Muslims and the media in the blogosphere

In the past two decades a virtual Ummah has evolved in cyberspace. While some of these websites are targeted specifically at Muslims, others attempt to provide outreach on Islam or counter Islamophobic bias. As noted by Jon Anderson, in his pioneering work on Islam in cyberspace, Muslims were among the first engineering students to create websites at the dawn of the Internet, before mainstream Islamic organizations posted official websites. There is a wealth of material by Muslims in English and Western languages, some of it archived for research. This article explores the methodological problems posed in studying the range of Islam-content blogs, from private individuals to religious scholars, as well as Muslim websites that feature comments from readers. The focus of the paper is an analysis of blogs about Islam or by Muslims that either act as watchdogs on the media or try to provide alternative views to the mainstream media of competing Muslim groups. Researching these blogs as a form of e-ethnography calls for a rethinking and refining of anthropological methodology as e-ethnography.     

What Influences Work-Family Conflict? The Function of Work Support and Working from Home

The current study examined how work support resources and working from home influenced forms of work-family conflict (WFC) in employees at a large corporation. Scales measuring employee’s general WFC, time-based WFC, and strain-based WFC were used to evaluate the extent to which employees experienced work-induced conflict at home. Two forms of working at home were assessed, days worked at home and extra hours worked at home, and five variables measured the extent of one’s support resources: work social support, organizational support, individual consideration from one’s manager, idealized influence from one’s manager and contingent reward from one’s manager. We predicted that days worked at home would be negatively related to the three forms of WFC, while the extra hours worked at home would be positively related. Moreover, we hypothesized that the five support variables would moderate the relationship between extra hours worked at home and the types of WFC. The data supported some of the predictions, and the implications of these findings are discussed.     

Couple Psychoeducation for New Parents: Observed and Potential Effects on Parenting

The transition to parenthood is a substantial challenge for many couples, and the extent to which the partners can support each other and their relationship is strongly related to the sensitivity and responsiveness of their parenting of their infant. This paper critically analyses the links between the couple relationship and parenting of infants and reviews the research evaluating couple psychoeducation (CP) to assist couples’ parenting of their infant. It is concluded that CP has considerable potential to enhance couples’ adaptation to parenthood and enhance the sensitivity and responsiveness of parenting of new infants.     

Commentary: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges to the Study of Emotion Regulation and Psychopathology

In this commentary, I argue that although emotion regulation and its role in psychopathology has been the focus of considerable psychological research with both children and adults, fundamental questions remain about how these phenomena are linked. I pose four challenges to the study of emotion regulation and psychopathology that have yet to be fully met, either empirically or conceptually. I note that a multi-level developmental approach that places emotion regulation within the context of both the larger self-regulatory system and the social relationships within which regulation occurs may be useful in understanding the emergence and maintenance of early behavioral patterns that evolve into disorders of psychological functioning.     

Unraveling the race paradox of achievement and self-views

Considerable evidence indicates that African American students achieve less academically than European American students. Yet, African American students hold more positive self-views than their European American counterparts. Previous studies that address these seemingly paradoxical findings focus on students in a relatively narrow age range and/or convenience samples. Therefore, the current study examines two common explanations for these seemingly paradoxical findings, among a large and diverse sample of African American and European American students (N = 1, 493) from elementary to post-secondary school and across the socioeconomic spectrum. Results indicate that among a diverse group of students and conceptualized in two different ways, African American students do not devalue academics. However, African American students are more likely than European American students to discount academic feedback.     

Induced cortical gamma-band oscillations reflect cognitive control elicited by implicit probability cues in the preparing-to-overcome-prepotency (POP) task

Previous research suggests that synchronous cortical gamma-band oscillations reflect the implementation of cognitive control in anticipation of the need to overcome prepotent responses. These studies often require participants to link task instructions with task cues signaling the need (or lack thereof) for cognitive control. Thus, the oscillatory response elicited by these cues may also reflect the implementation of explicit task instructions. The aim of this research was to determine whether gamma-band oscillations would also be increased in preparation for cognitive control when the need for that control was only made implicitly available to the participant. Using a task-ambiguous cue to indicate the position of a subsequent probe stimulus, we manipulated the need for cognitive control by varying the probability of high- and low-control probes appearing in each of two positions. Results show that participants developed the anticipated expectancies regarding probe identity in the two positions and that the anticipation of a high-control probe was associated with an increase in the power of induced cortical gamma band over frontal scalp recording sites.     

Subitizing in congenitally blind adults

We investigated the role of vision in tactile enumeration within and outside the subitizing range. Congenitally blind and sighted (blindfolded) participants were asked to enumerate quickly and accurately the number of fingers stimulated. Both groups of participants enumerated one to three fingers quickly and accurately but were much slower and less accurate with four to nine fingers. Within the subitizing range, blind participants performed no differently from both sighted (blindfolded) and sighted-seeing participants. Outside of the subitizing range, blind and sighted-seeing participants showed better performance than did sighted-blindfolded participants, suggesting that lack of access to the predominant sensory modality does affect performance. Together, these findings further support the claim that subitizing is a general perceptual mechanism and demonstrate that vision is not necessary for the development of the subitizing mechanism.     

Paranormal Encounters as Eyewitness Phenomena: Psychological Determinants of Atypical Perceptual Interpretations

Many people who report paranormal sightings (e.g., Bigfoot and UFO aliens) are apparently sincere. This places many such sightings in the category of eyewitness errors, rather than of deliberate deception. Recent research has supported this idea; in an earlier paper, we demonstrated that paranormal beliefs are facilitated by tendencies toward attention deficit hyperactive disorder, dissociation, and depression. These characteristics predicted specific patterns of beliefs in several paranormal phenomena. The present research addressed the question of whether such psychological tendencies would tend to create bias in perception and interpretation as well as in belief- in whether a person’s identification of a given stimulus as paranormal in nature would be influenced by the same factors previously demonstrated to influence paranormal beliefs. This hypothesis was supported. Specifically, those with dissociative tendencies were significantly more likely to identify given stimulus items as paranormal in nature than were those with lower dissociation scores. Dissociation was further shown to be related to paranormal beliefs, consistent with earlier findings. Results are discussed in terms of the reconfigurative dynamics known to operate in areas of human cognition such as eyewitness identification, and in terms of the generality of those effects to the realm of paranormal sightings.     

In the Eye of the Beholder: Eye-tracking Assessment of Social Information Processing in Aggressive Behavior

Acording to social information processing theories, aggressive children are hypersensitive to cues of hostility and threat in other people’s behavior. However, even though there is ample evidence that aggressive children over-interpret others’ behaviors as hostile, it is unclear whether this hostile attribution tendency does actually result from overattending to hostile and threatening cues. Since encoding is posited to consist of rapid automatic processes, it is hard to assess with the selfreport measures that have been used so far. Therefore, we used a novel approach to investigate visual encoding of social information. The eye movements of thirty 10–13 year old children with lower levels and thirty children with higher levels of aggressive behavior were monitored in real time with an eyetracker, as the children viewed ten different cartoon series of ambiguous provocation situations. In addition, participants answered questions concerning encoding and interpretation. Aggressive children did not attend more to hostile cues, nor attend less to non-hostile cues than non-aggressive children. Contrary, aggressive children looked longer at non-hostile cues, but nonetheless attributed more hostile intent than their non-aggressive peers. These findings contradict the traditional bottom-up processing hypotheses that aggressive behavior would be related with failure to attend to non-hostile cues. The findings seem best explained by topdown information processing, where aggressive children’s pre-existing hostile intent schemata (1) direct attention towards schema inconsistent non-hostile cues, (2) prevent further processing and recall of such schema-inconsistent information, and (3) lead to hostile intent attribution and aggressive responding, disregarding the schema-inconsistent non-hostile information.