THE VARIETIES OF NON‐RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

I want to consider the suggestion that certain essential components of human experience are by their nature distinctively religious, and thus that the atheist is either debarred from participating fully in such experiences, or fails to understand their real nature. I am going to look at five kinds of experience:

• ? the experience of the moral ‘ought’;
• ? the experience of beauty;
• ? the experience of meaning conferred by stories;
• ? the experience of otherness and transcendence;
• ? the experience of vulnerability and fragility.

These seem to me to be integral features of any meaningful human life. They are aspects of what it is to be human. Some theists would simply agree with that statement. Others, however, would say that though essentially human they are also essentially religious, and that the secular humanist's participation in such experiences is in some way defective. That is the claim which I want to consider and contest.     

Dynamical evolutionary psychology: individual decision rules and emergent social norms

A new theory integrating evolutionary and dynamical approaches is proposed. Following evolutionary models, psychological mechanisms are conceived as conditional decision rules designed to address fundamental problems confronted by human ancestors, with qualitatively different decision rules serving different problem domains and individual differences in decision rules as a function of adaptive and random variation. Following dynamical models, decision mechanisms within individuals are assumed to unfold in dynamic interplay with decision mechanisms of others in social networks. Decision mechanisms in different domains have different dynamic outcomes and lead to different sociospatial geometries. Three series of simulations examining trade-offs in cooperation and mating decisions illustratehow individual decision mechanisms and group dynamics mutually constrain one another, and offer insights about gene-culture interactions.     

Aging and the perception of speed

Two experiments were conducted to explore the potential effects of aging upon the perception and discrimination of speed. In the first experiment, speed difference thresholds were obtained for younger and older observers for a variety of standard speeds ranging from slow to fast. The second experiment was designed to evaluate the observers' ability to discriminate differences in the speed of moving patterns in the presence of significant amounts of noise (the noise was manipulated by limiting the lifetimes of individual moving stimulus elements). The results of both experiments revealed a significant deterioration in the ability of the older observers to perceive or detect differences in speed. While the presence of noise was found to affect the observers' discrimination performance, it affected both younger and older observers' thresholds in a proportionally equivalent manner-the older observers were no more affected by noise than the younger observers.     

Dependency and self-criticism as predictors of suicidal behavior

Individuals have been theorized to develop anaclitic and introjective depression to the extent that they may be characterized as dependent and self-critical, respectively (e.g., Blatt, 1990). Blatt's theory was applied to suicidal behavior to determine if suicidal behavior could also be reliably broken down into two distinctive types, with respect to a number of parameters. Sixty-four undergraduate students who had attempted suicide were interviewed, and the lethality of their attempts was assessed with the Risk-Rescue Rating scale (Weisman & Worden, 1972). Participants were also administered an Intent and Precipitating Events scale, a modified version of the BDI-II, and the Depressive Experiences Questionnaire (DEQ). Self-critical individuals showed greater intent to die and greater lethality in their suicide attempts than did dependents. Self-critics were also more likely to attempt in response to an intrapsychic stressor, with the explicit motivation to escape. In contrast, dependents were more likely to attempt in response to an interpersonal stressor, with the motivation to communicate some form of unhappiness. Implications for suicide prediction and treatment are discussed, with special reference to the importance of identifying different suicidal subtypes.     

Internal consistency reliability of the self-report antisocial process screening device

The self-report version of the Antisocial Process Screening Device (APSD) has become a popular measure for assessing psychopathic features in justice-involved adolescents. However, the internal consistency reliability of its component scales (Narcissism, Callous-Unemotional, and Impulsivity) has been questioned in several studies. This study evaluates the internal consistency reliability of the self-report APSD by examining various indices (e.g., Cronbach's alpha, mean interitem correlation) across 11 studies. Whereas the Narcissism and Impulsivity scales display moderate to good reliability, internal consistency indices for the Callous-Unemotional scale are consistently poor across studies. Suggestions are made for revisions to this scale that would substantially improve its internal consistency reliability.     

Latent structure of anxiety: taxometric exploration

Taxometrics is a statistical tool that can be used to discern categories from continua. Taxometric analyses (MAXCOV and MAXEIG) were conducted in a large nonclinical sample (N=1,215) to determine whether extreme anxiety forms a distinct psychopathological category, an anxiety taxon. Anxiety was operationalized with self-report measures of subjective anxiety, anxious cognitive style, physiological arousal, and anxiety-related impairment. Procedures consistently identified a taxon with a prevalence of approximately 11%. Examination of the taxon's convergent and discriminant validity revealed that it reflects general distress rather than physiological arousal. Taxon membership showed some evidence of incremental validity.     

Neurocognitive correlates of socioeconomic status in kindergarten children

Socioeconomic status (SES) is strongly associated with cognitive ability and achievement during childhood and beyond. Little is known about the developmental relationships between SES and specific brain systems or their associated cognitive functions. In this study we assessed neurocognitive functioning of kindergarteners from different socioeconomic backgrounds, using tasks drawn from the cognitive neuroscience literature in order to determine how childhood SES predicts the normal variance in performance across different neurocognitive systems. Five neurocognitive systems were examined: the occipitotemporal/visual cognition system, the parietal/spatial cognition system, the medial temporal/memory system, the left perisylvian/language system, and the prefrontal/executive system. SES was disproportionately associated with the last two, with low SES children performing worse than middle SES children on most measures of these systems. Relations among language, executive function, SES and specific aspects of early childhood experience were explored, revealing intercorrelations and a seemingly predominant role of individual differences in language ability involved in SES associations with executive function.     

Chewing on it can chew you up: effects of rumination on triggered displaced aggression

Ruminating about a provocation increases the likelihood of displaced aggression following a minor annoyance (trigger). In Study 1, provoked participants who ruminated for 25 min were more aggressive toward a fumbling confederate than were distracted participants. Provocation-induced negative affect was positively related to aggression but only among those who ruminated. Study 2 conceptually replicated Study 1 and also found that the more negatively people reacted to the trigger, the more likely the trigger was to increase displaced aggression. Study 3 replicated the findings of Studies 1 and 2 by using an 8-hr rumination period. All 3 studies suggest that ruminating about a provocation increases the likelihood that a minor triggering annoyance will increase displaced aggression.     

Attention control and ability level in a complex cognitive skill: Attention shifting and second-language proficiency

In this study, we investigated the relationship between attention control and proficiency in a complex cognitive skill. The participants were English-French bilinguals with varying degrees of second-language (French) proficiency. Proficiency was operationalized as efficiency of lexical access in an animacy judgment task, as reflected in the coefficient of variability of response time adjusted for first-language performance on the same task. Attention control was operationalized as the shift cost obtained in a linguistic version of the alternating runs task-switching paradigm. Hierarchical regression revealed that, overall, attention control accounted for 59% of the variance of proficiency and that second-language attention control alone accounted for 32% of the unique variance of proficiency, indicating a high degree of skill domain (second language) specificity in the relationship between attention control and proficiency. The results speak to issues regarding the development of expertise, second-language acquisition, and a cognitive linguistic approach to language and attention.     

Attentional blink differences between adolescent dyslexic and normal readers

The goal of this study was to evaluate the possibility that dyslexic individuals require more working memory resources than normal readers to shift attention from stimulus to stimulus. To test this hypothesis, normal and dyslexic adolescents participated in a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation experiment (Raymond, Shapiro, & Arnell, 1992). Surprisingly, the result showed that the participants with dyslexia produced a shallower attentional blink than normal controls. This result may be interpreted as showing differences in the way the two groups encode information in episodic memory. They also fit in a cascade-effect perspective of developmental dyslexia.