spreading activation. Longer periods of repetition (20-40 s), however, abolished priming. Interestingly, this massed-repetition decrement was particularly robust for semantic associates of repeated words, and was evident after a 15-min delay. These findings document a paradoxical feature of the effects of rehearsal on memory: When ideas are repeated often enough, the benefits of rehearsal can actually be reversed.     

Appraisal of suicidal risk among adolescents and young adults through the Rorschach test

The aims of this study are to investigate suicidal behaviors among adolescents and young adults and to test an index composed using Rorschach test responses related to an increased risk of suicide. Using a cross-sectional design, 4 groups were studied (according to criteria of the Columbia Classification Algorithm of Suicide Assessment [Posner, Oquendo, Gould, Stanley, & Davies, 2007]): A group with suicidal ideation (n = 30), a group with parasuicidal behavior (n = 30), a group with near-lethal suicide attempts (n = 26), and a control group (n = 30). Responses to the Rorschach test yielded 6 potential indicators of suicidal behavior (scored according to Exner's Comprehensive System and the Suicidal Index for Adolescents; Silberg & Armstrong, 1992 ). Rorschach scores including at least 4 of these 6 indicators selected 69% of the people who had committed serious suicide attempts. The Rorschach Suicidal Index reached an acceptable reliability and was related to other criteria of suicide risk, such as the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI; Beck, Ward, Mendelsohn, Mock, & Erbaugh, 1961) and Linehan Reasons for Living Inventory (RFL-I; Linehan, Goodstein, Nielsen, & Chiles, 1983). Moreover, the Rorschach Suicidal Index showed incremental validity over the BDI and the RFL-I to predict suicidal behavior. A path analysis additionally showed that low social support was an important mediator between the Rorschach Suicidal Index and the number of suicide attempts committed by participants.     

Recovering from negative events by boosting implicit positive affect

Upregulation of implicit positive affect (PA) can act as a mechanism to deal with negative affect. Two studies tracked temporal changes in positive and negative affect (NA) assessed by self-report and the Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test (IPANAT; Quirin, Kazen, & Kuhl, 2009). Study 1 observed the predicted increases in implicit PA after exposure to a threat-related film clip, which correlated positively with the speed of recognising a happy face among an angry crowd. Study 2 replicated increases in implicit PA after exposition to the same film clip, and showed that such increases were enhanced by priming self-referential stimuli. The findings are discussed against the background of personality systems interaction (PSI) theory (Kuhl, 2000, 2001), which emphasises the role of the implicit self in affect regulation.     

A perceptual interference account of acquisition difficulties for non-native phonemes

This article presents an account of how early language experience can impede the acquisition of non-native phonemes during adulthood. The hypothesis is that early language experience alters relatively low-level perceptual processing, and that these changes interfere with the formation and adaptability of higher-level linguistic representations. Supporting data are presented from an experiment that tested the perception of English /r/ and /l/ by Japanese, German, and American adults. The underlying perceptual spaces for these phonemes were mapped using multidimensional scaling and compared to native-language categorization judgments. The results demonstrate that Japanese adults are most sensitive to an acoustic cue, F2, that is irrelevant to the English /r/-/l/ categorization. German adults, in contrast, have relatively high sensitivity to more critical acoustic cues. The results show how language-specific perceptual processing can alter the relative salience of within- and between-category acoustic variation, and thereby interfere with second language acquisition.     

Emotion and intuition

We investigated effects of emotional states on the ability to make intuitive judgments about the semantic coherence of word triads. Participants were presented word triads, consisting of three clue words that either were weakly associated with a common fourth concept (coherent triads) or had no common associate (incoherent triads). In Experiment 1, participants in a neutral mood discriminated coherent and incoherent triads reliably better than chance level even if they did not consciously retrieve the solution word. In Experiment 2, the induction of a positive mood reliably improved intuitive coherence judgments, whereas participants in a negative mood performed at chance level. We conclude that positive mood potentiates spread of activation to weak or remote associates in memory, thereby improving intuitive coherence judgments. By contrast, negative mood appears to restrict spread of activation to close associates and dominant word meanings, thus impairing intuitive coherence judgments.