Family,public and private religiousness and psychological well-being over time in at-risk adolescents

Positive effects of different dimensions of religiousness (including private, public and familial) on well-being as well as the stress buffering effects of religiousness have been documented. However, relatively little research has explored how these different facets of religiousness are related to psychological well-being in at-risk adolescents. This study examined family, public and private religiousness and their protective influence on psychological adjustment in adolescents at risk for poor psychological and behavioural outcomes. Participants include 186 urban teens divided between African Americans and European Americans. Structured interviews assessed religiousness, stress, as well as change in emotional distress and substance abuse problems over a one-year period. Greater private religiousness protects adolescents exposed to higher levels of stress from emotional and behavioural problems. In contrast, higher levels of family religiousness exacerbate emotional problems over time in adolescents exposed to greater stress. Findings demonstrate the complex influence of religiousness on psychological well-being in adolescence.     

Flashbulb Memories for September 11th can be Preserved in Older Adults

Flashbulb memories (FMs) are vivid, long-lasting memories for the source of surprising, arousing news. Laboratory studies have consistently found that older adults, especially those with below-average frontal lobe (FL) function, are impaired in source memory relative to young. We tested memory for the source of news concerning the September 11th terrorist attacks in older adults with high or low frontal lobe function and in young people. We found no age differences in source memory a year after the event and no differences related to FL function. Flashbulb memories may be different from usual cases of source memory because of their emotional content, personal importance, or social relevance.     

An Exploration of Coaching Research in Journal of Applied Sport Psychology from 1989 to 2017

This article seeks to examine the treatment of coaching research within Journal of Applied Sport Psychology (JASP) and, specifically, to explore whether the Association for Applied Sport Psychology’s mission in recognizing the coach as a performing “other” is being adopted in the field. The study followed a 3-phase design. In Phase 1, an exhaustive search was conducted to identify all coach-related research published in JASP from 1989 to 2017. Phase 2 consisted of accessing the 101 identified articles from a total of 690 articles that had been published in JASP during the review period. In Phase 3, articles were categorized into the multidisciplinary sport and exercise psychology (M-SEP) and contemporary multidisciplinary sport and exercise psychology (C-SEP) periods, and analysis of the articles was completed. Main results indicated that articles that focused on coach perceptions about different topics related primarily to SEP decreased in focus from 40% in the M-SEP period to 23% in the C-SEP period. A prominent focus in both periods was the impact of coaches (often interpersonal behaviors) on their athletes’ performance (M-SEP?=?35%, C-SEP?=?46%). A coach performance focus was coded in only 10% of articles in both periods. Articles decreased in their explicit discussion of how research applied to consulting from 60% to 44% across periods. The findings suggest that currently the literature in JASP does not directly provide SEP professionals with effective knowledge application for working with coaches as a performer within the sport context. This review emphasizes the lack of research positioning of coach as a performing “other” within JASP and may increase awareness of viewing the coach as a performer within the field of applied sport psychology.

Lay Summary: This study was a review of research articles published within the Journal of Applied Sport Psychology (JASP) between 1989 and 2017. Only research with a main focus in coaching was included in the review. A multiple-step process was used to examine the articles and pinpoint the type of research about coaches that was being published in JASP. Results showed a large focus on how coaches contribute to their athletes’ performance, however, a lack of research examining aspects of the coach themselves and how they might enhance their own performance as a coach.     

Vocal Imitations and the Identification of Sound Events

It is commonly observed that a speaker vocally imitates a sound that she or he intends to communicate to an interlocutor. We report on an experiment that examined the assumption that vocal imitations can effectively communicate a referent sound and that they do so by conveying the features necessary for the identification of the referent sound event. Participants were required to sort a set of vocal imitations of everyday sounds. The resulting clusters corresponded in most of the cases to the categories of the referent sound events, indicating that the imitations enabled the listeners to recover what was imitated. Furthermore, a binary decision tree analysis showed that a few characteristic acoustic features predicted the clusters. These features also predicted the classification of the referent sounds but did not generalize to the categorization of other sounds. This showed that, for the speaker, vocally imitating a sound consists of conveying the acoustic features important for recognition, within the constraints of human vocal production. As such vocal imitations prove to be a phenomenon potentially useful to study sound identification.     

Meta-Invariant Structure in Stimulus Arrays: A Response to Mace's Zetetic Challenge to Ecological Perceptual Researchers

ABSTRACT

Ecological perception, per James Gibson's theory, avows that perception depends on informative structure in stimulus arrays, where information is defined as stimulus array invariants. Gibson, however, was somewhat vague about the nature of such structure. Consequently, ecological perceptual research—even acknowledging some remarkable successes—has generally been ad hoc: Lacking principled heuristics, researchers examine array structure, which, by some means, they have come to discover as (or believe to be) informative. Here, I propose a series of heuristic principles potentially useful for the discovery of informative structure in stimulus arrays, with examples to suggest how those principles might apply. The major benefit of principled search for stimulus array invariants is more efficient elaboration of their function in perception. While admittedly preliminary, the principles outlined may both guide perceptual investigations and prompt additional consideration of how to approach the search for stimulus array invariants.     

Much Ado About Something: An Ethic of the Common Good for Information Technology

As the culture of information technology grows and with it the exacerbation of associated problems, so does the body of literature that seeks to reflect on its impact and prospects. The advancements in information technology tend to be outpacing critical reflection and solid ethical analysis. The quality of the foundational ethical work done in information technology ethics has been inadequate, consisting of applied ethics or an appeal to law. This article considers how the richer perspective—the common good, as expressed through the lens of the Roman Catholic Church—can serve as a hermeneutic in the field of information technology ethics, offering a more substantial foundation to address pressing controversial issues associated with this burgeoning field and function as a guide for future developments in this industry. The common good can supplement the operative ways of appealing to law and business ethics to address crime and abuse associated with the World Wide Web with a specifically Roman Catholic paradigm and, in turn, offer a broader and richer appreciation of the societal-wide context that information technology impacts.     

The Relationship Between Personality,Burnout, and Engagement Among the Indian Clergy

This study examined the relationship between the Big Five personality dimensions, burnout, and engagement among 511 Indian Catholic diocesan priests. We expected that Neuroticism would be positively associated with burnout and negatively associated with engagement. Moreover, we expected Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness to be negatively associated with burnout and positively associated with engagement. Hierarchical regression analyses largely confirmed these expectations. Results are discussed in the context of the broader literature on burnout and engagement, as well as the literature on priesthood.     

Priming of actions increases sense of control over unexpected outcomes

Sense of agency (SoA) refers to the feeling that we are in control of our own actions and, through them, events in the outside world. SoA depends partly on retrospectively matching outcomes to expectations, and partly on prospective processes occurring prior to action, notably action selection.To assess the relative contribution of these processes, we factorially varied subliminal priming of action selection and expectation of action outcomes. Both factors affected SoA, and there was also a significant interaction. Compatible action primes increased SoA more strongly for unexpected than expected outcomes. Outcome expectation had strong effects on SoA following incompatible action priming, but only weak effects following compatible action priming. Prospective and retrospective SoA may have distinct and complementary functions.     

Physical activity does not provoke panic attacks in patients with panic disorder: A review of the evidence

Abstract

This paper summarizes the results of published studies in which physical activity has been performed by patients with panic disorder. Several case studies of apparent exercise-induced panic attacks were found. However, in field studies that involved ambulatory monitoring of panic disorder patients only 1 of 91 panic attacks that were monitored actually occurred while the test subject was engaged in moderately intense physical activity. Moreover, only five panic attacks occurred in association with 444 exercise bouts performed by 420 panic disorder patients in laboratory settings despite the fact that exercise induces somatic signs and symptoms of anxiety. Thus, the weight of the published evidence shows that acute physical activity does not provoke panic attacks in panic disorder patients.     

The Many Faces of Closure and Introspection

In this paper I present a more refined analysis of the principles of deductive closure and positive introspection. This analysis uses the expressive resources of logics for different types of group knowledge, and discriminates between aspects of closure and computation that are often conflated. The resulting model also yields a more fine-grained distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge, and places Hintikka’s original argument for positive introspection in a new perspective.