Effect of socioeconomic status (SES) disparity on neural development in female African‐American infants at age 1 month

There is increasing interest in both the cumulative and long‐term impact of early life adversity on brain structure and function, especially as the brain is both highly vulnerable and highly adaptive during childhood. Relationships between SES and neural development have been shown in children older than age 2 years. Less is known regarding the impact of SES on neural development in children before age 2. This paper examines the effect of SES, indexed by income‐to‐needs (ITN) and maternal education, on cortical gray, deep gray, and white matter volumes in term, healthy, appropriate for gestational age, African‐American, female infants. At 5 weeks postnatal age, unsedated infants underwent MRI (3.0T Siemens Verio scanner, 32‐channel head coil). Images were segmented based on a locally constructed template. Utilizing hierarchical linear regression, SES effects on MRI volumes were examined. In this cohort of healthy African‐American female infants of varying SES, lower SES was associated with smaller cortical gray and deep gray matter volumes. These SES effects on neural outcome at such a young age build on similar studies of older children, suggesting that the biological embedding of adversity may occur very early in development.     

Christian Churches and the Prevention of Preadolescent Aggression and Violence in Puerto Rico: Regional Leaders’ Perspective

Journal of Religion and Health - Preadolescents’ involvement in religious congregations may serve as a distal protective factor against aggression. Interviews were conducted to...     

Religion and Spirituality among American Indian,South Asian,Black, Hispanic/Latina,and White Women in the Study on Stress,Spirituality, and Health

Social scientists have increasingly recognized the lack of diversity in survey research on American religion, resulting in a dearth of data on religion and spirituality (R/S) in understudied racial and ethnic groups. At the same time, epidemiological studies have increasingly diversified their racial and ethnic representation, but have collected few R/S measures to date. With a particular focus on American Indian and South Asian women (in addition to Blacks, Hispanic/Latinas, and white women), this study introduces a new effort among religion and epidemiology researchers, the Study on Stress, Spirituality, and Health. This multicohort study provides some of the first estimates of R/S beliefs and practices among American Indians and U.S. South Asians, and offers new insight into salient beliefs and practices of diverse racial/ethnic and religious communities.     

Do Smarter People Employ Better Decision Strategies? The Influence of Intelligence on Adaptive Use of the Recognition Heuristic

Within the adaptive toolbox approach, it has repeatedly been shown that, on average, people tend to adapt their decision strategies to the decision context. Building upon these results, we investigated whether individuals systematically differ in their ability to successfully adapt to the situation when applying the fast‐and‐frugal recognition heuristic (RH). In decisions between recognized and unrecognized choice objects, individuals can base their choices solely on recognition, as predicted by the RH, or they can use further knowledge retrieved from memory. Since intelligence has been conceived as the ability to successfully adapt to different situations, we expected intelligence to influence the degree of adaptive use of the RH. To test this hypothesis, we first re‐analyzed data that referred to a decision domain for which RH‐use is known to perform well. As expected, individual RH‐use increased with general intelligence. Next, we designed an experiment addressing individual RH‐use in two new decision domains, one domain for which RH‐use was less effective than knowledge‐use and another domain for which both strategies were about equally effective. In addition, we tested whether fluid or crystallized intelligence best predicts adaptive use of the RH. RH‐use was found to decrease with fluid but not crystallized intelligence when RH‐use was less effective than use of further knowledge. In contrast, there was no significant association between either type of intelligence and RH‐use when none of the two strategies was optimal. We conclude that adaptive use versus non‐use of the RH is moderated by fluid intelligence. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Electroencephalogram and heart rate measures of working memory at 5 and 10 months of age

We recorded electroencephalogram (EEG; 6-9 Hz) and heart rate (HR) from infants at 5 and 10 months of age during baseline and performance on the looking A-not-B task of infant working memory (WM). Longitudinal baseline-to-task comparisons revealed WM-related increases in EEG power (all electrodes) and EEG coherence (medial frontal-occipital electrode pairs) at both ages. WM-related decreases in HR were only present at 5 months, and WM-related increases in EEG coherence became more localized by 10 months. Regression analyses revealed that baseline-to-task changes in psychophysiology accounted for variability in WM performance at 10 but not 5 months. HR and EEG power (medial frontal and lateral frontal electrodes) were unique predictors of variability in 10-month WM performance. These findings are discussed in relation to frontal lobe development and represent the first comprehensive longitudinal analysis of age-related changes in the behavioral and psychophysiological correlates of WM.     

Social identity and perceptions of torture: It's moral when we do it

Two studies examined the effects of social identity concerns on the moral justification of torture. British and American nationals read a media report concerning the torture of a terrorist suspect that they were led to believe had been perpetrated either by members of their own nation's security services or by another nation's security services. When the torture was perpetrated by the ingroup, participants described it as more morally justified than when the torture was perpetrated by the other nation's security services. This effect was mediated by participants' decreased empathy for the ingroup's torture victim (Study 1), as well as increased victim blame and perceiving the perpetrators as prototypical of their national group (Study 2). We consider how social identity concerns enable moral justification of harm doing.