Wage Differentials in the United States: Does Religious Participation Matter?

Using data on non‐Hispanics from the 2005 Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), this article examines the within‐religion association between religious participation and wages for mainline Protestants, conservative Protestants, and Catholics, the three major religious groups in the United States. While previous studies have examined this relationship for women only and using ordinary least squares (OLS), this article further analyzes gender differences and differences along the wage distribution using a quantile regression (QR) approach. The results indicate that high participation in religious services is associated with lower wages among mainline Protestant women and men, and among Catholic men. Among Catholic women, those who are not participating in religious activities earn higher wages relative to those who participate on a weekly basis. Furthermore, this advantage is more pronounced at high wages, as the QR estimates show. These results suggest the importance of defining religious participation in a manner that allows the detection of nonlinear effects. In addition, the findings speak to the importance of religion in the lives of individuals and may benefit policies dealing with male‐female wage differentials.     

The Association of Bipolar Spectrum Psychopathology with Psychotic-Like and Schizotypic Symptoms

Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment - Bipolar disorders are increasingly understood as part of a spectrum of clinical and subclinical symptoms and impairment. Upwards of 50% of...     

Why Do You Ask? The Effects of Perceived Motives on the Effort that Managers Allocate Toward Delivering Feedback

Journal of Business and Psychology - Although people are generally motivated to perform well at work, there is often ambiguity regarding whether they are meeting their organization’s...     

Taken out of context? Cross-level effects of between-person self-efficacy and difficulty on the within-person relationship of self-efficacy with resource allocation and performance

Research examining the within-person relationship among self-efficacy, resource allocation, and performance has been decidedly mixed, with positive, null, and even negative relationships being observed. In the present research, we propose that relationship of within-person changes in self-efficacy with subsequent changes in resource allocation and performance depends upon one’s typical level of self-efficacy; that is, increases and decreases in self-efficacy have different implications for individuals that are generally highly efficacious than for individuals who are typically less efficacious. Moreover, we propose that these relationships further depend upon the difficulty of goal being pursued. Support for these arguments is found across two studies. These results provide support for self-efficacy’s non-monotonic relationship with resource allocation, including our proposition that the nature of this non-monotonic relationship differs as a function of difficulty. These results also help further illuminate when and for whom self-efficacy is likely to increase or decrease resource allocation and performance.     

The Extreme Claim,Psychological Continuity and the Person Life View

Marya Schechtman has raised a series of worries for the Psychological Continuity Theory of personal identity (PCT) stemming from what Derek Parfit called the ‘Extreme Claim’. This is roughly the claim that theories like it are unable to explain the importance we attach to personal identity. In her recent Staying Alive (2014), she presents further arguments related to this and sets out a new narrative theory, the Person Life View (PLV), which she sees as solving the problems as well as bringing other advantages over the PCT. I look over some of her earlier arguments and responses to them as a way in to the new issues and theory. I will argue that the problems for the PCT and advantages that the PLV brings are all merely apparent, and present no reason for giving up the former for the latter.     

Changing target trajectories influences tracking performance

People have the ability to attentively select and successfully track several moving objects, a process known as multiple-object tracking (MOT; Pylyshyn & Storm Spatial Vision 3: 179–197, 1988). Various factors have been known to influence MOT performance, such as speed, number of distractors, and proximity, while recent work has suggested that object trajectories may also be a factor (Fencsik, Kleiger, & Horowitz Perception and Psychophysics 69: 567–577, 2007). Meanwhile, unexpected changes in motion information have been demonstrated to be a critical facet for attracting attention Howard & Holcombe Attention, Perception & Psychophysics 72: 2087–2095, (2010). Therefore, we suggest that unexpected changes in target trajectories are an important factor in tracking performance. The research presented here controlled for spatial proximity while manipulating the number of instances in which an object changed trajectory. We found that spatial proximity had no effect on tracking performance but, rather, as the number of trajectory changes increased, tracking performance suffered. Results imply that the ability to track multiple moving objects is limited by unexpected changes in direction.     

A new illusion of height and width: taller people are perceived as thinner

It is commonly said that tall people look thinner. Here, we asked whether an illusion exists such that the taller of two equally wide stimuli looks thinner, and conversely whether the thinner of two equally tall stimuli looks taller. In five experiments, participants judged the horizontal or vertical extents of two identical bodies, rectangles, or cylinders that differed only in their vertical or horizontal extents. Our results confirmed the folk wisdom that being tall makes you look thinner. We similarly found that being thin makes you look taller, although this effect was less pronounced. The same illusion was present for filled rectangles and cylinders, but it was consistently stronger for both photographs and silhouettes of the human body, raising the question of why the human form should be more prone to this illusion.     

Holistic face perception: Mind the gap!

The most widely used measurement of holistic face perception, the composite face effect (CFE), is challenged by two apparently contradictory goals: having a defined face part (i.e., the top half), and yet perceiving the face as an integrated unit (i.e., holistically). Here, we investigated the impact of a small gap between top and bottom face halves in the standard composite face paradigm, requiring matching of sequentially presented top face halves. In Experiment 1, the CFE was larger for no-gap than gap stimuli overall, but not for participants who were presented with gap stimuli first, suggesting that the area of the top face half was unknown without a gap. This was confirmed in Experiment 2, in which these two stimulus sets were mixed up: the gap stimuli thus provided information about the area of a top face half and the magnitude of the CFE did not differ between stimulus sets. These observations indicate that the CFE might be artificially inflated in the absence of a stimulus cue that objectively defines a border between the face halves. Finally, in Experiment 3, observers were asked to determine which of two simultaneously presented faces was the composite face. Perceptual judgements for no-gap stimuli approached ceiling; however, with a gap, participants were almost unable to distinguish the composite face from a veridical face. This effect was not only due to low-level segmentation cues at the border of no-gap face halves, because stimulus inversion decreased performance in both conditions. This result indicates that the two halves of different faces may be integrated more naturally with a small gap that eliminates an enhanced contrast border. Collectively, these observations suggest that a small gap between face halves provides an objective definition of the face half to match and is beneficial for valid measurement of the behavioural CFE.     

Types of self-reported anxiety in outpatients with DSM-III-R anxiety disorders1

To ascertain whether psychiatric outpatients can be classified into distinct types according to their self-reported symptoms of anxiety, the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI) was administered to 655 outpatients diagnosed with DSM-III-R anxiety disorders. Cluster analysis identified three internally consistent subscales representing subjective, somatic, and panic symptoms. Further analysis revealed six types of outpatients reflecting below average, panic-subjective, low subjective, low somatic-panic, above average, and subjective-somatic anxiety. The types were differentiated with respect to age, primary diagnosis, clinically rated anxiety, and both self-reported and clinically rated depression.     

Evaluation of Training in Mental Health

Abstract

This paper reports on the use of cinema therapy at a psychiatry clinic for inpatients. The program, “Watching Cinema Group Therapy,” was used with over 500 inpatients over the course of one year. We found that using movies for group psychotherapy sessions encouraged the patients to talk about their beliefs, thoughts, and feelings while discussing the characters and stories. We also used the movies as a reward for patients who had developed a therapeutic alliance. It motivated the patients to be active instead of simply remaining in their rooms. As a follow-up to full-length films, it was more useful to show short scenes to patients who had been administered high doses of drugs. Movies can be an important, positive, and productive means of treatment and teaching.