'To Whom Much Has Been Given...': Religious Capital and Community Voluntarism Among Churchgoing Protestants

Research on volunteering behavior has consistently found a positive relationship between religion and volunteering. Using a sample of churchgoing Protestants (N=1,738)from the Religious Identity and Influence Survey we examine the specific influences of religiosity, religious identity, religious socialization, and religious social networks on local volunteer activity in church programs and non-church organizations, as well as general volunteering tendencies. These influences are presented within the theoretical framework of religious capital. Logistic regression techniques were applied to determine the strength of the contribution of these influences while accounting for basic background factors. Findings suggest that churchgoing Protestants are influenced by all measures to some degree, but religiosity (specifically participation in church activities) remains the strongest influence. Significant religious influences overall are most pronounced within the context of church-related volunteering which suggests that churchgoing Protestants exhibit a strong sense of community identity through their local churches. A discussion of these results and their implications for volunteering follows.     

Characteristics of finger force production during one- and two-hand tasks

Relations among finger forces were studied during one-hand and two-hand isometric maximal force production tasks in right- and left-handers. We particularly focused on the phenomena of force deficit during one-hand multi-finger tasks and of bilateral force deficit during two-hand tasks. Ten healthy subjects (five of them left-handed) performed maximal voluntary force production tasks with different finger combinations involving fingers of one of the hands or of both hands together. In one-hand tasks, finger enslaving (forces produced by fingers that were not instructed to produce force) was larger in the dominant hand, while force deficit (drop in individual finger peak force during multi-finger tasks) showed no differences between the hands. An additional drop in finger forces was seen in two-hand tests (bilateral deficit). The magnitude of the bilateral deficit for a hand was larger for tasks involving fewer fingers within the hand and more fingers in the other hand, with a ceiling effect. Smaller bilateral deficit was seen in tasks involving symmetrical finger combinations. In two-hand tasks that could potentially lead to the generation of large total moments in the frontal plane, the hand that was expected to generate larger moments showed larger bilateral deficit, so that the magnitude of the total moment was reduced. These observations suggest that force deficit within a hand and bilateral deficit have different origins but their effects are combined at a certain level of the multi-finger control hierarchy. Bilateral deficit may display task dependence reflecting, in particular, the principle of minimization of secondary moments. A double-representation, mirror-image hypothesis is suggested to provide a neurophysiological basis for the observed patterns of bilateral deficit.     

Conflict Between Religion and Science Among Academic Scientists?

Using new survey data ( N = 1,646), we examine the attitudes academic scientists at 21 elite U.S. research universities have about the perceived conflict between religion and science. In contrast to public opinion and scholarly discourse, most scientists do not perceive a conflict between science and religion. Different from what other studies would indicate, this belief does not vary between social and natural scientists. We argue that maintaining plausibility frameworks for religion is an important correlate of whether scientists will reject the conflict paradigm, with such frameworks taking surprising forms. When scientists do not attend religious services they are more likely to accept the conflict paradigm. When scientists think their peers have a positive view of religion, they are less likely to agree there is a conflict between science and religion. Religious upbringing is associated with scientists adopting the conflict paradigm. Spirituality is much more important in this population than other research would lead us to believe. Results reformulate widely cited earlier research, offer new insights about how scientists view the connection between religion and science, and expand public discussion about religious challenges to science.     

Grounding as a facilitator in Anglo-Canadian and Mainland Chinese conversations

This study examined whether a short training in grounding strategies could improve intercultural communication. Forty intercultural dyads (Anglo-Canadians and Mainland Chinese) were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. Prior to their conversations the experimental groups received 10–15 min training on grounding while the control groups received no training. The trained dyads performed significantly better than the untrained dyads in grounding, speaker presentation and listener recall, thus documenting that the 10–15 min training on grounding was fruitful in improving intercultural communication. Grounding training may open a new avenue for reducing intercultural miscommunication, thus improving information transmission.     

The Effects of Expertise on the Hindsight Bias

We present data from three experiments examining the effects of objective and subjective expertise on the hindsight bias. In Experiment 1, participants read an essay about baseball or dogs and then answered questions about the baseball essay to the best of their ability, as if they had not read the essay, or to the best of their ability, although they read about dogs. Participants also completed a quiz about baseball rules and terminology, which was an objective measure of expertise. Results demonstrated that as participants' baseball expertise increased, their inability to act as if they never read the essay also increased; expertise exacerbated the hindsight bias. To test the effects of subjective expertise on hindsight bias and investigate factors underlying the relationship, participants in Experiment 2 ranked five topics in order of expertise and gave feeling‐of‐knowing (FOK) ratings for questions from these topics. Foresight participants then saw each question again and answered the questions; hindsight participants saw the questions and answers and gave the probability they would have known the answers had they not been provided. Hindsight bias increased with subjective expertise as did average FOK ratings. In Experiment 3, we experimentally manipulated perceived expertise but found that neither average FOK ratings nor hindsight bias was affected by experimentally induced expertise. Taken together, the results demonstrate that expertise exacerbates both objective and subjective hindsight bias but that an FOK, which likely exists only when expertise is naturally acquired, is necessary to engender the detrimental effect of expertise on the hindsight bias. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Parental Support for Autonomy and Child Depressive Symptoms in Middle Childhood: The Mediating Role of Parent–Child Attachment

To facilitate understanding of the factors associated with child depressive symptoms in middle childhood, we examined the roles of parental support for autonomy and parent–child attachment in child depressive symptoms among 150 Chinese parent–child dyads. The participating children’s ages ranged from 6 to 12 years old. Parental support for autonomy was coded from a conflict resolution and a cooperation task. Children reported their depressive symptoms and their attachment relationships with the participating parents. After controlling for parent depressive symptoms, parental support for autonomy was associated with fewer child depressive symptoms. The association between parental support for autonomy and child depressive symptoms was mediated by parent–child attachment quality, suggesting that parental support for autonomy was negatively associated with child depressive symptoms through its positive association with parent–child attachment quality. Moreover, the positive association between parental support for autonomy and parent–child attachment quality was stronger for older children. The current study expanded the knowledge on parental support for autonomy in middle-childhood and its association with parent–child relationships and child mental health. Future research is encouraged to pay more attention to the role of parental support for autonomy in various aspects of child development for children in middle-childhood and pre-adolescence.     

Music as a Therapeutic Medium for Occupational Engagement: Implications for Occupational Therapy

Music is a meaningful occupation; a summary of current literature and the authors’ experiences regarding health and wellness benefits and potential for music as a therapeutic medium in occupational therapy practice is presented. An interview and a summary of the authors’ experiences illustrate the role for music and its benefits for occupational therapy. These benefits are described through three themes which emerged: (a) music as a means of increasing group cohesion toward common goals, (b) music as a means of increasing socialization, and (c) music as a meaningful occupation can empower individuals to enhance and embrace wellness and recovery.     

Evolutionary Constraints on Human Object Perception

Language and culture endow humans with access to conceptual information that far exceeds any which could be accessed by a non‐human animal. Yet, it is possible that, even without language or specific experiences, non‐human animals represent and infer some aspects of similarity relations between objects in the same way as humans. Here, we show that monkeys’ discrimination sensitivity when identifying images of animals is predicted by established measures of semantic similarity derived from human conceptual judgments. We used metrics from computer vision and computational neuroscience to show that monkeys’ and humans’ performance cannot be explained by low‐level visual similarity alone. The results demonstrate that at least some of the underlying structure of object representations in humans is shared with non‐human primates, at an abstract level that extends beyond low‐level visual similarity. Because the monkeys had no experience with the objects we tested, the results suggest that monkeys and humans share a primitive representation of object similarity that is independent of formal knowledge and cultural experience, and likely derived from common evolutionary constraints on object representation.     

Rumination in Response to Stress as a Common Vulnerability Factor to Depression and Substance Misuse in Adolescence

The current study examined rumination in response to stress as a common vulnerability factor to both depression and substance use problems in adolescence. Specifically, we used a multi-wave longitudinal design to examine whether adolescents who tend to ruminate in response to stress exhibit increases in depressive symptoms and substance misuse following the occurrence of negative events. At time 1, adolescents (n = 161) completed measures assessing depressive symptoms, substance misuse, and the tendency to ruminate in response to stress. Every 6 weeks for the next 18 weeks participants completed measures assessing the occurrence of negative events, depressive symptoms, and substance misuse. Hierarchical linear modeling analyses indicated that adolescents who tend to ruminate in response to stress report greater elevations in depressive symptoms and substance misuse following elevations in negative events than other adolescents. The relationship between rumination, negative events, and substance misuse was moderated by age. Support was not obtained for fluctuations in depressive symptoms as a mediator of the relationship between negative events and substance misuse. Fluctuations in negative affect, however, were found to mediate this relationship.