Ethnodoxy: How Popular Ideologies Fuse Religious and Ethnic Identities

Popular beliefs conflating ethnic identities with particular faiths can lead to marginalization of religiously and ethnically “other” and fuel ethnoreligious conflict even in secularized societies. Despite their importance to ethnoreligious conflict and coexistence, ideological conflations of faith and ethnos have previously received little scholarly attention. We fill the gap by introducing the concept of ethnodoxy: a collectively held belief system that rigidly links a group's ethnic identity to its dominant faith. We theorize this phenomenon at three levels: macro (the interplay between religion and ethnonational identities), micro (construction of ethnoreligious identities and imagined communities viewed from a social identity theory perspective), and meso (the nature and functions of popular ideologies and religiosities). Subsequently, ethnodoxy is conceptualized as an ideal‐typical syndrome of six component beliefs. We further operationalize and verify the concept using representative national survey data from Russia. Findings show ethnodoxy's extent, coherence, dimensionality, and associations with religious and ethnic intolerance.     

Alcohol-related Cues Promote Automatic Racial Bias

Previous research has shown that alcohol consumption can increase the expression of race bias by impairing control-related processes. The current study tested whether simple exposure to alcohol-related images can also increase bias, but via a different mechanism. Participants viewed magazine ads for either alcoholic or nonalcoholic beverages prior to completing Payne's (2001) Weapons Identification Task (WIT). As predicted, participants primed with alcohol ads exhibited greater race bias in the WIT than participants primed with neutral beverages. Process dissociation analyses indicated that these effects were due to automatic (relative to controlled) processes having a larger influence on behavior among alcohol-primed relative to neutral-primed participants. Structural equation modeling further showed that the alcohol-priming effect was mediated by increases in the influence of automatic associations on behavior. These data suggest an additional pathway by which alcohol can potentially harm inter-racial interactions, even when no beverage is consumed.     

New Directions in Capacity Building: Incorporating Cultural Competence into the Interactive Systems Framework

The UMBC Psychology Department's Center for Community Collaboration (CCC) provides training and support for capacity building to promote substance abuse and mental health treatment as well as adherence improvement in community agencies funded through the Ryan White Act serving persons living with HIV/AIDS. This article describes an approach to dissemination of Evidence Based Practices (EBPs) for these services that uses the Interactive Systems Framework (ISF) and incorporates a collaborative process involving trainer cultural competence, along with a comprehensive assessment of organizational needs, culture, and climate that culminates in tailored training and ongoing collaboration. This article provides: (1) an overview of the CCC's expanded ISF for the effective dissemination of two EBPs—motivational interviewing and the stages of change perspective; (2) an examination of the role of trainer cultural competence within the ISF framework, particularly attending to organizational culture and climate; and (3) case examples to demonstrate this approach for both general and innovation‐specific capacity building in two community based organizations. Special Issue: Advances in Bridging Research and Practice Using the Interactive System Framework for Dissemination and Implementation; Guest Editors: Abraham Wandersman, Paul Flaspohler, Catherine A. Lesesne, Richard Puddy; Action Editor: Emilie Phillips Smith     

Decomposing the brain: components and modes, networks and nodes

Smith and colleagues recently presented a temporal independent component analysis (tICA) decomposition of resting-state functional MRI data. Compared to the widely used spatial ICA (sICA), tICA better allows for a brain region to engage in multiple, independent interactions with other regions and will potentially offer new insights into brain function.     

Evaluation of the effectiveness of minimum intervention measures on young offenders

The goal of this study was to analyze the recidivism rate in minor offenders to whom a minimum intervention measure was applied after their first felony or misdemeanor, and to determine the variables associated with recidivism. The sample was made up of 154 minors from the province of Santa Cruz of Tenerife (Canary Islands, Spain). The information was collected from the database of the Minors' Court. The recidivism rate depends on the measure imposed, ranging between 14 and 40.6%. The degree of agreement between the Technical Team's proposal and the court decision was 70%. With regard to the variables associated with recidivism, a model was obtained through logistic regression that correctly classified 83.7% of the cases, and was made up of the variables perception of parenting problems, intervention of social services, and social isolation.     

Social cognitive and demographic factors related to adolescents’ intrinsic satisfaction with school

Based on social cognitive theory, the purpose of this study is to examine certain social cognitive and demographic factors involved in intrinsic satisfaction amongst secondary school students of different cultural backgrounds in a new migrant-receiving country. Given the role of schools in youth acculturation and adaptation, it is important to detect the variables related to successful academic adaptation of adolescents. The sample comprised of 938 South American, African and Spanish adolescents who settled in Spain. Correlation analyses showed that age, social self-efficacy, academic self-concept, attribution style and intrinsic satisfaction were related. ANOVAs revealed that girls displayed a greater tendency to attribute their outcomes to internal factors than boys. Furthermore, older and Spanish adolescents displayed lower levels of intrinsic satisfaction than younger and immigrant adolescents. Path analyses found that social self-efficacy and academic self-concept were the best predictors of intrinsic satisfaction. Therefore, the promotion of social self-efficacy and academic self-concept should increase intrinsic satisfaction in schools. In addition, research into the role of cultural origin in self-regulation in schools may be necessary.     

Revisiting social recognition systems in invertebrates

Since the 1970s, the ability of some invertebrate species to recognize individual conspecifics has attracted increased scientific interest. However, there is still confusion in the literature, possibly due to the lack of unambiguous criteria for classifying social recognition in its different forms. Here, we synthesize the results of studies on invertebrates and provide a framework with the purpose of identifying research needs and directions for future investigations. Following in part Sherman et al.'s (Behavioural ecology: an evolutionary approach. Blackwell Science, Oxford, pp 69-96, 1997) definition of 'recognition systems' and Tibbetts and Dale's (Trends Ecol Evol 22:529-537, 2007) classification of 'individual recognition,' we first discuss different case studies that exemplify the categories of 'familiar recognition' and 'class-level recognition.' Then, through the analysis of the invertebrate literature, we illustrate eight key properties that characterize 'true individual recognition' systems. We are confident that the proposed framework will provide opportunities for exciting discoveries of the cognitive abilities in invertebrates.     

Gestural sense-making: hand gestures as intersubjective linguistic enactments

The ubiquitous human practice of spontaneously gesturing while speaking demonstrates the embodiment, embeddedness, and sociality of cognition. The present essay takes gestural practice to be a paradigmatic example of a more general claim: human cognition is social insofar as our embedded, intelligent, and interacting bodies select and construct meaning in a way that is intersubjectively constrained and defeasible. Spontaneous co-speech gesture is markedly interesting because it at once confirms embodied aspects of linguistic meaning-making that formalist and linguistic turn-type philosophical approaches fail to appreciate, and it also forefronts intersubjectivity as an inherent and inherently normative dimension of communicative action. Co-speech hand gestures, as linguistically meaningful speech acts, demonstrate both sedimentation and spontaneity (in the sense of Maurice Merleau-Ponty??s dialectic of linguistic expression (2002)), or features of convention and nonconvention in a Gricean sense (1989). Yet neither pragmatic nor classic phenomenological approaches to communication can accommodate the practice of co-speech hand gesturing without some rehabilitation and reorientation. Pragmatic criteria of intersubjectivity, normativity, and rationality need to confront the non-propositional and nonverbal meaning-making of embodied encounters. Phenomenological treatments of expression and intersubjectivity must consider the normative nature of high-order social practices like language use. Reciprocally critical exchanges between these traditions and gesture studies yield an improved philosophy that treats language as a multi-modal medium for collaborative meaning achievement. The proper paradigm for these discussions is found in enactive approaches to social cognition. Co-speech hand gestures are first and foremost emergent elements of social interaction, not the external whirring of an isolated internal consciousness. In contrast to current literature that frequently presents gestures as uncontrollable bodily upsurge or infallible imagistic phenomenon that drives and dances with verbal or ??linguistic?? convention (McNeill 1992, 2005), I suggest that we study gestures as dynamic, embodied, and shared tools for collaborative sense-making.     

Nodding in dis/agreement: a tale of two cultures

Head movement is commonly used to communicate positive versus negative response. However, whereas in US culture, vertical head movement denotes positivity (nodding to say “yes”) and horizontal head movement is associated with negativity (shaking heads to say “no”), in Bulgaria, this response pattern is reversed, that is, horizontal head movement means “yes” and vertical head movement means “no.” Thus, these two cultures spatially “embody” agreement via different movement directions. We examined the effect of such cultural differences on cognitive processing that has no communicative intent by comparing ratings of likeability, brightness, and positive feeling associated with different color moving dots. Participants followed the dots’ movement with their heads in a 2 (direction: vertical vs. horizontal) by 2 (speed: fast vs. slow) design. We found a two-way country by speed of movement interaction such that Bulgarian participants associated colors with more positive feeling when those were perceived in combination with slower head movement irrespective of movement direction. US participants, on the other hand, rated color dots as better mood-enhancing in combination with faster head movement. There was a similar two-way country by movement speed interaction for likeability ratings but none for brightness. Findings are discussed in terms of variability in gestural meaning and culture-specific embodiment patterns.