Parent and child causal attributions during clinical interviews

Attributions made by children and their parents for the cause of the child's clinical problem were monitored during assessment interviews. Results support previously observed differences obtained through questionnaires, with parents making more attributions than their children to characteristics of the child. This pattern was affected by variations in interview format. Parents and children differed in the locus of their attributions when interviewed individually, but these differences were not present when families were interviewed with both parents and children present. Implications for the methodology of attribution research with child-clinical populations are highlighted.     

Racialized Religion and Judicial Injustice: How Whiteness and Biblicist Christianity Intersect to Promote a Preference for (Unjust) Punishment

America's judicial system is both exceptionally punitive and demonstrably unjust toward racial minorities. While these dual realities are structured into America's institutions, we propose they are also partially sustained by the intersection of ideologies that are both racialized and sacralized. Using multiple waves of the General Social Surveys and a unique measure that asks Americans to choose between two forms of judicial injustice (wrongful conviction or erroneous acquittal), we examine how white racial identity intersects with biblical literalism to bolster America's bent toward unjust punitiveness. In the main effects, Americans who affirm biblical literalism are more likely to show a preference for convicting the innocent, as are whites compared to Black Americans. Examining interaction effects, however, we find whiteness moderates the influence of biblical literalism such that only white biblical literalists (as opposed to non‐white biblical literalists or white non‐biblical literalists) are more likely to prefer wrongful conviction. Indeed, in our full model, being a white biblical literalist is the strongest predictor of preferring wrongful conviction. We theorize that preference for wrongful conviction over erroneous acquittal stems, at least in part, from the combination of sacralized authoritarianism and perceived racial threat.     

How Religion Predicts Pet Ownership in the United States

Over 60 percent of Americans have some sort of family pet. Although studies have explored the personality and demographic correlates of pet ownership, none have considered whether religious characteristics may influence not only pet ownership, but the kind of pet Americans own. Drawing on data from the 2018 General Social Survey, we examine the religious antecedents of pet ownership in general as well as owning a cat or a dog, taking into account factors previously associated with owning certain pets (e.g., urban vs. rural residence, political affiliation). Although religious tradition and biblical literalism generally do not predict pet ownership, frequent worship attendees and the most conservative evangelicals report owning fewer pets. Religious characteristics also predict Americans’ ownership of particular pets. Most notably, we find a strong, negative association between worship attendance and cat ownership. We theorize potential mechanisms. On the one hand, certain personality types might simultaneously attract some Americans toward religious participation and away from pets, and cats in particular. Alternatively, to the extent that pet ownership is a partial substitute for human bonding and interaction, Americans more deeply embedded within a religious community may have less need (or time) for pets generally, and specifically more independent “roommate pets,” like cats.     

Truth Without Reference: The Use of Fictional Names

Topoi - Singular terms without referents are called empty or vacuous terms. But not all of them are equally empty. In particular, not all proper names that fail to name an existing object fail in...     

Enhancing social diffusion theory as a basis for prevention intervention: A conceptual and strategic framework

Social diffusion theory has recently been recognized as a promising approach for large-scale disease prevention and health promotion efforts. This paper describes how principles and tactics from social cognitive theory, operant psychology, social psychology, social marketing, and the overarching stages of change model can be used to further develop the conceptual and strategic (technological) bases of social diffusion theory. Within an integrative framework, we discuss in detail more effective ways to train peer mediators of behavior change as one example of how social diffusion theory can benefit from this conceptual and strategic reformulation. We then further illustrate the use of peer mediators of change in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and cancer prevention intervention studies with both interventions training peer mediators to diffuse information, norms, and risk reduction strategies. Although the results of these studies showed reductions in high-risk behaviors across population segments, more closely following the framework discussed in this article should further increase the behavior change potential of future interventions based on social diffusion theory.     

Cross-language computational investigation of the length effect in reading aloud

The authors examined whether 2 computational models of reading, the dual-route cascaded model (M. Coltheart, K. Rastle, C. Perry, R. Langdon, & J. C. Ziegler, 2001) and the connectionist 2-layer model (M. Zorzi, G. Houghton, & B. Butterworth, 1998), were able to predict the pattern that the length effect found in reading aloud is larger in German than in English (J. C. Ziegler, C. Perry, A. M. Jacobs, & M. Braun, 2001). The results showed that the dual-route cascaded model, which uses a serial mechanism for assembling phonology, successfully predicted this cross-language difference. In contrast, the connectionist model of Zorzi et al. (1998) predicted the opposite: a larger length effect in English than in German. Both the success of one model and the failure of the other highlight fundamental differences between 2 major classes of computational models.     

Linguistic difficulties in language and reading development constrain skilled adult reading

This study investigated whether the quality and specification of phonological representations in early language development would predict later skilled reading. Two perceptual identification experiments were performed with skilled readers. In Experiment 1, spelling difficulties in Grade 1 were used as a proxy measure for poorly specified representations in early language development. In Experiment 2, difficulties in perceiving and representing liquid and nasalized phonemes in final consonant clusters were used for the same purpose. Both experiments showed that words that were more likely to develop underspecified lexical representations in early language development remained more difficult in skilled reading. This finding suggests that early linguistic difficulties in speech perception and structuring of lexical representations may constrain the long-term organization and dynamics of the skilled adult reading system. The present data thus challenge the assumption that skilled reading can be fully understood without taking into account linguistic constraints acting upon the beginning reader.