Intrinsic religiosity reduces intergroup hostility under mortality salience

Results of three studies indicate that intrinsic religiosity and mortality salience interact to predict intergroup hostility. Study 1, conducted among 200 American Christians and Jews, reveals that under mortality salience, intrinsic (but not extrinsic or quest) religiosity is related to decreased support for aggressive counterterrorism. Study 2, conducted among 148 Muslims in Iran, demonstrates that intrinsic religiosity predicts decreased out‐group derogation under mortality salience. Study 3, conducted among 131 Polish Christians, shows that under mortality salience, priming of intrinsic religious concepts decreases support for aggressive counterterrorism. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Are the pathogens of out-groups really more dangerous?

We question the plausibility of Fincher & Thornhill's (F&T's) argument that localised pathogen-host coevolution leads to out-groups having pathogens more damaging than those infecting one's own family or religious group.     

Arm adductor with arm abduction in rotator cuff tear patients vs. healthy--design of a new measuring instrument

The incidence of (a)symptomatic rotator cuff tears is high, but etiologic mechanisms are unclear and treatment outcomes vary. A practical tool providing objective outcome measures and insight into etiology and potential patient subgroups is desirable. Symptomatic cuff tears coincide with humerus cranialization. Adductor co-activation during active arm abduction has been reported to reduce subacromial narrowing and pain in cuff patients. We present an easy-to-use method to evaluate adductor co-activation. Twenty healthy controls and twenty full-thickness cuff tear patients exerted EMG-recorded isometric arm abduction and adduction tasks. Ab- and adductor EMG's were expressed using the "Activation Ratio (AR)" (-1 ≤ AR ≤ 1), where lower values express more co-activation. Mean control AR's ranged from .7 to .9 with moderate to good test-retest reliability (ICC: .60-.74). Patients showed significantly more adductor co-activation during abduction, with adductor AR's ranging between .3 (teres major) and .5 (latissimus dorsi). In conclusion, the introduced method discriminates symptomatic cuff tear patients from healthy controls, quantifies adductor co-activation in an interpretable measure, and provides the opportunity to study correlations between muscle activation and humerus cranialization in a straightforward manner. It has potential as an objective outcome measure, for distinguishing symptomatic from asymptomatic cuff tears and as a tool for surgical or therapeutic decision-making.     

Parenting style in Spanish parents with children aged 6 to 14

The aim of this paper was to establish which parenting style of Spanish families is associated with optimum children's outcomes. A random Spanish sample of 1,103 parents of children and teenagers from 6 to 14 years of age, of whom 47% were females, reported on their child-rearing practices. Families were classified into 1 of 4 groups (authoritative, authoritarian, indulgent, or neglectful) based on the parents' answers. Socialization outcomes were 6 indicators of interpersonal relationship quality, 9 indicators of psychological adjustment, 7 indicators of personal competence, and 12 indicators of behavior problems. Results showed that indulgent and authoritative parenting styles were associated with better outcomes than authoritarian and neglectful parenting. Overall, our results supported the idea that, in Spain, the optimum parenting style is the indulgent one, as scores in the four sets of socialization outcomes among children and teenagers from indulgent families were always equal to, or even better than, the authoritative parenting style.     

Identity construction and career development interventions with emerging adults

Today's wealthy societies are more fluid, varied and complex than they were just a few decades ago. As a consequence, what were “vocational choices” at the beginning of the 20th century now appear as “life designing issues”. In this context, contemporary research stresses the plurality and relative malleability of human subjects as well as their ability to take reflexive stances on their current and past experiences. Fitting in such an epistemology, a self-constructing model is proposed as a basis for a life designing counseling interview. This model describes self-identity as a dynamic system of (past, present and expected) subjective identity forms (SIF), the synthesis and dynamism of which originate in a tension between two kinds of reflexivity. Counseling interviews with emerging adults show that the elicitation of some expected SIF allows them to re-read their current and past experiences from such a perspective and constitutes a compelling incentive to act.     

Career Adapt-Abilities Scale—Brazilian Form: Psychometric properties and relationships to personality

The Career Adapt-Abilities Scale—Brazilian Form (CAASBrazil) consists of four scales which measure concern, control, curiosity, and confidence as psychosocial resources for managing occupational transitions, developmental tasks, and work traumas. Internal consistency estimates for the subscale and total scores ranged from good to excellent. The factor structure was quite similar to the one computed for combined data from 13 countries. CAASBrazil is similar to the International Form, with the exception of two items that were not included in Brazilian version. Concurrent validity evidence was collected relative to personality factors from the Five-Factor Model of Personality. The relationships between career adaptability and personality factors were as predicted.     

Sándor Ferenczi: From Clinical Turmoil to Theoretical Articulations

The article deals with concepts proposed by Sándor Ferenczi: confusion of tongues, disavowal and progressive trauma, illustrated by a clinical example, in which excessive life experiences deeply determined the psychic construction, compromising the integrity of the self-image and the potentiality of egoic capacities. We attempt to understand the uniqueness of the patient's history, and the ethical practice of deep analytic listening.     

Increasing magnitude counts more: asymmetrical processing of ordinality in 4-month-old infants

While infants' ability to discriminate quantities has been extensively studied, showing that this competence is present even in neonates, the ability to compute ordinal relations between magnitudes has received much less attention. Here we show that the ability to represent ordinal information embedded in size-based sequences is apparent at 4months of age, provided that magnitude changes involve increasing relations. Infants in Experiments 1A and 1B discriminated changes in ordinal relations after habituation to ascending sequences, but did not show evidence of discrimination after habituation to descending sequences. In Experiment 2 we replicated this asymmetry in magnitude discrimination even when additional cues known to boost ordinal competence were provided. The presence of an asymmetry between ascending vs. descending order during infancy suggests a developmental continuity in the underlying code used to represent magnitude, whereby the reported addition advantage in children and adults' arithmetic performance emerges.     

Perceptual simulation in developing language comprehension

We tested an embodied account of language proposing that comprehenders create perceptual simulations of the events they hear and read about. In Experiment 1, children (ages 7–13 years) performed a picture verification task. Each picture was preceded by a prerecorded spoken sentence describing an entity whose shape or orientation matched or mismatched the depicted object. Responses were faster for matching pictures, suggesting that participants had formed perceptual-like situation models of the sentences. The advantage for matching pictures did not increase with age. Experiment 2 extended these findings to the domain of written language. Participants (ages 7–10 years) of high and low word reading ability verified pictures after reading sentences aloud. The results suggest that even when reading is effortful, children construct a perceptual simulation of the described events. We propose that perceptual simulation plays a more central role in developing language comprehension than was previously thought.