Religion in Meaning Making and Boundary Work: Theoretical Explorations

Based on the articles brought together for this special issue, this article proposes a transversal analysis and theoretical elaboration of the question of the uses of religious elements for meaning making and boundary work. In order to do so, we will first propose a sociocultural psychological perspective to examine meaning making dynamics. Second, we will apply a boundary work perspective, as recently developed in the social sciences, on the organization of religious differences. The first considers religious elements as resources that can be used by people to orient themselves in time and the social space, to interpret and guide action, and to create new forms of life. The second approach proposes an analysis of uses of religious stuff in order to understand how boundaries between groups are created, transgressed or dissolved as well as to explore the link between religion and power. Our argument is that the articulation of these two approaches can itself offer a rich theoretical frame to apprehend religions in contemporary society.     

Imagination as Expansion of Experience

This paper proposes a developmental view on imagination: from this perspective, imagination can be seen as triggered by some disrupting event, which generates a disjunction from the person’s unfolding experience of the “real” world, and as unfolding as a loop, which eventually comes back to the actual experience. Examining recent and classical theorization of imagination in psychology, the paper opposes a deficitary view of imagination to an expansive notion of imagination. The paper explores Piaget, Vygotsky, Harris and Pelaprat & Cole consider: 1) What does provoke a “rupture” or disjunction? 2) What are the psychological processes involved in the imaginary loop? 3) What nourishes such processes? 4) What are the consequences of such imaginary loop, or what does it enable doing? The paper proposes to adopt an expansive view of imagination, as Vygotsky proposed—a perspective that has been under-explored empirically since his seminal work. To stimulate such sociocultural psychology of imagination, two empirical examples are provided, one showing how children make sense of metaphor in an experimental setting, the other showing a young person using a novel met at school as symbolic resource.     

The empathic brain: how, when and why?

Recent imaging results suggest that individuals automatically share the emotions of others when exposed to their emotions. We question the assumption of the automaticity and propose a contextual approach, suggesting several modulatory factors that might influence empathic brain responses. Contextual appraisal could occur early in emotional cue evaluation, which then might or might not lead to an empathic brain response, or not until after an empathic brain response is automatically elicited. We propose two major roles for empathy; its epistemological role is to provide information about the future actions of other people, and important environmental properties. Its social role is to serve as the origin of the motivation for cooperative and prosocial behavior, as well as help for effective social communication.     

Plasticity of memory for new learning in very old age: a story of major loss?

Longitudinal survivors of the Berlin Aging Study (N = 96, mean age = 84 years, range 75-101 years) were instructed and trained in a mnemonic skill to examine plasticity of episodic memory performance in very old age. Performance gains after mnemonic instruction were modest, and most individuals were unable to further enhance their performance during 4 sessions of mnemonic practice. Whereas the proportion of variance explained by measures from the broad fluid-ability domain (e.g., perceptual speed) increased with training, the proportion of variance explained by crystallized-ability domain (e.g., word knowledge) and sociobiographical variables decreased. Furthermore, prior 6-year longitudinal changes (loss) in perceptual speed predicted individual differences in plasticity. Results suggest that aging-induced biological factors are a prominent source of individual differences in cognitive plasticity in very old age.     

Ask me why,don't tell me why: Asking children for explanations facilitates relational thinking

Identifying abstract relations is essential for commonsense reasoning. Research suggests that even young children can infer relations such as “same” and “different,” but often fail to apply these concepts. Might the process of explaining facilitate the recognition and application of relational concepts? Based on prior work suggesting that explanation can be a powerful tool to promote abstract reasoning, we predicted that children would be more likely to discover and use an abstract relational rule when they were prompted to explain observations instantiating that rule, compared to when they received demonstration alone. Five- and 6-year-olds were given a modified Relational Match to Sample (RMTS) task, with repeated demonstrations of relational (same) matches by an adult. Half of the children were prompted to explain these matches; the other half reported the match they observed. Children who were prompted to explain showed immediate, stable success, while those only asked to report the outcome of the pedagogical demonstration did not. Findings provide evidence that explanation facilitates early abstraction over and above demonstration alone.     

Psychological Health and Attitude Toward Christianity Among Protestant and Catholic Sixth-Form Pupils in Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland remains both one of the more religiously active and also one of the most religiously divided countries in Europe. In this context 1,093 sixth-form pupils attending Protestant schools and 1,266 sixth-form pupils attending Catholic schools (aged between 16 and 19 years) completed the abbreviated Eysenck Personality Questionnaire Revised (EPQR-A), as a measure of psychological health, alongside the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christainity (FSAC). The findings demonstrated that a positive attitude toward Christianity was associated with neither higher nor lower neuroticism scores, but was associated in both religious communities with lower psychoticism scores. There is no evidence, therefore, to associate a positive view of Christianity with poorer levels of psychological health among adolescents in Northern Ireland, and some evidence to associate a positive view of Christianity with better levels of psychological health.     

Inferring design: evidence of a preference for teleological explanations in patients with Alzheimer's disease

Unlike educated adults, young children demonstrate a "promiscuous" tendency to explain objects and phenomena by reference to functions, endorsing what are called teleological explanations. This tendency becomes more selective as children acquire increasingly coherent beliefs about causal mechanisms, but it is unknown whether a widespread preference for teleology is ever truly outgrown. The study reported here investigated this question by examining explanatory judgments in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD), whose dementia affects the rich causal beliefs adults typically consult in evaluating explanations. The results indicate that unlike healthy adults, AD patients systematically and promiscuously prefer teleological explanations, suggesting that an underlying tendency to construe the world in terms of functions persists throughout life. This finding has broad relevance not only to understanding conceptual impairments in AD, but also to theories of development, learning, and conceptual change. Moreover, this finding sheds light on the intuitive appeal of creationism.     

Knowing who dunnit: Infants identify the causal agent in an unseen causal interaction

Preverbal infants can represent the causal structure of events, including distinguishing the agentive and receptive roles and categorizing entities according to stable causal dispositions. This study investigated how infants combine these 2 kinds of causal inference. In Experiments 1 and 2, 9.5-month-olds used the position of a human hand or a novel puppet (causal agents), but not a toy train (an inert object), to predict the subsequent motion of a beanbag. Conversely, in Experiment 3, 10- and 7-month-olds used the motion of the beanbag to infer the position of a hand but not of a toy block. These data suggest that preverbal infants expect a causal agent as the source of motion of an inert object.     

Explaining prompts children to privilege inductively rich properties

Four experiments with preschool-aged children test the hypothesis that engaging in explanation promotes inductive reasoning on the basis of shared causal properties as opposed to salient (but superficial) perceptual properties. In Experiments 1a and 1b, 3- to 5-year-old children prompted to explain during a causal learning task were more likely to override a tendency to generalize according to perceptual similarity and instead extend an internal feature to an object that shared a causal property. Experiment 2 replicated this effect of explanation in a case of label extension (i.e., categorization). Experiment 3 demonstrated that explanation improves memory for clusters of causally relevant (non-perceptual) features, but impairs memory for superficial (perceptual) features, providing evidence that effects of explanation are selective in scope and apply to memory as well as inference. In sum, our data support the proposal that engaging in explanation influences children’s reasoning by privileging inductively rich, causal properties.     

A Constellation of Stigmas: Intersectional Stigma Management and the Professional Dominatrix

In this article, we explore stigma management among dominatrices, a relatively understudied profession within the literature on sex work. Our analysis is based on in-depth interviews with current and former dominatrices and published memoirs and blogs written by women who have worked in the industry. We argue that the professional dominatrix occupies a unique position within the sex industry, responding to stigma directed toward her both as a sex worker and practitioner of sadomasochism. Our research has implications for understanding the management of intersecting stigmas and the relationship between stigma management and social ideologies of gender, sexuality, and sex work.