Dimensions of Religion and Spirituality: A Longitudinal Topic Modeling Approach

In lieu of the traditional text data analysis methods, structural topic modeling was utilized to analyze the text contents of 255 self-report inventories of religion and spirituality (R/S) published from 1929 to 2017. The study had two objectives: (a) to clarify and identify the latent dimensions of R/S inherent in the items of the measures; and (b) to examine and demonstrate the usefulness of a longitudinal topic modeling in the study of R/S. We identified 5,617 unique text terms from the measures and fitted topic models on those terms to extract latent dimensions called topics. We also simultaneously analyzed the longitudinal effect of publication decade (i.e., 1950s–2010s) on the topics. A topic model with three topics was chosen to best support the data: Experience of Transcendence (Topic 1), Engagement in Transcendence (Topic 2), and Essence of Transcendence (Topic 3). In addition, the longitudinal analysis revealed that Topic 1 showed a continual increase over the decades, while Topics 2 and 3 both demonstrated a gradual decrease, in effect matching the general trend of Topic 1's increasing popularity in society and the academia.     

Developmental change and cross‐domain links in vocal and musical emotion recognition performance in childhood

Although the configurations of psychoacoustic cues signalling emotions in human vocalizations and instrumental music are very similar, cross‐domain links in recognition performance have yet to be studied developmentally. Two hundred and twenty 5‐ to 10‐year‐old children were asked to identify musical excerpts and vocalizations as happy, sad, or fearful. The results revealed age‐related increases in overall recognition performance with significant correlations across vocal and musical conditions at all developmental stages. Recognition scores were greater for musical than vocal stimuli and were superior in females compared with males. These results confirm that recognition of emotions in vocal and musical stimuli is linked by 5 years and that sensitivity to emotions in auditory stimuli is influenced by age and gender.     

FEMINIST RESEARCH METHODS A Content Analysis of Psychology and Social Science Textbooks

This research examined the extent to which research methods textbooks in psychology and general social science discuss feminist challenges and approaches to social science (N = 40 textbooks). Two dimensions were examined. First, within the "nonsexist" dimensions, textbooks were analyzed to determine if they used nonsexist language and if they discussed ways to avoid sexist bias in research. The second dimension was "profeminist." Within this dimension four subdomains receiving considerable attention from feminist researchers were explored: (a) epistemology (or "ways of knowing"); (b) objectivity and subjectivity; (c) the relationship between the researcher and the researched; and (d) qualitative versus quantitative methodologies. Results demonstrated that although the majority of the textbooks did not use sexist language, they did not move much beyond this standard. There was little discussion of feminist challenges to these research issues. When the textbook authors did mention these topics, their analyses were most often inconsistent with feminist approaches.     

STRUGGLING WITH A NONTRADITIONAL PAST

This article reports findings from a qualitative study that explored the educational experiences of women who were academic high achievers and who were disadvantaged as children. An interesting result was that most participants, if not all, believed that one reason they were successful was because they never revealed their personal histories to education professionals. This article describes the participants' relationship to the concept of disadvantage and the process they went through to have a voice in a system that rewarded them for their silence. It also addresses the question of when it is appropriate to disclose personal information in educational settings. Some believe there should be a separation between the personal and the professional. Others argue that women and disadvantaged students need education that is connected to their life experiences. If this is true, we must ask how this connection can be made when people from disadvantaged backgrounds believe they must hide who they are to succeed.