Motivations and self-presentation strategies on Korean-based "Cyworld" weblog format personal homepages.

The main purposes of this study are to find out individuals' motives and interpersonal self-presentation strategies on constructing Korean weblog format personal homepage (e.g., "Cyworld mini-homepage"). The study also attempts to find predictor motives that lead to the activities of posting and maintaining a homepage and compare the self-presentation strategies used on the Web with those commonly used in interpersonal situations. By using a principal component factor analysis, four salient self-presentation strategy factors and five interpretable mini-homepage hosting motive factors were identified. Accompanying multiple regression analysis shows that entertainment and personal income factors are major predictors in explaining homepage maintenance expenditures and frequencies of updating.     

Opposing effects of stimulus-driven and memory-driven attention in visual search

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - When one searches for a specific target in a cluttered visual scene, a perceptually salient stimulus or a stimulus that matches working memory’s contents...     

Sacred Canopies or Religious Markets? The Effect of County-Level Religious Diversity on Later Changes in Religious Involvement

Secularization theories, such as Berger's Sacred Canopy argument, hold that religious diversity leads to a decline in religious participation. Religious market models (e.g., Finke and Stark) argue the opposite. Voas, Olson, and Crockett found that nearly all of the vast research exploring this important question prior to 2002 was flawed due to a previously unrecognized noncausal statistical relationship between measures of religious diversity and measures of religious participation. Since 2002, this methodological issue has largely stymied research on this important topic. We first describe how, following Voas et al.’s recommendations, longitudinal models can overcome these problems. We then apply these methods to data measuring the religious composition of all U.S. counties found in the Religious Congregations and Membership Studies from 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010. Using multilevel longitudinal regression models, we find that greater county-level religious diversity is followed by later declines in county-level religious participation rates. The negative effect size of religious diversity is large and robust to changes in the control variables and different methods of measuring religious diversity.     

The Rhetoric Of Context

This paper presents a critical appraisal of the recent turn in comparative religious ethics to virtue theory; it argues that the specific aspirations of virtue ethicists to make ethics more contextual, interdisciplinary, and practice‐centered has in large measure failed to match the rhetoric. I suggest that the focus on the category of the human and practices associated with self‐formation along with a methodology grounded in “analogical imagination” has actually poeticized the subject matter into highly abstract textual studies on normative voices within traditions, largely in isolation from considerations of socio‐historical context, political and institutional pressures, and the lived ethics of non‐elite moral actors. I conclude with some programmatic suggestions for how the field of comparative religious ethics can move forward.     

BODY DISSATISFACTION AND DISORDERED EATING AMONG COLLEGE WOMEN IN CHINA, SOUTH KOREA, AND THE UNITED STATES: CONTRASTING PREDICTIONS FROM SOCIOCULTURAL AND FEMINIST THEORIES

Body dissatisfaction and disordered eating were compared across groups of college women from China ( n = 109), South Korea ( n = 137), and the United States ( n = 102). Based on cultural differences in the amount of exposure to Western appearance standards, particularly the thin-body ideal, sociocultural theory ( Thompson, Heinberg, Altabe, & Tantleff-Dunn, 1999 ) would predict that body dissatisfaction and disordered eating would be highest in the U.S. sample and lowest in the Chinese sample. In contrast, based on the speed and pervasiveness of changes in women's roles, feminist theory ( Bordo, 1993 ; Jeffreys, 2005 ) would predict that body dissatisfaction and disordered eating would be highest in the Korean sample and lowest in the U.S. sample. Multidimensional measures indicated the highest levels of body dissatisfaction and disordered eating in the Korean sample and the lowest levels in the U.S. sample, indicating that predictions derived from feminist theory were a better fit to the data than predictions derived from sociocultural theory. Results indicated that theoretical understandings of body dissatisfaction must recognize not only differences between Western and non-Western cultures, but also differences among non-Western cultures.     

A reliability generalization study of the Frost Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (F-MPS)

Perfectionism has been identified as a common concern among clients who seek counseling services. For more than 20 years, the Frost Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (F-MPS) has been used extensively to measure the construct of individuals' perfectionism. The current study used reliability generalization to identify the average score reliability as well as variables explaining the variability of score reliability. Typical reliability across subscale scores ranged from .71 to.86 with the Doubt about Action subscale showing the least variability and the Organization subscale showing the most. In addition, sex, language, and standard deviation of the scale had statistically significant relations to reliability estimates.     

Neuronal representation of conditioned taste in the basolateral amygdala of rats

Animals develop robust learning and long lasting taste aversion memory once they experience a new taste that is followed by visceral discomfort. A large body of literature has supported the hypothesis that basolateral amygdala (BLA) plays a critical role in the acquisition and extinction of such conditioned taste aversions (CTA). Despite the evidence that BLA is crucially engaged during CTA training, it is unclear how BLA neural activity represents the conditioned tastes. Here, we incorporated a modified behavioral paradigm suitable for single unit study, one which utilizes a sequence of pulsed saccharin and water infusion via intraoral cannulae. After conditioning, we investigated BLA unit activity while animals experience the conditioned taste (saccharin). Behavioral tests of taste reactivity confirmed that the utilized training procedure produced reliable acquisition and expression of the aversion throughout test sessions. When neural activity was compared between saccharin and water trials, half of the recorded BLA units (77/149) showed differential activity according to the types of solution. 76% of those cells (29/38) in the conditioned group showed suppressed activity, while only 44% of taste reactive cells (17/39) in controls showed suppressed activity during saccharin trials (relative to water trials). In addition, the overall excitability of BLA units was increased as shown by altered characteristics of burst activity after conditioning. The changes in BLA activity as a consequence of CTA were maintained throughout test sessions, consistent with the behavioral study. The current study suggests that the neuronal activity evoked by a sweet taste is altered as a consequence of CTA learning, and that the overall change might be related to the learning induced negative affect.     

A Case Study of Solution-Focused Brief Family Therapy

Abstract

Solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT) was developed as a form of family therapy. Recently, these features have blurred. This case study explores how Insoo Kim Berg interacts with multiple family members in SFBT. The results indicate that she used a circular procedure to ensure that all the family members were involved in the process. The analysis demonstrates the importance of purposeful use of language and the influence of systems theory in SFBT. SFBT provides a useful framework that enables a family therapist to work together with families to help them make the changes they want with their own strengths and resources.