A Stairway to Heaven? Structure of the Religious Involvement Inventory and Spiritual Well-Being Scale

Being religious or having spiritual beliefs has been linked to improved health and well-being in several empirical studies. Potential underlying mechanisms can be suggested by psychometrically reliable and valid indices. Two self-report measures of religiosity/spirituality were completed by a cohort of older adults: the Religious Involvement Inventory and the Spiritual Well-being Scale. Both were analyzed using principal components analysis and the Mokken scaling procedure. The latter technique examines whether items can be described as having a hierarchical structure. The results across techniques were comparable and hierarchical structures were discovered in the scales. Analysis of the hierarchy in the RII items suggested the latent trait assesses the extent to which an individual’s belief in God influences their life. Examining scales with a range of psychometric techniques may give a better indication of the latent construct being assessed, particularly the hierarchies within these which may be of interest to those investigating religiosity-health associations.     

Discussing smart pills versus endorsing smart pills: reply to Swanson, Wigal, and Volkow (2011) and Elliott and Elliott (2011)

We find much of interest, and little to disagree with, in the commentaries on our article. We take issue only with the suggestion that our article was provocative and submit that the attempt to understand the use of stimulants as smart pills does not imply an endorsement of the practice.     

Spontaneous gestures influence strategy choices in problem solving

Do gestures merely reflect problem-solving processes, or do they play a functional role in problem solving? We hypothesized that gestures highlight and structure perceptual-motor information, and thereby make such information more likely to be used in problem solving. Participants in two experiments solved problems requiring the prediction of gear movement, either with gesture allowed or with gesture prohibited. Such problems can be correctly solved using either a perceptual-motor strategy (simulation of gear movements) or an abstract strategy (the parity strategy). Participants in the gesture-allowed condition were more likely to use perceptual-motor strategies than were participants in the gesture-prohibited condition. Gesture promoted use of perceptual-motor strategies both for participants who talked aloud while solving the problems (Experiment 1) and for participants who solved the problems silently (Experiment 2). Thus, spontaneous gestures influence strategy choices in problem solving.     

Maintaining the Double Standard: Portrayals of Age and Gender in Popular Films

An analysis of the top 100 domestic grossing films of 2002 found evidence of a lingering double standard for aging female and male characters. Overall, major male characters outnumbered major female characters (73% vs. 27%); the majority of male characters were in their 30s and 40s, and the majority of female characters were in their 20s and 30s. Both women and men in their 60s and older were dramatically underrepresented compared to their representation in the US population. For male characters, leadership and occupational power increased with age. Men in their 40s, 50s, and 60s were more likely to play leadership roles and wield occupational power than were their female counterparts. As female characters aged, they were less likely to have goals.     

The Syllabus as Passport into a Common Culture of Teaching and Learning: Developing and Assessing Strategies for Dealing with Diversity

Abstract. Finding themselves teaching to increasingly diverse student populations, two mid‐career faculty from different disciplines embarked on a common voyage to make their foundational courses more sensitive to student learning styles. Adrift in the seas of multiple intelligences and multiculturalism, the researchers quickly abandoned any hope of developing distinctive teaching portfolios for individual learning profiles. Instead, they structured the syllabus to be the passport into a common culture of teaching and learning in the classroom. Syllabus design and on‐going “spot” assessments proved trusty guides in re‐centering learning on the students' needs. In the process of outlining these two strategies for creating a common culture of teaching and learning, the article offers testimony that old dogs can learn new tricks! Additional materials, including syllabi used in these courses and in class assessment tools, can be found on the Web page of the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion: http://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/journal/green&stortz.html     

Differential involvement of M1-type and M4-type muscarinic cholinergic receptors in the dorsomedial striatum in task switching

Previous experiments have demonstrated that the rat dorsomedial striatum is one brain area that plays a crucial role in learning when conditions require a shift in strategies. Further evidence indicates that muscarinic cholinergic receptors in this brain area support adaptations in behavioral responses. Unknown is whether specific muscarinic receptor subtypes in the dorsomedial striatum contribute to a flexible shift in response patterns. The present experiments investigated whether blockade of M1-type and/or M4-type cholinergic receptors in the dorsomedial striatum underlie place reversal learning. Experiment 1 investigated the effects of the M1-type muscarinic cholinergic antagonist, muscarinic-toxin 7 (MT-7) infused into the dorsomedial striatum in place acquisition and reversal learning. Experiment 2 investigated the effects of the M4-type muscarinic cholinergic antagonist, muscarinic-toxin 3 (MT-3) injected into the dorsomedial striatum in place acquisition and reversal learning. All testing occurred in a modified cross-maze across two consecutive sessions. Bilateral injections of MT-7 into the dorsomedial striatum at 1 or 2 microg, but not 0.05 microg impaired place reversal learning. Analysis of the errors revealed that MT-7 at 1 and 2 microg significantly increased regressive errors, but not perseverative errors. An injection of MT-7 2 microg into the dorsomedial striatum prior to place acquisition did not affect learning. Experiment 2 revealed that dorsomedial striatal injections of MT-3 (0.05, 1 or 2 microg) did not affect place acquisition or reversal learning. The findings suggest that activation of M1-type muscarinic cholinergic receptors in the dorsomedial striatum, but not M4-type muscarinic cholinergic receptors facilitate the flexible shifting of response patterns by maintaining or learning a new choice pattern once selected.     

Preservation of mouth region processing in two cases of prosopagnosia

Although most adults are considered experts in face recognition, brain trauma can produce a selective loss in this ability, a condition referred to as prosopagnosia. This study examined the processing strategies of prosopagnosic patients LR and HH using the Face Dimensions Test. In this test, featural and configural information in the upper and lower halves of the face was parametrically varied and sensitivity to these changes measured. We found that relative to age‐matched control participants, LR and HH exhibited an impaired ability to discriminate differences in the eye region, but a preserved ability to detect featural and configural differences in the mouth region. This pattern of impairment and sparing was demonstrated in tests of direct perception and immediate memory. The obtained findings demonstrate that prosopagnosia does not necessarily cause a global impairment to face perception, but a selective impairment to the perception of information in the upper half of the face.     

Reasons for Reason-giving in a Public-Opinion Survey

This paper explores why respondents to a telephone public-opinion survey often give reasons for answering as they do, even though reason-giving is neither required nor encouraged and it is difficult to see the reasons as attempts to deal with disagreement. We find that respondents give reasons for the policy claims they make in their answers three times as frequently as they give reasons for value or factual claims, that their reasons tend to involve appeals to personal experience, and that they often talk about their thought processes, especially when the evidentiary stakes are high. We then explore several ways of explaining these findings. We suggest that one useful approach is to see the reason-giving in the survey interviews as deliberative, reflexive argumentation of the sort described as `critical thinking. We further suggest that the reason such argumentation is often conducted out loud in the interviews, rather than internally, is that it functions in the service of rhetorical ethos, in particular the need to display the fact that one is human, with human autonomy and agency. Doing this may be particularly important in contexts such as anonymous survey interviews in which people are at risk of being treated like machines.