THE DISPOSITIONALIST DEITY: HOW GOD CREATES LAWS AND WHY THEISTS SHOULD CARE

How does God govern the world? For many theists “laws of nature” play a vital role. But what are these laws, metaphysically speaking? I shall argue that laws of nature are not external to the objects they govern, but instead should be thought of as reducible to internal features of properties. Recent work in metaphysics and philosophy of science has revived a dispositionalist conception of nature, according to which nature is not passive, but active and dynamic. Disposition theorists see particulars as being internally powerful rather than being governed by external laws of nature, making external laws in effect ontologically otiose. I will argue that theists should prefer a dispositionalist ontology, since it leads them toward the theory of concurrentism in divine conservation, rather than occasionalism, and revives the distinction between internal and external teleology. God on this view does not govern the world through external laws of nature, but rather through internal aspects of powerful properties.     

Emotional Bonds with Parents, Emotion Regulation, and School-Related Behavior Problems Among Elementary School Truants

Among juvenile status offenses, truancy represents the largest share of juvenile court caseloads. As a marker of risk, truancy is important because of its associations with school disengagement, drop-out, and developmental trajectories that include various forms of delinquency and anti-social behavior. Better understanding of the developmental circumstances and needs of truant children may point the way to more effective intervention strategies. Much accumulated research has shown strong associations between the emergence of juvenile delinquency and qualities of caregiving in parent–child relationships. Child-parent attachment in particular has been identified as an important developmental foundation of the child-parent relationship. We used a multi-informant approach to examine associations between children’s self-reported perceptions of attachment security (using the Security Scales), their emotion regulation (reported by parents on the Emotion Regulation Checklist), and school-related behavior problems (as reported by teachers with the Child Behavior Checklist), among 74 elementary school-aged truant children (mean age 9 years). Children and families were recruited through a truancy intervention program in a state in the deep South in the U.S. Data were analyzed via hierarchical multiple regression. Parents’ reports of their children’s emotion regulation predicted behavior problems as reported by teachers. Children’s own reports of their emotional bonds with parents were somewhat less predictive of emotion regulation and behavior problems. Implications for truancy intervention programs for high-risk elementary school children include more focused attention to the importance of children’s developing capacities for emotion regulation and the child-parent bond.     

Gender Typed Advertisements and Impression Formation: The Role of Chronic and Temporary Accessibility

In this research, we tested the effects of chronic and temporary sources of accessibility on impression formation. Although some research suggests that chronicity amplifies temporary effects because of greater susceptibility to external primes, other research suggests that chronicity masks temporary effects because of redundance. We demonstrate in a thought listing study that in the domain of gender stereotypes, trait stereotypes may be routinely applied by those with a medium or high tendency to stereotype women, making external primes redundant. Based on this redundancy, we proposed that gender stereotypical primes will have little influence on subsequent judgments of those with a medium or high tendency to gender stereotype. In contrast, gender stereotypical primes will result in the classic assimilation effect for those with a low tendency to gender stereotype. We tested these propositions in the domain of female role portrayals in advertising and examined the effect of advertisements that feature women as homemakers (vs. do not feature women) on trait judgments of a target woman whose behaviors are ambiguously described. Results from 2 experiments show that, as predicted by the redundancy hypothesis, judgments of medium and high tendency to stereotype participants are not affected by advertisements portraying homemakers. Also as expected, judgments of low tendency to stereotype participants are assimilated to the homemaker prime. These results hold across tendency to trait stereotype (Experiment 1) and tendency to role stereotype (Experiment 2) and for trait judgments as well as gift choice. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Order or disorder? Impaired Hebb learning in dyslexia

The present study offers an integrative account proposing that dyslexia and its various associated cognitive impairments reflect an underlying deficit in the long-term learning of serial-order information, here operationalized as Hebb repetition learning. In nondyslexic individuals, improved immediate serial recall is typically observed when one particular sequence of items is repeated across an experimental session, a phenomenon known as the Hebb repetition effect. Starting from the critical observation that individuals with dyslexia seem to be selectively impaired in cognitive tasks that involve processing of serial order, the present study is the first to test and confirm the hypothesis that the Hebb repetition effect is affected in dyslexia, even for nonverbal modalities. We present a theoretical framework in which the Hebb repetition effect is assumed to be a laboratory analogue of naturalistic word learning, on the basis of which we argue that dyslexia is characterized by an impairment of serial-order learning that affects language learning and processing.     

The gendering of heterosexual religious young adults’ imagined futures

This article draws from a mixed-methods project that examined religion, youth, gender, and sexuality among young women and men aged between 18 and 25, from various religious traditions, and living in the UK. It charts how unmarried heterosexuals imagined their future lives in relation to marriage and parenthood. We deploy conceptual literature on ‘imagined future’, which is under-used in the sociology of religion, to explore what difference, if any, religious belonging makes to the futures the participants imagined. We assert that religion is part of their cultural tapestry, which broadly informed their values and actions. In other words, religion, as a component of culture, provides a ‘toolkit’ which they used in imagining futures that they deemed meaningful. This article contributes significantly to literature on gender and religious cultures and imagined future, highlighting the complex and interweaving role religion played in the way young adults in this study imagined their future gendered lives.     

Using individualism and collectivism to compare cultures--a critique of the validity and measurement of the constructs: comment on Oyserman et al. (2002)

Analyzing national and ethnic differences in individualism and collectivism, D. Oyserman, H. M. Coon, and M. Kemmelmeier (2002) showed that small differences in scales or samples produce markedly divergent results, challenging the validity of these constructs. The author examines the following limitations of research on individualism and collectivism: It treats nations as cultures and culture as a continuous quantitative variable; conflates all kinds of social relations and distinct types of autonomy; ignores contextual specificity in norms and values; measures culture as the personal preferences and behavior reports of individuals; rarely establishes the external validity of the measures used; assumes cultural invariance in the meaning of self-reports and anchoring and interpretation of scales; and reduces culture to explicit, abstract verbal knowledge.     

Additive impact of childhood emotional,physical, and sexual abuse on suicide attempts among low-income African American women

This study examines the association between exposures to multiple forms of childhood abuse (emotional, physical, sexual) and adult suicidal behavior in a sample of low-income, African American women. We hypothesized a linear relation between childhood abuse and risk for making a suicide attempt, such that the more forms of childhood abuse to which a woman was exposed, the greater her risk would be to make a suicide attempt. Logistic regression analyses revealed that, compared to women who did not report any experiences of childhood abuse, women who experienced one, two, or three forms of abuse were 1.83, 2.29, or 7.75 times more likely to attempt suicide, respectively (all statistically significant). Furthermore, compared to women who reported one or two types of abuse, women who reported all three types of abuse were statistically more likely to attempt suicide. These findings have implications for clinicians working with African American women who report either childhood abuse or exhibit suicidal behavior.