The normatively relativised logical argument from evil

It is widely agreed that the ??Logical?? Argument from Evil (LAFE) is bankrupt. We aim to rehabilitate the LAFE, in the form of what we call the Normatively Relativised Logical Argument from Evil (NRLAFE). There are many different versions of a NRLAFE. We aim to show that one version, what we call the ??right relationship?? NRLAFE, poses a significant threat to personal-omniGod-theism??understood as requiring the belief that there is an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good person who has created our world??because it appeals to value commitments theists themselves are likely to endorse. The ultimate success of this NRLAFE will rest on developing a theological ethics of right relationship that rejects as morally flawed the exercise of omnipotence first to sustain horrors and then to redeem them. Yet a vindicated NRLAFE of this sort need not require atheism, but only rejection of the standard conception of God as a personal omniGod.     

Race/ethnicity, color-blind racial attitudes, and multicultural counseling competence: the moderating effects of multicultural counseling training

Increasing trainees' multicultural counseling competence (MCC) has been a hot topic in counseling. Scholars have identified predictors (e.g., race/ethnicity, color-blindness) of MCC, and educators provide multicultural training for trainees. Using a sample of 370 psychology trainees, this study examined whether multicultural training (a) moderated racial/ethnic differences on MCC and (b) changed the relationship between color-blindness and MCC. Results indicated a significant interaction effect of race/ethnicity (i.e., White vs. ethnic minority) and multicultural training on multicultural awareness, but not on multicultural knowledge. Specifically, at lower levels of training, racial/ethnic minority trainees had significantly higher multicultural awareness than their White counterparts; at higher levels of training, no significant difference was found. Described differently, more training significantly enhanced Whites' multicultural awareness, but did not enhance racial/ethnic minority trainees' awareness. Additionally, there was a significant interaction effect of color-blindness and multicultural training on multicultural knowledge, but not on multicultural awareness. The association between color-blindness and multicultural knowledge was stronger at higher levels of multicultural training than at lower levels of training. Alternatively, the effect of training on enhancing knowledge was stronger for those with lower color-blindness than for those with higher color-blindness.     

Intergenerational cultural dissonance in parent-adolescent relationships among Chinese and European Americans

Generational cultural gaps (assessed as the mismatch between adolescents' ideals and perceptions of the parent-adolescent relationship) were investigated among Chinese youth with immigrant parents and their European American counterparts who have been in the United States for generations and assumingly do not have intergenerational cultural gaps. The authors of the study examined the associations of such generational gaps with adolescents' behavioral problems and whether youth's appreciation of Chinese parent-adolescent relationships (parental devotion, sacrifice, thoughtfulness, and guan) described by the notion of qin would moderate the relationship between discrepancies and youth's adjustment. A total of 634 high school students (M = 15.97 years; 95 and 154 first- and second-generation Chinese American respectively, and 385 European Americans) completed measures of parental warmth, parent-adolescent open communication, qin, and psychological adjustment. The U.S.-born Chinese American adolescents' ideals exceeded perceptions of parents' warmth and open communication to a greater degree than it did for European American adolescents (ps < 0.05). Such discrepancies in parental warmth were related to greater internalizing symptoms for second-generation Chinese American youth than for their European American peers. In addition, for second-generation Chinese, their perceptions of qin, particularly parents' devotion and sacrifice, had stronger moderating effects, diminishing the associations between generational cultural gaps and youth's behavioral problems compared with those of European American and first-generation Chinese youth. Parental thoughtfulness also played a similar beneficial role, but did so for all youth.     

Linking resident behavior to dementia care communication: effects of emotional tone

Care for older adults with dementia is complicated by behaviors such as verbal and physical aggression and withdrawal that disrupt and increase the costs of providing care. These behaviors, referred to as resistiveness to care (RTC), have been linked to staff elderspeak communication, measured by behaviorally coded explicit behaviors. This study examined videotapes of nursing home (NH) residents with dementia interacting with staff during bathing to explore the relationships between implicit messages communicated by nursing staff and resident RTC behavior.Implicit messages in nursing staff communication were rated using the Emotional Tone Rating Scale by naïve coders. Associations between implicit ratings of care, respect, and control were analyzed in relation to RTC scale scores. Highly controlling communication was significantly correlated with increased resident RTC (r = .49, p < .05). Associations between the care and respect dimensions of communication were not significantly correlated with RTC; however, trends in hypothesized directions were identified. The association between emotional tone and RTC found in this study suggests that it is an important factor in care. Understanding affective messages is a first step in modifying these implicit messages conveyed during staff-resident communication. Research is needed to confirm these findings and to identify and test interventions to teach staff to reduce controlling messages that will to reduce RTC and improve care.     

Is auditory discrimination mature by middle childhood? A study using time‐frequency analysis of mismatch responses from 7 years to adulthood

Behavioural and electrophysiological studies give differing impressions of when auditory discrimination is mature. Ability to discriminate frequency and speech contrasts reaches adult levels only around 12 years of age, yet an electrophysiological index of auditory discrimination, the mismatch negativity (MMN), is reported to be as large in children as in adults. Auditory ERPs were measured in 30 children (7 to 12 years), 23 teenagers (13 to 16 years) and 32 adults (35 to 56 years) in an oddball paradigm with tone or syllable stimuli. For each stimulus type, a standard stimulus (1000 Hz tone or syllable [ba]) occurred on 70% of trials, and one of two deviants (1030 or 1200 Hz tone, or syllables [da] or [bi]) equiprobably on the remaining trials. For the traditional MMN interval of 100–250 ms post-onset, size of mismatch responses increased with age, whereas the opposite trend was seen for an interval from 300 to 550 ms post-onset, corresponding to the late discriminative negativity (LDN). Time-frequency analysis of single trials revealed that the MMN resulted from phase-synchronization of oscillations in the theta (4–7 Hz) range, with greater synchronization in adults than children. Furthermore, the amount of synchronization was significantly correlated with frequency discrimination threshold. These results show that neurophysiological processes underlying auditory discrimination continue to develop through childhood and adolescence. Previous reports of adult-like MMN amplitudes in children may be artefactual results of using peak measurements when comparing groups that differ in variance.     

Maternal and paternal plasma, salivary, and urinary oxytocin and parent-infant synchrony: considering stress and affiliation components of human bonding

Studies in mammals have implicated the neuropeptide oxytocin (OT) in processes of bond formation and stress modulation, yet the involvement of OT in human bonding throughout life remains poorly understood. We assessed OT in the plasma, saliva, and urine of 112 mothers and fathers interacting with their 4-6-month-old infants. Parent-infant interactions were micro-coded for parent and child's social behaviors and for the temporal coordination of their socio-affective cues. Parents were interviewed regarding their attachment to the infant and reported on bonding to own parents, romantic attachment, and parenting stress. Results indicated that OT in plasma (pOT) and saliva (sOT) were inter-related and were unrelated to OT in urine (uOT). pOT and sOT in mothers and fathers were associated with parent and child's social engagement, affect synchrony, and positive communicative sequences between parent and child. uOT was related to moments of interactive stress among mothers only, indexed by the co-occurrence of infant negative engagement and mother re-engagement attempts. pOT and sOT were associated with mothers' and fathers' attachment relationships throughout life: to own parents, partner, and infant, whereas uOT correlated with relationship anxiety and parenting stress among mothers only. Similar to other mammals, OT is involved in human attachment and contingent parenting. The dual role of OT in stress and affiliation underscores its complex involvement in processes of social bonding throughout life.     

Modality effects in memory for basic stimulus attributes: a temporal and nontemporal comparison

Previous research suggests that there are significant differences in the operation of reference memory for stimuli of different modalities, with visual temporal entries appearing to be more durable than auditory entries (Ogden, Wearden, & Jones, 2008 , 2010). Ogden et al. ( 2008 , 2010 ) demonstrated that when participants were required to store multiple auditory temporal standards over a period of delay there was significant systematic interference to the representation of the standard characterized by shifts in the location of peak responding. No such performance deterioration was observed when multiple visually presented durations were encoded and maintained. The current article explored whether this apparent modality-based difference in reference memory operation is unique to temporal stimuli or whether similar characteristics are also apparent when nontemporal stimuli are encoded and maintained. The modified temporal generalization method developed in Ogden et al. (2008) was employed; however, standards and comparisons varied by pitch (auditory) and physical line length (visual) rather than duration. Pitch and line length generalization results indicated that increasing memory load led to more variable responding and reduced recognition of the standard; however, there was no systematic shift in the location of peak responding. Comparison of the results of this study with those of Ogden et al. (2008, 2010) suggests that although performance deterioration as a consequence of increases in memory load is common to auditory temporal and nontemporal stimuli and visual nontemporal stimuli, systematic interference is unique to auditory temporal processing.     

Listening to your heart. How interoception shapes emotion experience and intuitive decision making

Theories proposing that how one thinks and feels is influenced by feedback from the body remain controversial. A central but untested prediction of many of these proposals is that how well individuals can perceive subtle bodily changes (interoception) determines the strength of the relationship between bodily reactions and cognitive-affective processing. In Study 1, we demonstrated that the more accurately participants could track their heartbeat, the stronger the observed link between their heart rate reactions and their subjective arousal (but not valence) ratings of emotional images. In Study 2, we found that increasing interoception ability either helped or hindered adaptive intuitive decision making, depending on whether the anticipatory bodily signals generated favored advantageous or disadvantageous choices. These findings identify both the generation and the perception of bodily responses as pivotal sources of variability in emotion experience and intuition, and offer strong supporting evidence for bodily feedback theories, suggesting that cognitive-affective processing does in significant part relate to "following the heart."     

The Starting Early Starting Smart Integrated Services Model: Improving Access to Behavioral Health Services in the Pediatric Health Care Setting for At-Risk Families with Young Children

We evaluated the Starting Early Starting Smart (SESS) national initiative to integrate behavioral health services (parenting, mental health, and drug treatment) into the pediatric health care setting for families with young children. Data are presented from five pediatric care (PC) sites, drawing from families at risk due to demographic and behavioral health factors, with infants less than 12 months of age (n = 612). Families were randomly assigned to either the SESS program or a standard care Comparison group. We utilized longitudinal analyses to estimate differences in utilization rates for parenting, mental health, and drug treatment over 6 follow-up time points (3, 6, 9, 12, 15 and 18 months). Our findings indicate that SESS caregiver participants were 4.6 times (p < 0.001; CI = 3.33–6.26) more likely to receive parenting services, 2.1 times (p < 0.001; CI = 1.48–2.86) more likely to receive outpatient mental health treatment, and 1.8 times (p = 0.025; CI = 1.08–3.14) more likely to receive drug treatment than Comparison group participants. Our results demonstrate the success of the SESS program in coordinating and improving access to behavioral health services for high-risk caregivers within the pediatric health care setting and highlight the importance of continuing to focus public health policy on the behavioral health care needs of families with young children.