Religious Affiliation Influences on the Health Status and Behaviours of Students Attending Seventh-Day Adventist Schools in Australia

Students attending Seventh-day Adventist (Adventist) schools in Australia have been shown to have better health status and behaviours compared to secular norms, yet these schools cater for a high percentage of non-Adventist students. The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of religious affiliation (Adventist/non-Adventist) on the health status and behaviours of students attending Adventist secondary schools in Australia. The sample included 1734 students who responded to a health and lifestyle survey that captured demographic details, self-reported height and weight, self-reported health status, mental health and select health behaviours. Students who identified themselves as Adventist reported significantly better health behaviours than the non-Adventist students in several behavioural domains, especially among the male students. However, this did not translate to a difference in health status. Further research is needed to understand the causal mechanisms responsible for the potential health advantage of Adventist students, which may include family or church religious influences.     

Extending the Balloon Analogue Risk Task to Assess Naturalistic Risk Taking via a Mobile Platform

The Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) is a behavioral measure that is commonly used to assess risk taking propensity. The primary goal of the present study was to introduce a mobile version of the BART (mBART) that can be included within ambulatory assessment protocols to assess risk taking in daily life. Study 1 compared common BART indices (i.e., total money earned, adjusted average pumps, balloon explosions, and coefficient of variability [CV]) on a single administration of the laboratory BART on a computer and the mBART on a smartphone (n = 78). Results revealed generally consistent relationships between indices of risk taking propensity in both the laboratory BART and mBART. Study 2 administered the mBART as part of a 7-day ecological momentary assessment (EMA) protocol in a population of nondaily smokers (n = 51). Using multi-level models, results suggest that males have greater adjusted average pumps (p = .03), and that a participant’s average CV is negatively related to trait sensation seeking (p = .03) and positively associated with trait positive urgency (p = .04). There were within-person effects of study day (p = .05) and environment (p = .02) with respect to adjusted average pumps such that individuals took greater risks as the study progressed and were riskier when alone compared to with others. Inclusion of the mBART in EMA did not appear to significantly increase participant burden and demonstrated acceptable levels of compliance. These results offer initial evidence supporting the feasibility and utility of the mBART for ambulatory research designs.     

Developing the Good Physician: Spirituality affects the development of virtues and moral intuitions in medical students

The Project on the Good Physician is a national longitudinal study of moral and professional formation of American physicians over the course of medical training. The purpose of this paper is to examine the processes by which spirituality influences the development of three virtues (mindfulness, empathic compassion, and generosity) in medical students as mediated by the moral intuition to care/harm, as well as make predictions as to how this type of study could be generalizable to other populations. Study participants were 563 medical students recruited by the University of Chicago from 24 medical schools across the U.S. (54.7% male, 57% white) who completed measures assessing virtue formation 9 months apart. Path analysis of a cascade model showed that spirituality (but not religiousness) was directly and indirectly related to change in the virtue empathic compassion, and also indirectly related to change in the virtue generosity. Moreover, the moral intuition to care/harm partially mediated the association between spirituality and the virtues of empathic compassion and generosity (but not mindfulness).     

Manipulating informational constraints shapes movement reorganization in interceptive actions

Movement organization of cricket batters' actions was analyzed under three distinct experimental task constraints: a representative condition of a practice context in which the batters batted against a "live" bowler, a ball projection machine, and a near life-size video simulation of a bowler. Results showed that each distinct set of task constraints led to significant variations in the patterns of movement control. Removal of advanced information sources from a bowler's actions when the batters faced the ball projection machine caused significant delays in movement initiation, resulting in reduced peak bat swing velocities and a reduction in the quality of bat-ball contact, when compared with batting against a "live" bowler. When responding to a two-dimensional video simulation, batters were able to use information from the bowlers' action, enabling fidelity of initial behavioral responses consistent with the task of batting against a "live" bowler. However, without interceptive task requirements or actual ball flight information, significant variations in downswing initiation timing and peak bat velocities were demonstrated. Findings stress the need for representative experimental and learning designs in fast ball sports for developing performers.     

The Role of Animacy in Children's Interpretation of Relative Clauses in English: Evidence From Sentence–Picture Matching and Eye Movements

Subject relative clauses (SRCs) are typically processed more easily than object relative clauses (ORCs), but this difference is diminished by an inanimate head-noun in semantically non-reversible ORCs (“The book that the boy is reading”). In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the influence of animacy on online processing of semantically reversible SRCs and ORCs using lexically inanimate items that were perceptually animate due to motion (e.g., “Where is the tractor that the cow is chasing”). In Experiment 1, 48 children (aged 4;5–6;4) and 32 adults listened to sentences that varied in the lexical animacy of the NP1 head-noun (Animate/Inanimate) and relative clause (RC) type (SRC/ORC) with an animate NP2 while viewing two images depicting opposite actions. As expected, inanimate head-nouns facilitated the correct interpretation of ORCs in children; however, online data revealed children were more likely to anticipate an SRC as the RC unfolded when an inanimate head-noun was used, suggesting processing was sensitive to perceptual animacy. In Experiment 2, we repeated our design with inanimate (rather than animate) NP2s (e.g., “where is the tractor that the car is following”) to investigate whether our online findings were due to increased visual surprisal at an inanimate as agent, or to similarity-based interference. We again found greater anticipation for an SRC in the inanimate condition, supporting our surprisal hypothesis. Across the experiments, offline measures show that lexical animacy influenced children's interpretation of ORCs, whereas online measures reveal that as RCs unfolded, children were sensitive to the perceptual animacy of lexically inanimate NPs, which was not reflected in the offline data. Overall measures of syntactic comprehension, inhibitory control, and verbal short-term memory and working memory were not predictive of children's accuracy in RC interpretation, with the exception of a positive correlation with a standardized measure of syntactic comprehension in Experiment 1.