Depth Psychology and Symbolic Anthropology: Toward a Depth Sociology of Psychocultural Interaction

Research on the moral faculty indicates that morality emerges naturally over the course of normal human development, similar to other competencies such as face perception, language, numerical reasoning, and some motor skills (running, jumping, etc.). One implication of this is that there should be a roughly normal distribution of moral skills. Thus, while most people develop competent moral skills, a few fail to develop these skills and a few develop them to an “expert” level. The skill development literature indicates that deliberate practice is necessary for the acquisition of expertise. Religious participation appears to provide the basic elements of deliberate “moral practice.” Empirical evidence is reviewed supporting the notion that religion provides the means and opportunity for the acquisition of moral expertise. A program of research into moral expertise is proposed with testable hypotheses presented.     

The persistent impact of incidental experience

As we perform daily activities—driving to work, unlocking the office door, or grabbing a coffee cup—our actions seem automatic and preprogrammed. Nonetheless, routine, well-practiced behavior is continually modulated by incidental experience: In repetitive experimental tasks, recent (~4) trials reliably influence performance and action choice. Psychological theories downplay the significance of sequential effects, explaining them as rapidly decaying perturbations of behavior, with no long-term consequences. We challenged this traditional perspective in two experiments designed to probe the impact of more distant experience, finding evidence for effects spanning up to a thousand intermediate trials. We present a normative theory in which these persistent effects reflect optimal adaptation to a dynamic environment exhibiting varying rates of change. The theory predicts a heavy-tailed decaying influence of past experience, consistent with our data, and suggests that individual incidental experiences are catalogued in a temporally extended memory utilized in order to optimize subsequent behavior.     

Effect of Cheating Experience on Attitudes toward Infidelity

The present study investigated how cheating experience influences perception of others’ infidelity. Using vignette characters, we explored the hypothesis that a participant’s experience cheating on a partner and gender of vignette character moderate gender-differentiated perceptions of infidelity (i.e., men reporting more accepting attitudes toward infidelity than women). Participants (N = 320) were asked a series of questions evaluating both how ‘acceptable’ and ‘forgivable’ was a vignette character’s infidelity. Men and women with prior experience cheating found the cheating vignette character of their same gender significantly more acceptable and forgivable than the unfaithful character of the other gender. Participants who reported no history of infidelity found infidelity as generally unacceptable, regardless of character gender.     

Measuring secondhand smoke exposure in babies: the reliability and validity of mother reports in a sample of low-income families.

The reliability and validity of mother's reports of their infants' exposure to secondhand smoke (SHS) were examined in an ethnically diverse sample of low-income, low-education families (N = 141 mothers). At baseline and posttest, smoking mothers reported about their infants' SHS exposure at different locations and by different sources during the previous week. Findings show that mothers can give reliable accounts of the degree to which they contribute to their babies' SHS exposure. Mothers are able to differentiate between their own smoking behavior and the extent to which they expose their infants. Consistent with the overall exposure pattern, exposure caused by the mother and exposure occurring at home showed the strongest associations with biological and environmental measures. These findings suggest that smoking mothers can provide reliable and valid reports of the degree to which their infants are exposed to SHS.     

Sexual Attitudes and Double Standards: A Literature Review Focusing on Participant Gender and Ethnic Background

We conducted a review of literature regarding sexual attitudes and double standards, focusing on participant gender and ethnic background. We found that men had more permissive sexual attitudes than women, and that African Americans had the most permissive sexual attitudes, followed by White Americans, then by Hispanic Americans and Asian Americans. The literature regarding sexual double standards was mixed; some studies showed evidence of continued sexual double standards and some studies showed the absence of sexual double standards. In some studies, men were more likely to endorse the sexual double standard than women. We found only one article addressing sexual double standards using ethnic background as a quasi-independent variable; this research revealed that non-North American (Russian and Japanese) samples were more likely to endorse the traditional double standard, that sex is more acceptable for men than for women.

Ordered short-term memory differs in signers and speakers: implications for models of short-term memory

Capacity limits in linguistic short-term memory (STM) are typically measured with forward span tasks in which participants are asked to recall lists of words in the order presented. Using such tasks, native signers of American Sign Language (ASL) exhibit smaller spans than native speakers ([Boutla, M., Supalla, T., Newport, E. L., & Bavelier, D. (2004). Short-term memory span: Insights from sign language. Nature Neuroscience, 7(9), 997-1002]). Here, we test the hypothesis that this population difference reflects differences in the way speakers and signers maintain temporal order information in short-term memory. We show that native signers differ from speakers on measures of short-term memory that require maintenance of temporal order of the tested materials, but not on those in which temporal order is not required. In addition, we show that, in a recall task with free order, bilingual subjects are more likely to recall in temporal order when using English than ASL. We conclude that speakers and signers do share common short-term memory processes. However, whereas short-term memory for spoken English is predominantly organized in terms of temporal order, we argue that this dimension does not play as great a role in signers' short-term memory. Other factors that may affect STM processes in signers are discussed.     

Growth curve models for indistinguishable dyads using multilevel modeling and structural equation modeling: the case of adolescent twins' conflict with their mothers

Growth modeling is a useful tool for studying change over time, and it is becoming increasingly popular with developmental researchers. There is a considerable methodological literature surrounding growth modeling for individuals; however, far less attention has been focused on growth models for pairs of related individuals (i.e., dyads). In this article, the authors consider dyadic growth models for those cases where there are no relevant variables that can empirically distinguish between dyad members (e.g., same-sex twins or best friends). The authors describe how researchers can estimate growth models for indistinguishable dyads using both multilevel modeling and structural equation modeling. Although both approaches can be used to estimate the same underlying models, the authors focus on practical similarities and differences between the two approaches. They illustrate modeling issues using an overtime study of adolescent twins' conflict with their mothers, a substantively important topic given the enduring interest in parent-child relationships during adolescence.     

Parental divorce and adolescent delinquency: ruling out the impact of common genes

Although the well-documented association between parental divorce and adolescent delinquency is generally assumed to be environmental (i.e., causal) in origin, genetic mediation is also possible. Namely, the behavior problems often found in children of divorce could derive from similar pathology in the parents, pathology that is both heritable and increases the risk that the parent will experience divorce. To test these alternative hypotheses, the authors made use of a novel design that incorporated timing of divorce in a sample of 610 adoptive and biological families. They reasoned that if genes common to parent and child mediate this association, nonadopted youth should manifest increased delinquency in the presence of parental divorce even if the divorce preceded their birth (i.e., was from a prior parental relationship). However, should the association be environmental in origin, the authors reasoned that adolescents should manifest increased delinquency only in response to divorce exposure, and this association should not vary by adoption status. Results firmly supported the latter, suggesting that it is the experience of parental divorce, and not common genes, that drives the association between divorce and adolescent delinquency.