Social facilitation in young toddlers

As a test of Zajonc's social facilitation hypothesis, the behavior of 18 young toddlers (16-24 mo.) was observed. Their performance on a simple task was incongruent with his hypothesis, that is, these young toddlers may not evaluate their outcomes in relation to a social standard.     

Roles of salience and strategy in conjunction search

In some cases, the search for a conjunction target proceeds through the smaller group of elements in a display, whereas in others, search is limited to those elements that share a particular feature with the target. In 6 experiments, participants searched for a conjunction target among displays consisting of various proportions of 2 distractor types. Smaller-group search was more prevalent than target-feature search with denser displays and with features that were highly discriminable. Explicit instructions to limit search to a specific feature affected performance only when the discriminability of the guiding feature was much greater than the other target feature. Together, these experiments show that bottom-up factors have more influence in guiding conjunction searches than previously thought.     

‘As in a Mirror’: Jonathan Edwards,Self-Love and Enlarging to Receive Another

Through a robust deployment of visual metaphors, Jonathan Edwards’s theology utilizes notions of vision to articulate his doctrine of God, creation, anthropology, redemption and ultimately glorification. Focusing on anthropology, this article attends to how human beings are constituted through sight, and reconstituted (i.e. regenerated) as they are contemplated in the Son and as they are given a vision of the Father in the Son by the Spirit of illumination. Put differently, Edwards’s anthropology is ordered around its teleology of becoming like God only if one can ‘see him as he is’ (1 Jn 3:2), which is anticipated by faith in this present age and ‘through a mirror dimly’ (1 Jn 13:12). After mooring his anthropology to broader theological concerns, the article narrows to consider how Edwards’s idiosyncratic personalism is developed around the notion of a ‘reflective self’ that can enlarge to internalize an ‘other’. Clarifying this notion is a brief comparison of a similar construction in Thomas Aquinas, showing how Edwards’s theory of loving neighbor as oneself is a unique contribution to questions concerning personhood, self-love and neighbor-love.     

The Southern Pub Crawl and Brawl: An Examination of the Alcohol–Violence Nexus in a Southern City

This research examines the relationship between alcohol availability and crime, specifically the variation of effects between the presence of off- and on-site establishments on violent crime. We contribute to extant research by providing a more comprehensive disaggregation of alcohol establishments. Framed in routine activities theory, we argue that alcohol availability will exacerbate violent crime rates by increasing quantities of motivated offenders and suitable targets, while simultaneously decreasing the number of capable guardians. We find a nuanced relationship between the presence of alcohol establishments and violence that varies based on establishment type as well as the characteristics of its block group.     

Trends in Behavior-Analytic Gambling Research and Treatment

The purpose of the present review was to analyze research outcomes for all gambling studies reported in the behavior analysis literature. We used the search term “gambling” to identify articles that were published in behaviorally oriented journals between the years 1992 and 2012 and categorized the content of each article as empirical or conceptual. Next, we examined and categorized the empirical articles by inclusion of an experimental manipulation and treatment to alleviate at least some aspect of pathological gambling, participant population used, type of gambling task employed in the research, whether the participants in the study actually gambled, and the behavioral phenomena of interest. The results show that the rate of publication of gambling research has increased in the last 6 years, and a vast majority of articles are empirical. Of the empirical articles, examinations of treatment techniques or methods are scarce; slot machine play is the most represented form of gambling, and slightly greater than half of the research included compensation based on gambling outcomes within experiments. We discuss implications and future directions based on these observations of the published literature.     

Using a Compromise Programming Framework to Integrating Spatially Specific Preference Information for Forest Management Problems

The development of forest management plans is a multi‐criteria problem that usually involves multiple stakeholders. In forested recreational areas or natural parks, stakeholders could include government officials, forest companies and visitors to the area. With the progress of mobile phone technology, preference information (including aesthetic values) can be conveniently obtained from stakeholders while they are in the forest. This paper develops a methodological approach that incorporates place‐specific opinion preference into the development of alternative forest management plans. Through the use of a modified Compromise Programming approach, prospective alternatives are developed, which optimize the opinions of stakeholders and the quantity of timber over time depending on specified parameters. The analysis is based on a small simulated forest holding and place‐specific simulated opinion data. To allow for a comparison between potential stakeholder groups, the opinion data was generated by a method that produced three separate groups. The results indicate the practical use of place‐specific preferences and provide a means to incorporate the information to generate possible alternative plans. In addition, the analysis highlights that by segregating the preference information into groups, the planning of more specific courses of actions can be made. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Intensive OutPatient Therapy for Clergy Burnout: How Much Difference Can a Week Make?

A pre-test and post-test quasi-experimental matched pairs design was used to assess the effectiveness of a week-long multi-therapist intensive outpatient intervention process with clergy suffering from depression and burnout. Participants (n = 23) in the “Clergy in Kairos” program of the Pastoral Institute (Muse in J Pastor Care Couns 61(3):183–195, 2007) constituted the experimental variable. Clergy surveyed from United Methodist and Presbyterian denominations (n = 121) provided a control group from which 23 respondents were selected whose pre-test scores in depression and burnout were statistically equivalent to those in the experimental group. The treatment group consisted of clergy from three denominations who self-selected (or in some cases were referred by denominational officials) into the program. At the outset, clergy in both groups reported equivalent levels of conflict, emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and depression. At the 6-months follow-up, clergy in the experimental group showed significant improvement of depression, emotional exhaustion, and depersonalization scores. By contrast, there was no change in the burnout and depression scores in the control group at 6-months post-test. Findings suggest the usefulness of a week-long multi-therapist intensive outpatient intervention in reducing burnout and depression.     

The Text Matters: Eye Movements Reflect the Cognitive Processing of Interrogation Rights

Suspects' decisions to waive or invoke interrogation rights have considerable impact on whether subsequent interrogations ensue, self‐incriminating information is offered, and in the case of innocent suspects, wrongful convictions occur. Although interrogation warnings differ in their text characteristics, empirically examining the influence of these text differences on suspects' ability to process and comprehend their rights has largely been neglected, which is especially problematic for vulnerable populations. Using a novel approach, we monitored the eye movements of 60 juveniles as they silently read different versions of Miranda warnings in order to investigate the relationship among text characteristics, processing difficulty, and comprehension problems. Results indicated that text characteristics were associated with processing difficulties and these processing difficulties were strongly correlated with comprehension of the warnings. Along with advancing basic and applied research programs, this approach can inform policy decisions and benefit vulnerable populations whose comprehension of interrogation rights is encumbered by legalese.Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Searching for serial refreshing in working memory: Using response times to track the content of the focus of attention over time

One popular idea is that, to support the maintenance of a set of elements over brief periods of time, the focus of attention rotates among the different elements, thereby serially refreshing the content of working memory (WM). In the research reported here, probe letters were presented between to-be-remembered letters, and response times to these probes were used to infer the status of the different items in WM. If the focus of attention cycles from one item to the next, its content should be different at different points in time, and this should be reflected in a change in the response time patterns over time. Across a set of four experiments, we demonstrated a striking pattern of invariance in the response time patterns over time, suggesting either that the content of the focus of attention did not change over time or that response times cannot be used to infer the content of the focus of attention. We discuss how this pattern constrains models of WM, attention, and human information processing.