Does Funding Impact Our Research? Causality,Normativity, and Diversity in 40 Years of U.S. Sociology of Religion

In this article we use a sample of 40 years of sociology journal articles (N = 1,024) on religion to ask what role funding plays in some of the leading trends in the subdiscipline. Our analysis reveals a considerable increase in the number of published articles on religion with funding over the past 40 years as well as a shift away from public funding as the primary source of funding. Engaging our findings in previous analyses of this database, we surprisingly find a positive correlation between public funding and positive socio‐evaluative findings in articles on religion, but not between private funding and positive socio‐evaluative findings. We also find a positive correlation between funding from religious organizations and research on religion in the United States and a weak, but negative, correlation between funding from religious organizations and research on non‐Christian religious traditions. We do not find a relationship between funding and causal order.     

Early Childhood Teachers' Perspectives on Social-Emotional Competence and Learning in Urban Classrooms

The promotion of social-emotional competence and implementation of social-emotional learning programs have increased substantially in schools; however, little is known about teachers' perceptions of such programs. This qualitative study explored early childhood (3 to 8 years old) teachers' perceptions of classroom-based social-emotional learning programs for young, urban-dwelling children. A focus of the study included learning what teachers believe were the critical components and challenges of such programs. Five themes emerged from the content analysis: responsibility, curricula/program design, contextual relevance, support, and barriers. The findings from this study are discussed with regard to educational policy implications about social-emotional learning curricula and programs, especially those implemented in urban schools.     

Aging, source memory, and emotion

In 2 experiments we assessed younger and older adults' ability to remember contextual information about an event. Each experiment examined memory for 3 different types of contextual information: (a) perceptual information (e.g., location of an item); (b) conceptual, nonemotional information (e.g., quality of an item); and (c) conceptual, emotional information (e.g., safety of an item). Consistent with a large literature on aging and source memory, younger adults outperformed older adults when the contextual information was perceptual in nature and when it was conceptual, but not emotional. Age differences in source memory were eliminated, however, when participants recalled emotional source information. These findings suggest that emotional information differentially engages older adults, possibly evoking enhanced elaborations and associations. The data are also consistent with a growing literature, suggesting that emotional processing remains stable with age (e.g., Carstensen & Turk-Charles, 1994, 1998; Isaacowitz, Charles, & Carstensen, 2000).     

Paying attention to meaning

Abstract— Several paradigms show that responses to one event compromise responses to a second event for around 500 ms. Such effects are generally attributed to attentional capacity limitations associated with processing information in the first event. In a task in which targets could be distinguished only by their meaning, we varied the semantic relationship between distractors and targets following at different lags. Semantic relatedness alone produced a classic attentional blink. We conclude by discussing how attention theory might best accommodate these new effects.