Religious Studies at Berkeley

The University of California at Berkeley has had a Group Major in Religious Studies since 1970, but there is no core faculty for the program. Efforts on the part of distinguished Berkeley faculty members over the years to create a viable department have met with no success. Now (in 1999), as a result of actions taken by the administration, the group major is in serious jeopardy.     

Developmental course of auditory processing interactions: Garner interference and Simon interference.

Previous research suggests that with increasing age children become more efficient in inhibiting conflicting responses and in resisting interference from irrelevant information. We assessed the abilities of 100 children (ages 3-16 years) and 20 adults to resist interference during the processing of 2 auditory dimensions of speech, namely the speaker's gender and spatial location. The degree of interference from irrelevant variability in either dimension did not vary with age. Apparently, young children do not have more difficulty in resisting interference when the nontarget and the target are both perceptual attributes. We also assessed the participants' abilities to inhibit conflicting task-irrelevant information from spatial location and to resist interference from spatial variability in the context of conflict. In the presence of conflicting task-irrelevant information, both interference effects declined significantly with age. Developmental change in auditory processing seems to vary as a function of (1) the nature of the target-nontarget combination and (2) the presence/absence of conflicting task-irrelevant information.     

Are Written Reports of Suicide and Seeking Help Contagious? High Schoolers' Perceptions1

To assess contagion for suicide and seeking mental health help, 128 high school students read a short vignette about a teen under stress. Half of them were told that this teen knew someone in the community who had similar problems and had committed suicide, and half were told that the teen knew someone in the community who had similar problems and had sought help from a mental health professional. A 2 (Gender of Respondent) × 2 (Gender of Victim) × 2 (Vignette: Response to Stress) analysis of variance indicated a significant main effect for response, and a significant two-way interaction for gender of respondent and response to stress. These high school students thought contagion occurred for suicide as well as seeking mental health help. Girls tended to be more responsive to seeking help, whereas boys were slightly more responsive to suicide. An implication is that publicity about seeking help may ameliorate suicidal contagion.     

Auditory attention switching: a developmental study

The developmental course of the ability to rapidly allocate attention was studied using a dichotic listening task with 8-year old, 11-year old and college age subjects. In this task, subjects were instructed to listen to one ear for predescribed targets and then were later signaled (on some trials) to switch their attention to the other ear. Reorientation was assessed by comparing the pattern of subjects' omission and intrusion errors on trials following a command to switch ears with the pattern of errors on no-switch trials. Older subjects were better able to reallocate their attention in accordance with task demands, with the greatest gains in performance occurring between ages 8 and 11. This developmental change appears to be generally continuous and quantitative in nature. Since successful performance of this task requires flexibility in subjects' ability to control their focus of attention, these results support the hypothesis that the basis of the developmental improvement in the ability to ignore irrelevant information is linked to the ability to use active attentional strategies.     

Are monocular arrays discriminable from binocular arrays?

On each trial of this experiment, a subject was visually stimulated by one or two shadows on a translucent background in a Telebinocular. For each subject, there were 40 trials of monocular stimulation by one shadow, 40 trials of monocular stimulation by two shadows (one in each hemifield), and 40 trials of binocular stimulation by two shadows (one in the left hemifield of one eye and another in the right hemifield of the other eye). Across these randomly ordered trials, 52 subjects were unable to discriminate two right-eye shadows from two left-eye shadows and were unable to discriminate two monocularly perceived shadows from two binocularly perceived shadows. Generally, subjects tended to misidentify right-hemifield shadows as right-eye shadows and tended to misidentify two-hemifield shadows as two-eye shadows.     

Impulsiveness and spiral maze performance in elderly psychiatric patients

The short form EPQ-R, the I₇ Impulsiveness Questionnaire and the Gibson Spiral Maze test of the CAPE were administered to 72 elderly patients attending a psychiatric day hospital. Forty two were diagnosed as suffering from a functional, and 30 from an organic, disorder. The previous finding of a relationship between Psychoticism and Spiral Maze Error score was not replicated for either the functional or the organic group. An hypothesized relationship between Impulsiveness and Spiral Maze Error score was not supported.     

Adolescents' compliance-resistance: effects of parents' compliance strategy and gender

This investigation determined choice of compliance-resisting behaviors on the basis of compliance-gaining strategy, gender of parent, and gender of adolescent. One hundred and eighteen 9th- through 12th-grade students identified resistance strategies they would use when confronted with five compliance-gaining attempts: manipulation, nonnegotiation, emotional appeal, personal rejection, and empathic understanding. Each compliance-gaining attempt was associated with a specific parent and a specific compliance-gaining strategy. The results demonstrate significant differences in resistance strategy selected on the basis of parent's gender, adolescent's gender, and compliance-gaining strategy. When mothers employed personal rejection or empathic understanding, the adolescent was most likely to use nonnegotiation. When the mother used an emotional appeal, adolescents used identity management. Fathers who employed manipulation by using an emotional appeal were resisted with justification. When fathers used nonnegotiation or personal rejection, adolescents used nonnegotiation. The father's use of empathic understanding was countered with identity management. Adolescents are more likely to use identity management with their mothers and justification with their fathers. Female adolescents are more likely to use identity management than are male adolescents, while males are more likely to use nonnegotiation and negotiation than are females. Nonnegotiation occurs most often from son to mother, followed by son to father, daughter to father, and daughter to mother.