Beyond family‐level adversities: Exploring the developmental timing of neighborhood disadvantage effects on the brain

A growing literature suggests that adversity is associated with later altered brain function, particularly within the corticolimbic system that supports emotion processing and salience detection (e.g., amygdala, prefrontal cortex [PFC]). Although neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage has been shown to predict maladaptive behavioral outcomes, particularly for boys, most of the research linking adversity to corticolimbic function has focused on family‐level adversities. Moreover, although animal models and studies of normative brain development suggest that there may be sensitive periods during which adversity exerts stronger effects on corticolimbic development, little prospective evidence exists in humans. Using two low‐income samples of boys (n = 167; n = 77), Census‐derived neighborhood disadvantage during early childhood, but not adolescence, was uniquely associated with greater amygdala, but not PFC, reactivity to ambiguous neutral faces in adolescence and young adulthood. These associations remained after accounting for several family‐level adversities (e.g., low family income, harsh parenting), highlighting the independent and developmentally specific neural effects of the neighborhood context. Furthermore, in both samples, indicators measuring income and poverty status of neighbors were predictive of amygdala function, suggesting that neighborhood economic resources may be critical to brain development.     

Integral Spirituality, Deep Science, and Ecological Awareness

There is a growing understanding that addressing the global crisis facing humanity will require new methods for knowing, understanding, and valuing the world. Narrow, disciplinary, and reductionist perceptions of reality are proving inadequate for addressing the complex, interconnected problems of the current age. The pervasive Cartesian worldview, which is based on the metaphor of the universe as a machine, promotes fragmentation in our thinking and our perception of the cosmos. This divisive, compartmentalized thinking fosters alienation and self‐focused behavior. I aim to show in this essay that healing the fragmentation that is at the root of the current world crises requires an integrated epistemology that embraces both the rational knowledge of scientific empiricism and the inner knowledge of spiritual experience. This “deep science” transcends the illusion of separateness to discern the unity, the unbroken wholeness, that underlies the diverse forms of the universe. Our perception of connectedness, of our integral place in the web of life, emerges as an attribute of our connection with the eternal, beatific source of all existence. This awakened spiritual vision “widens our circle of understanding and compassion, to embrace all living creatures in the whole of nature” (Einstein, quoted in Goldstein [1976] 1987). Our behavior, as it emerges naturally out of our perception of the sacredness of the natural world, will naturally embody love and respect for all life forms. This vision promotes the healing of our long‐standing alienation from the natural world and offers hope for renewal in the midst of widespread cultural deterioration and environmental destruction.     

The Need for a Revolution in the Philosophy of Science

There is a need to bring about a revolution in the philosophy of science, interpreted to be both the academic discipline, and the official view of the aims and methods of science upheld by the scientific community. At present both are dominated by the view that in science theories are chosen on the basis of empirical considerations alone, nothing being permanently accepted as a part of scientific knowledge independently of evidence. Biasing choice of theory in the direction of simplicity, unity or explanatory power does not permanently commit science to the thesis that nature is simple or unified. This current ‘paradigm’ is, I argue, untenable. We need a new paradigm, which acknowledges that science makes a hierarchy of metaphysical assumptions concerning the comprehensibility and knowability of the universe, theories being chosen partly on the basis of compatibility with these assumptions. Eleven arguments are given for favouring this new ‘paradigm’ over the current one. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A New Task for Philosophy of Science

This paper argues that we philosophers of science have before us an important new task that we urgently need to take up. It is to convince the scientific community to adopt and implement a new philosophy of science that does better justice to the deeply problematic basic intellectual aims of science than that which we have at present. Problematic aims evolve with evolving knowledge, that part of philosophy of science concerned with aims and methods thus becoming an integral part of science itself. The outcome of putting this new philosophy into scientific practice would be a new kind of science, both more intellectually rigorous and one that does better justice to the best interests of humanity.     

How Readability Shapes Social Media Engagement

We suggest that text readability plays an important role in driving consumer engagement on social media. Consistent with a processing fluency account, we find that easy‐to‐read posts are more liked, commented on, and shared on social media. We analyze over 4,000 Facebook posts from Humans of New York, a popular photography blog on social media, over a 3‐year period to see how readability shapes social media engagement. The results hold when controlling for photo features, story valence, and other content‐related characteristics. Experimental findings further demonstrate the causal impact of readability and the processing fluency mechanism in the context of a fictitious brand community. This research articulates the impact of processing fluency on brief word‐of‐mouth transmissions in the real world while empirically demonstrating that readability as a message feature matters. It also extends the impact of processing fluency to a novel behavioral outcome: commenting and sharing actions.     

Preliminary validation of a Chinese version of the State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-2

The increased globalization of psychology and related fields necessitates the availability of psychometric instruments in a number of languages, countries and cultures. Unfortunately, research on anger and aggression in Chinese populations has suffered from a lack of valid and reliable measurement instruments. Therefore, the State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-2 (STAXI-2) was translated into Chinese (Chinese STAXI-2). Two samples of Hong Kong Chinese ( N  = 489 and N  = 775) completed the Chinese STAXI-2. Participants in the second sample also completed measures of anger rumination and aggression. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) of responses from the first sample resulted in the loss of nine items from the 57 original items due to misspecification. A second CFA, using responses from the second sample, supported the construct validity of the modified scale. Moderate correlations were observed with measures of aggression and anger rumination, and significant differences were found between males and females on three anger expression subscales (Anger Expression-In, Anger Control-Out, and Anger Control-In). The preliminary evidence suggests that the abbreviated inventory may be a useful measure of state and trait anger, and anger expression in some Chinese populations.     

Anger and perceived legitimacy of aggression in male Hong Kong Chinese athletes: Effects of type of sport and level of competition

ProblemThe vast majority of research examining the interplay between aggressive emotions, beliefs, behaviors, cognitions, and situational contingencies in competitive athletes has focused on Western populations and only select sports (e.g., ice hockey). Research involving Eastern, particularly Chinese, athletes is surprisingly sparse given the sheer size of these populations. Thus, this study examines the aggressive emotions, beliefs, behaviors, and cognitions, of competitive Chinese athletes.MethodSeveral measures related to aggression were distributed to a large sample (N = 471) of male athletes, representing four sports (basketball, rugby union, association football/soccer, and squash).ResultsHigher levels of anger and aggression tended to be associated with higher levels of play for rugby and low levels of play for contact (e.g., football, basketball) and individual sports (e.g., squash).ConclusionsThe results suggest that the experience of angry emotions and aggressive behaviors of Chinese athletes are similar to Western populations, but that sport psychology practitioners should be aware of some potentially important differences, such as the general tendency of Chinese athletes to disapprove of aggressive behavior.     

Educating moral emotions: a praxiological analysis

This paper presents a praxiological analysis of three everyday educational practices or strategies that can be considered as being directed at the moral formation of the emotions. The first consists in requests to imagine other's emotional reactions. The second comprises requests to imitate normative emotional reactions and the third to re-appraise the features of a situation that are relevant to an emotional response. The interest of these categories is not just that they help to organize and recognize the significance of what might otherwise appear to be a disparate set of ordinary moral-educational interactions between children and educators. We suggest, further, that this analysis provides some new insight into what distinguishes the broad and recurrent conceptions of moral education from one another. Rather than being straightforwardly reducible to intractable differences over core normative or meta-ethical questions they can also be seen as correlating with different suppositions about the central role of the emotions in moral life and, correspondingly, different but to a large degree compatible interpretations of what the "education of the moral emotions" primarily means.

Development and preliminary validation of a Chinese version of the Buss-Perry Aggression Questionnaire in a population of Hong Kong Chinese

I developed a Chinese version of the Aggression Questionnaire (Buss & Perry, 1992) by translating scale items into Chinese and subjecting them to standard validation procedures. I used confirmatory factor analysis via structural equation modeling to compare several measurement models. Models based on Buss and Perry's (1992) original four-factor (29-item) scale failed to replicate in the Chinese sample; however, the construct validity of Bryant and Smith's (2001) abridged version of the Aggression Questionnaire received strong overall support. The new 12-item scale demonstrated good fit to the data and adequate internal reliability. Evidence for criterion validity was provided by the scale's sensitivity to differing levels of aggression in males and females. Convergent and discriminant validity received partial support from the pattern of correlations with a measure of anger rumination. Linguistic and metric equivalence were supported by high correlation coefficients between scores on Chinese and English versions of the scale completed by bilingual Chinese on separate occasions. Consistent replications of these preliminary results across three independent samples suggest that the Chinese version of the Aggression Questionnaire may be useful for clinical assessment and cross-cultural research.