Personality and strength-related attitude dimensions: Between and within-person relationships

Examined personality variables as predictors and moderators of strength-related attitude dimensions (SRAD) using multilevel modeling. Results revealed significant person-level variation in attitude importance, extremity, and ambivalence across attitude objects. Study 1 found the personality variable of need to evaluate (NE) predicted extremity across attitude objects, and finding meaning in life (ML) was predictive of importance across objects. Study 2 revealed that neuroticism and state anxiety were significant predictors of ambivalence across attitude objects. Finally, the NE, the Need for Cognition, and Openness to Experience each moderated the within-person relationship between extremity and ambivalence across objects, with higher values on the individual difference variables being related to stronger within-person relationships. Implications for research on attitude strength and the relationships between personality variables and attitudes are discussed.     

Embodied Domestics,Embodied Politics: Women,Home, and Agoraphobia

Agoraphobia is commonly considered to be a fear of outside, open, or crowded spaces, and is treated with therapies that work on acclimating the agoraphobic to external places she would otherwise avoid. I argue, however, that existential phenomenology provides the resources for an alternative interpretation and treatment of agoraphobia that locates the problem of the disorder not in something lying beyond home, but rather in a flawed relationship with home itself. More specifically, I demonstrate that agoraphobia is the lived body expression of a person who has developed an inward-turning tendency with respect to being-at-home, and who finds herself, as a result, vulnerable and even incapacitated when attempting to emerge into the public arena as a fully participatory agent. I consider this thesis in light of the fact that since World War I agoraphobia has been diagnosed significantly more in women than in men; indeed, one study found women to be 89% more likely than men to suffer from agoraphobia. I conclude that agoraphobia is a disorder that stands as an emblematic expression of the ongoing pathology of being a woman in contemporary society–a disorder that reflects that even today women belong to a political world in which they are not able to feel properly at-home.     

Developmental profiles for multiple object tracking and spatial memory: typically developing preschoolers and people with Williams syndrome

The ability to track moving objects, a crucial skill for mature performance on everyday spatial tasks, has been hypothesized to require a specialized mechanism that may be available in infancy (i.e. indexes). Consistent with the idea of specialization, our previous work showed that object tracking was more impaired than a matched spatial memory task in individuals with Williams syndrome (WS), a genetic disorder characterized by severe visuo‐spatial impairment. We now ask whether this unusual pattern of performance is a reflection of general immaturity or of true abnormality, possibly reflecting the atypical brain development in WS. To examine these two possibilities, we tested typically developing 3‐ and 4‐year‐olds and people with WS on multiple object tracking (MOT) and memory for static spatial location. The maximum number of objects that could be correctly tracked or remembered (estimated from the k‐statistic) showed similar developmental profiles in typically developing 3‐ and 4‐year‐old children, but the WS profile differed from either age group. People with WS could track more objects than 3‐year‐olds, and the same number as 4‐year‐olds, but they could remember the locations of more static objects than both 3‐ and 4‐year‐olds. Combining these data with those from our previous studies, we found that typically developing children show increases in the number of objects they can track or remember between the ages of 3 and 6, and these increases grow in parallel across the two tasks. In contrast, object tracking in older children and adults with WS remains at the level of 4‐year‐olds, whereas the ability to remember multiple locations of static objects develops further. As a whole, the evidence suggests that MOT and memory for static location develop in tandem typically, but not in WS. Atypical development of the parietal lobe in people with WS could play a causal role in the abnormal, uneven pattern of performance in WS. This interpretation is consistent with the idea that multiple object tracking engages different mechanisms from those involved in memory for static object location, and that the former can be particularly disrupted by atypical development.     

It just felt right: The neural correlates of the fluency heuristic

Simple heuristics exploit basic human abilities, such as recognition memory, to make decisions based on sparse information. Based on the relative speed of recognizing two objects, the fluency heuristic infers that the one recognized more quickly has the higher value with respect to the criterion of interest. Behavioral data show that reliance on retrieval fluency enables quick inferences. Our goal with the present functional magnetic resonance imaging study was to isolate fluency-heuristic-based judgments to map the use of fluency onto specific brain areas that might give a better understanding of the heuristic’s underlying processes. Activation within the claustrum for fluency heuristic decisions was found. Given that claustrum activation is thought to reflect the integration of perceptual and memory elements into a conscious gestalt, we suggest this activation correlates with the experience of fluency.     

Patienten mit einer wahnhaften Depression in der Maßregel nach § 63 StGB

Delinquency of depressed patients numerically plays a minor role in criminal or civil law. Compared with the high prevalence of affective disorders in the general population, the frequency of patients in forensic psychiatric hospitals with the respective disorder as a main diagnosis is low. The spectrum of possible crimes committed by depressed subjects essentially comprises disease-characteristic offences, amongst which cases of extended suicide or attempted suicide are the foremost and most tragic offences. Based on 2 case reports notions of extended suicide as well as questions of forensic assessment are discussed.     

Making Sense of Suffering: A Preliminary Study of Changes in Religious Women Adjusting to Severe Adversity

This qualitative study examined interviews from 25 women who held theistic beliefs from Christian, Islamic, or Jewish traditions. All had recently experienced severe adversity but reported they were coping well. Analysis illustrated changes in religious beliefs and attitudes they made as a result of learning to cope. Differences were found among the 3 religious groups. Findings of this preliminary study suggest that religious meaning and experience may change because of the process of learning to cope with severe adversity. Recommendations are made for counseling theistically oriented women.     

CONSCIOUS OBJECTIONS: GOD AND THE CONSCIOUSNESS DEBATES

Abstract. Consciousness studies are dogged with religious overtones, and many researchers fight hard against Christian ideas of soul or anything supernatural. This gives many studies on consciousness a particular relevance to religious belief. Many writers assume that, if consciousness can be explained physically, religious belief in a soul—and perhaps religious belief itself—must be false. Theorists of consciousness grapple with questions of materialism and reduction in trying to understand how the physical brain can produce the bizarre sensations that we call ourselves. In this essay I discuss the problems in trying to separate religion from science in such a “fuzzy” area as consciousness. I look at the question of what precisely theories of consciousness are trying to explain. I consider theories from David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, and Roger Penrose as examples of different approaches. Although all of these are materialistically based, I argue that they do not necessarily demonstrate the nonexistence of a soul and also that religious belief does not necessarily require belief in a nonmaterial soul. I conclude with a discussion of why a physical/ materialist explanation of consciousness is desired and how religious bias is still a problem in this scientific/philosophical field.     

Graded representations in the acquisition of English and German transitive constructions

English and German children aged 2 years 4 months and 4 years heard both novel and familiar verbs in sentences whose form was grammatical, but which mismatched the event they were watching (e.g., ‘The frog is pushing the lion’, when the lion was actually the ‘agent’ or ‘doer’ of the pushing). These verbs were then elicited in new sentences. All children mostly corrected the familiar verb (i.e., they used the agent as the grammatical subject), but there were cross-linguistic differences among the two-year-olds concerning the novel verb. When English 2-year-olds used the novel verb they mostly corrected. However, their most frequent response was to avoid using the novel verb altogether. German 2-year-olds corrected the novel verb significantly more often than their English counterparts, demonstrating more robust verb-general representations of agent- and patient-marking. These findings provide support for a ‘graded representations’ view of development, which proposes that grammatical representations may be simultaneously abstract but ‘weak’.