Fluctuating maximal God

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion - This paper explores a variety of perfect being theism that combines Yujin Nagasawa’s maximal God thesis with the view that God is not...     

The influence of instructive feedback presentation schedule: A replication with children with autism spectrum disorder

Instructive feedback (IF) is a modification to discrete trial instruction that may increase instructional efficiency for individuals with autism spectrum disorder. Several variations of IF have recently been evaluated in the literature; however, few studies have assessed the effectiveness and efficiency of presenting secondary targets on continuous versus intermittent presentation schedules. The current study evaluated the effectiveness and efficiency of various presentation schedules of secondary targets during discrete trial instruction. Specifically, we replicated and extended Griffen et al. (1998) by comparing a condition in which secondary targets were presented during each trial of a session, a condition in which secondary targets were presented every other trial, and a condition in which secondary targets were presented about every 4 trials. Within-subject replications were included for both participants. One of the intermittent presentation schedules was associated with the most optimal outcomes in all 4 comparisons.     

How Preschoolers Associate Power with Gender in Male-Female Interactions: A Cross-Cultural Investigation

Sex Roles - Interactions between males and females often display a power imbalance. Men tend to adopt more dominant physical postures, lead conversations more, and are more likely to impose their...     

Dynamic and Static Work-Family Relationships

This study investigated the linkages between work and family of 281 dual-employed couples. First, we developed a theoretical framework, distinguishing between the causal direction and the sign of the relationship between work and family. We classified the social and psychological mechanisms that explain specific directions and signs of work–family relationships and reviewed the empirical literature from the point of view of this framework. We then provided an illustration of how this framework can be used to generate a model for a specific sample. We generated a model and corresponding hypotheses for a sample of dual-employed couples in which the male′s career was dominant and analyzed these hypotheses by testing males and females separately using LISREL 7. In our sample, the relationship between work and family was reciprocal for males, suggesting a dynamic system in which males were able to adjust one domain to compensate for the other. Females exhibited a unidirectional relationship from family to work involvement, suggesting a static system. For both males and females, the family → work involvement relationship was negative as hypothesized. For males, the work → family relationship was positive. There were some similarities and some differences in the influence of exogenous constructs in the models for males and females. Results are discussed in terms of the importance of understanding dynamic versus static models of work and family relationships and the potential role of organizations in helping their employees lower the fixed demands of the family.     

Relating the adolescent mother—child relationship to preschool outcomes

Two domains of potential risk in relation to the cognitive-linguistic outcomes of preschool children of adolescent mothers were investigated: (1) interactive features of the mother—child relationship and (2) aspects of the demographic context of parenting. Sixty-nine adolescent mothers and their children participated in evaluations when the children were 13, 20, 30, and 44 months old. Results indicated that the cognitive-linguistic development of children of adolescent mothers was affected by both the mother—child relationship and cumulative index of demographic risk. Specifically, positive maternal affect, mother—child verbal reciprocity, mother—child interactive fit, and cumulative demographic risk all contributed to explaining difficulties in preschool cognitive and linguistic functioning in children of adolescent mothers.     

Reconstructing Hymens or Constructing Sexual Inequality? Service Provision to Islamic Young Women Coping with the Demand to be a Virgin

In Islamic culture, there is an imperative demand that women should be virgins on their wedding night. Service providers in The Netherlands are increasingly confronted by Islamic young women who find themselves in serious difficulties because they are no longer virgins, and are about to enter a forced or arranged marriage. These young women report a diversity of problems such as loneliness, social isolation, depression, despair, suicidal feelings, identity problems and serious conflicts with parents. In this article we focus attention on the circumstances that can result in these types of difficulties, and also critically consider the kinds of help that young Islamic women are given. Attention is paid to the question of whether existing forms of service provision, especially surgical reconstruction of the hymen, take sexual and other inequalities into account.     

Perceived physical and social causality in animated motions: spontaneous reports and ratings

Michotte argued that we perceive cause-and-effect, without contributions from reasoning or learning, even in displays of two-dimensional moving shapes. Two studies extend this line of work from perception of mechanical to social causality. We compared verbal reports with structured ratings of causality to gain a better understanding of the extent to which perceptual causality occurs spontaneously or depends on instruction or context. A total of 120 adult observers (72 in the main experiment, 48 in an initial experiment) saw 12 (or 8) different computer animations of shape A moving up to B, which in turn moved away. Animations factorially varied the temporal and spatial relations of the shapes, and whether they moved rigidly or in a non-rigid, animal-like manner. Impressions of social as well as physical causality appeared in both free reports and ratings. Perception of physical causality was stronger than perception of social causality, particularly in free reports. No differences of this nature appear in infants and children, so the asymmetry may reflect learnt knowledge. Physical causality was relatively unspecific initially, but discrimination of causal and delayed control events improved with exposure to multiple events. Experience seems to affect the causal illusion even over a short timeframe; the idea of 'one-trial causality' may be somewhat misleading. Regardless of such effects on the absolute level of responses, the different measures showed similar patterns of variation with the spatio-temporal configuration and type of motion. The good fit of ratings and reports validates much recent work in this area.     

Knowing what a novel word is not: Two-year-olds 'listen through' ambiguous adjectives in fluent speech

Three studies investigated how 24-month-olds and adults resolve temporary ambiguity in fluent speech when encountering prenominal adjectives potentially interpretable as nouns. Children were tested in a looking-while-listening procedure to monitor the time course of speech processing. In Experiment 1, the familiar and unfamiliar adjectives preceding familiar target nouns were accented or deaccented. Target word recognition was disrupted only when lexically ambiguous adjectives were accented like nouns. Experiment 2 measured the extent of interference experienced by children when interpreting prenominal words as nouns. In Experiment 3, adults used prosodic cues to identify the form class of adjective/noun homophones in string-identical sentences before the ambiguous words were fully spoken. Results show that children and adults use prosody in conjunction with lexical and distributional cues to ‘listen through’ prenominal adjectives, avoiding costly misinterpretation.