Representational coexistence in the God concept: Core knowledge intuitions of God as a person are not revised by Christian theology despite lifelong experience

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - Previous research has shown that in the minds of young adult religious adherents, acquired theology about the extraordinary characteristics of God (e.g.,...     

Semantic congruity and expectancy in symbolic judgments

These experiments assess the degree to which the semantic-congruity effect in comparative judgment can be explained by such expectancy effects as priming, perceptual "set," or strategies used in the task. The first experiment mixed a lexical-decision task with the comparative-judgment task and showed that neither automatic semantic priming nor deliberate preparation can account for the congruity effect. Experiments 2-4 assessed expectancy effects in a different way by presenting the instructions for comparative judgment either before or after the pair to be judged. These experiments included, among other things, a number of safeguards against artifacts in this paradigm. In these three experiments the congruity effect was obtained with both orders of stimuli and instructions, contrary to the prediction of an expectancy hypothesis. The results indicate that when stimuli are not degraded. The semantic-congruity effect depends largely on the relation between the stimuli and the instructions and only to a small degree, if at all, on expectancy.     

Cognitive Theories of Depression in Children and Adolescents: A Conceptual and Quantitative Review

This paper quantitatively reviews longitudinal studies examining three central cognitive theories of depression—Beck’s theory, Hopelessness theory, and the Response Styles theory—among children (age 8–12) and adolescents (age 13–19). We examine the effect sizes in 20 longitudinal studies, which investigated the relation between the cognitive vulnerability–stress interaction and its association with prospective elevations in depression after controlling for initial levels of depressive symptoms. The results of this review suggest that across theories there is a small relation between the vulnerability–stress interaction and elevations in depression among children (pr = 0.15) and a moderately larger effect (pr = 0.22) among adolescents. Despite these important findings, understanding their implications has been obscured by critical methodological, statistical, and theoretical limitations that bear on cognitive theories of depression. The evidence base has been limited by poor measurement of cognitive vulnerabilities and over reliance on null hypothesis significance testing; these have contributed to a field with many gaps and inconsistencies. The relative paucity of research on developmental applications of such theories reveals that surprisingly little is known about their hypothesized etiologic mechanisms in children and adolescents. Ways to advance knowledge in the area of cognitive theories of depression among youth are discussed.