Poverty, Patriotism, and National Covenant: Jonathan Edwards and Public Life

In this essay I address three ways in which Edwards can inform Christian understanding of public life. First I show how Edwards provides both philosophical and theological rationales for social engagement and thereby resists the separation of religion from public life, and use his consideration of poverty as an illustration. Part II examines Edwards's dialectical treatment of patriotism, demonstrating both its importance to the Christian life and its susceptibility to deceptive accommodation to culture. Finally, in Part III I discuss Edwards's use of "national covenant," which despite its temptation to chauvinism Edwards used to undermine national pride. In the conclusion I assess what we can use from Edwards for contemporary Christian understandings of public life.     

Contextual conditioning and reinstatement of extinguished instrumental responding

In three experiments we studied the relationship between contextual conditioning and the reinstatement of extinguished lever pressing that occurs when noncontingent food is introduced following extinction. In all three experiments the non-contingent food was presented off-baseline (with the response levers not present). On subsequent tests, with the response levers present, animals that had been exposed to food showed more reinstatement of lever pressing than control animals. This finding rules out alternative mechanisms for the reinstated responding that rely on the interaction of non-contingent food and responding, such as superstitious reinforcement or the discriminative after-effects of food. In addition, in each experiment we demonstrated that manipulations known to affect contextual conditioning (signalling the food in Experiment 1, context extinction in Experiment 2, and switching contexts in Experiment 3) reduced the reinstatement. These results are consistent with the claim that contextual conditioning is important in controlling instrumental conditioning and closely parallel findings concerning the reinstatement of Pavlovian responsing following extinction.     

Loving and angry? Happy and sad? Understanding and reporting of mixed emotions in mother–child relationships by 6‐ to 12‐year‐olds

The Evaluative Space Model of emotions allows for the coactivation of positive‐appetitive and negative‐avoidant systems, but few studies have examined mixed emotions in child development. Existing research suggests children's understanding of opposite valence emotion combinations emerges by approximately 11 years of age. However, it is not yet clear whether various opposite valence combinations are understood at different ages, nor whether children can understand them in others before they have experienced such mixed emotions themselves. Semi‐structured interviews with 97 children investigated whether they regarded six combinations of opposite valence mixed emotions as possible, could provide reasons for them, and report their own experience of each in the context of mother–child relationships. Both understanding that such combinations are possible and ability to provide reasons for them increased after age 6 and up to age 11, but were still incomplete in 12‐year‐olds. Understanding of different opposite valence combinations developed at different rates. At each age, fewer children who showed understanding of these combinations in others reported having had a similar experience themselves. The findings suggest a need to systematically examine a range of mixed emotions in order to develop a comprehensive theory of the development of mixed emotion understanding. They also suggest extending research into adolescence.     

Risk taking from the participant's perspective: the case of driving and accident risk.

Although perceived health risk plays a prominent role in theories of health behavior, its empirical role in risk taking is less clear. In Study 1 (N = 129), 2 measures of drivers' risk-taking behavior were found to be unrelated to self-estimates of accident concern but to be related to self-ratings of driving skill and the perceived thrill of driving. In Study 2 (N = 405), out of a wide range of potential influences, accident concern had the weakest relationship with risk taking. The authors concluded that although health risk is a key feature in many theories of health behavior and a central focus for researchers and policy makers, it may not be such a prominent factor for those actually taking the risk.     

Auditory Long term Memory: Repetition Priming of Voice Recognition

Two experiments examined repetition priming in the recognition of famous voices. In Experiment 1, reaction times for fame decisions to famous voice samples were shorter than in an unprimed condition, when voices were primed by a different voice sample of the same person having been presented in an earlier phase of the experiment. No effect of voice repetition was observed for non-famous voices. In Experiment 2, it was investigated whether this priming effect is voice-specific or whether it is related to post-perceptual processes in person recognition. Recognizing a famous voice was again primed by having earlier heard a different voice sample of that person. Although an earlier exposure to that person's name did not cause any priming, there was some indication of priming following an earlier exposure to that person's face. Finally, earlier exposure to the identical voice sample (as compared to a different voice sample from the same person) caused a considerable bias towards responding 'famous'-i.e. performance benefits for famous but costs for nonfamous voices. The findings suggestthat (1) repetition priming invoice recognition primarily involves the activation of perceptual representations of voices, and (2) it is important to determine the conditions in which priming causes bias effects that need to be disentangled from performance benefits.