Staring us in the face? An embodied theory of innate face preference

Human expertise in face perception grows over development, but even within minutes of birth, infants exhibit an extraordinary sensitivity to face‐like stimuli. The dominant theory accounts for innate face detection by proposing that the neonate brain contains an innate face detection device, dubbed ‘Conspec’. Newborn face preference has been promoted as some of the strongest evidence for innate knowledge, and forms a canonical stage for the modern form of the nature–nurture debate in psychology. Interpretation of newborn face preference results has concentrated on monocular stimulus properties, with little mention or focused investigation of potential binocular involvement. However, the question of whether and how newborns integrate the binocular visual streams bears directly on the generation of observable visual preferences. In this theoretical paper, we employ a synthetic approach utilizing robotic and computational models to draw together the threads of binocular integration and face preference in newborns, and demonstrate cases where the former may explain the latter. We suggest that a system‐level view considering the binocular embodiment of newborn vision may offer a mutually satisfying resolution to some long‐running arguments in the polarizing debate surrounding the existence and causal structure of newborns' ‘innate knowledge’ of faces.     

Students’ Perceptions of Academic and Business Dishonesty: Australian Evidence

Publicly available information indicates that the collapse of the high-profile corporations during the recent past were due to the unethical actions of a number of major players, including high level managers in those corporations. These examples of the ethical misdeeds of corporate actors have influenced accounting professional bodies and academic institutions around the globe to revisit the issue of ethical training of business and accounting students—the corporate managers of tomorrow. However, little is known about the ethical perceptions of business and accounting students, and business academics are finding it challenging to develop and promote ethics-based accounting and business curricula. This study addresses the research gap. It explores the ethical perceptions of accounting and business students in two Australian universities using three paradigms, that is, whether there are differences between regional and metropolitan, male and female, older and younger accounting students with respect to their ethical perceptions. Empirical evidence provided in this study suggests that while there are no differences in ethical perceptions of the regional and metropolitan accounting and business students, female and older students are found to be more ethical compared to male and younger students.     

夫妻生活事件、归因方式及其与婚姻冲突的关系

探讨夫妻生活事件、归因方式及其与婚姻冲突的关系。采用方便取样,选取辽阳市已婚完整家庭1～10年的夫妻620对进行调查。结果表明:夫妻报告的前三项冲突领域是家务琐事、不良习惯和交流解决问题方面;妻子和丈夫报告的生活事件解释了婚姻冲突15.4%和11.9%的变异,归因解释了28.7%和24.7%的变异;归因在夫妻报告的生活事件和婚姻冲突中起部分中介作用。     

Health-Related Quality of Life in Iranian Breast Cancer Survivors: A Qualitative Study

Women play the most important role in Iranian families. Therefore, it is necessary to pay attention to efforts to maintain and promote their health. The diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer have significant physical and psycho-social impacts on patients, families and friends. This qualitative study was designed to analyze the role of several social and cultural factors and their relationship to health-related quality of life among Iranian breast cancer survivors. In-depth semi-structured and unstructured face-to-face interviews were conducted with 39 breast cancer survivors. The results of the present study revealed that most prevalent physical problems that were reported by Iranian breast cancer survivors were fatigue, pain and lymphedema related to the adverse effects of mastectomy. We found that most participants have a strong sense of spirituality and used this as a source of psychological support to help them accept their disease. Spirituality has been found to be a strong source of psychological support among Iranian breast cancer survivors. Religious faith has provided this community the strength and motivation to seek medical treatment and to be patient and relax. These findings can help researchers to provide a framework for the development of appropriate and effective culturally sensitive health interventions.     

Intimate partner violence: A narrative review of the feminist,social and ecological explanations for its causation

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a major social and public health problem that affects populations around the world regardless of their culture, religion, and other demographic characteristics. In the last 100 years, many theories have been proposed to explain the phenomenon of IPV. Much research has been conducted using these theories as a guiding or underlying framework. However, it is difficult to find a single account that provides a succinct and up-to-date overview of these theories. As a result, a considerable effort is required to identify and retrieve relevant papers to understand the various theories, which attempt to explain IPV. This article attempts to provide a succinct and up-to-date integrative review of the feminist, social learning, and ecological explanations of IPV. These perspectives have been critically evaluated in the light of the available literature and an effort has been made to discuss the strengths and limitations of each perspective in shedding light on the causation of IPV.     

Socioeconomic status,perceived parental control,and authoritarianism: Development of authoritarianism in Iranian society

The purpose of the current study is to examine the relationship between socioeconomic status, parental control, and authoritarianism in Iran. A sample of 460 students was surveyed from Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz in Iran. Results demonstrated that subjective socioeconomic status, parental control, and parents' education have significant influence on authoritarianism. Further analysis showed that parental control partially mediates parents' education association with authoritarianism with a relatively high effect size. These findings highlight the importance of parental control and socioeconomic status in the development of authoritarianism in Iran. Furthermore, the higher authoritarianism of low socioeconomic status is mostly due to lower education levels rather than the income of the family. The findings were discussed with regards to literature as well as the socio‐cultural sphere of Iran.     

A little bit transparent with one another: Constructing vulnerability in the evangelical discourse of women preachers

Using four categories of Brown’s shame resilience theory (SRT), this paper analyses two similar online videos by prominent American evangelical female preachers: Joyce Meyer and Beth Moore. As each unpacks her survivor’s story of childhood sexual abuse, SRT (and its components of vulnerability, critical awareness, reaching out and speaking shame) can provide a matrix for interpreting the narrative in which each preacher frames her self-disclosure.     

Getting culture: a new path for Indonesia’s Islamist Justice and Prosperity party?

Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (PKS, The Justice and Prosperity Party) is the largest Islamist political party in Indonesia. It has roots in the religious and political and religious teachings of the Muslim Brotherhood and promotes what Oliver Roy calls "deculturized religion." The party can be understood as the political component of a larger social movement that seeks to transform Indonesian society and culture in ways that would establish Shari'ah as social, if not political, reality. It is also committed to the electoral process and to working inside the Indonesian political system in a more general sense. Until recently, the PKS has dismissed local modes of Muslim practice and much of Indonesian culture as "un-Islamic." The extent of the party's transformative agenda is unclear for three reasons: it shares the Muslim Brotherhood's gradualist approach, it is less than transparent about its goals, and it is divided into purist or "Justice" and pragmatic or "Prosperity" factions. The leadership of the Prosperity faction is currently ascendant and is attempting to reach beyond its Islamist base by sponsoring musical and dramatic performances it hopes will appeal to Muslims devoted to Javanese and other Indonesian cultural traditions. Ethnographic and web-based research indicate that these efforts are greeted with considerable suspicion.     

A novel paradigm reveals the role of reentrant visual processes in object substitution masking

Object substitution masking (OSM) occurs when an initial display of a target and mask continues with the mask alone, creating a mismatch between the reentrant hypothesis, triggered by the initial display, and the ongoing low-level activity. We tested the proposition that the critical factor in OSM is not whether the mask remains in view after target offset, but whether the representation of the mask is sufficiently stronger than that of the target when the reentrant signal arrives. In Experiment 1, a variable interstimulus interval (ISI) was inserted between the initial display and the mask alone. The trailing mask was presumed to selectively boost the strength of the mask representation relative to that of the target. As predicted, OSM occurred at intermediate ISIs, at which the mask was presented before the arrival of the reentrant signal, creating a mismatch, but not at long ISIs, at which a comparison between the reentrant signal and the low-level activity had already been made. Experiment 2, conducted in dark-adapted viewing, ruled out the possibility that low-level inhibitory contour interactions (metacontrast masking) had played a significant role in Experiment 1. Metacontrast masking was further ruled out in Experiment 3, in which the masking contours were reduced to four small dots. We concluded that OSM does not depend on extended presentation of the mask alone, but on a mismatch between the reentrant signals and the ongoing activity at the lower level. The present results place constraints on estimates of the timing of reentrant signals involved in OSM.     

COLLECTIVE RELIGIO‐SCIENTIFIC DISCUSSIONS ON ISLAM AND HIV/AIDS: I. BIOMEDICAL SCIENTISTS

During the 1990s, biomedical scientists and Muslim religious scholars collaborated to construe Islamic responses for the ethical questions raised by the AIDS pandemic. This is the first of a two‐part study examining this collective legal reasoning (ijtihād jamā‘ī). The main thesis is that the role of the biomedical scientists is not limited to presenting scientific information. They engaged in the human rights discourse pertinent to people living with HIV/AIDS, gave an account of the preventive strategy adopted by the World Health Organization, and offered an (Islamic) virtue‐based preventive model. Finally, these scientists tried to draft a number of Islamic legal rulings (a?kām), usually seen in Islamic jurisprudence as the exclusive business of Muslim religious scholars. This multilayered role played by the scientists reflects intriguing developments in the Islamic religio‐ethical discourse in general and in the field of Islamic jurisprudence in particular.