Prayer Behavior in Rural Kilimanjaro,Tanzania

Theories and empirical evidence regarding prayer behavior generally emerge from studies of survey respondents in developed countries. The research we describe here adds to the literature by exploring links between demographic characteristics and the frequency and content of prayers for respondents in rural Tanzania. We surveyed 349 Christian households from six villages in the country's Kilimanjaro region. In some aspects our findings match results from survey research conducted elsewhere, and in other aspects our results differ from those commonly reported in the literature. We suggest that local cultural and socioeconomic conditions may account for the differences in outcomes. These results suggest a need for caution in applying to poor countries theories and expectations drawn from the developed country context.     

Priming of face matching in amnesia.

Priming was studied in a task that required a speeded response to photographs of faces. On each trial, subjects viewed two faces and decided if the same person was shown twice or if two different people were shown. Both familiar and unfamiliar (i.e., well-known and unknown) faces were used, and some face pairs were repeated with a mean delay of about 10 min. Repetition was associated with faster reaction times in young subjects (Experiment 1) as well as in amnesic patients and age-matched control subjects (Experiment 2). The patients' reaction times were slower overall, although the magnitude of the priming effect did not differ from that in the control subjects. This preservation of a normal reaction-time facilitation in subjects with impaired recognition memory for faces occurred for both familiar and unfamiliar faces, suggesting that amnesia does not necessarily interfere with the acquisition of new information as indexed by this priming effect.     

HOW DID FREGE FALL INTO THE CONTRADICTION?

Quine made it conventional to portray the contradiction that destroyed Frege's logicism as some kind of act of God, a thunderbolt that descended from a clear blue sky. This portrayal suited the moral Quine was antecedently inclined to draw, that intuition is bankrupt, and that reliance on it must therefore be replaced by a pragmatic methodology. But the portrayal is grossly misleading, and Quine's moral simply false. In the person of others – Cantor, Dedekind, and Zermelo – intuition was working pretty well. It was in Frege that it suffered a local and temporary blindness. The question to ask, then, is not how Frege was overtaken by the contradiction, but how it is that he didn't see it coming. The paper offers one kind of answer to that question. Starting from the very close similarity between Frege's proof of infinity and the reasoning that leads to the contradiction, it asks: given his understanding of the first, why did Frege did not notice the second? The reason is traced, first, to a faulty generalization Frege made from the case of directions and parallel lines; and, through that, to Frege's having retained, and attempted incoherently to combine with his own, aspects of a pre‐Fregean understanding of the generality of logical principles.     

Expectancy priming of smoking cessation messages enhances the placebo effect of tailored interventions.

OBJECTIVE: Previous research (Webb, Simmons, & Brandon, 2005) suggested that smokers' reactions to self-help materials were more positive if they believed that the materials had been personally tailored to their individual characteristics and if they held expectancies that tailored interventions are superior to standard, or generic, interventions. The authors' objective in the current study was to replicate and extend this research by testing the efficacy expectancy priming before intervention delivery. DESIGN: In a 2 x 2 factorial experiment, 210 smokers (M = 23 cigarettes/day) recruited from the community (62% female; 92% Caucasian; mean age = 49) were randomly assigned to 1 of 4 conditions: placebo-tailored intervention/no priming, placebo-tailored intervention/priming, standard intervention/no priming, or standard intervention/priming. The tailoring-related expectancies of participants' in the priming conditions were primed before they were presented with the respective intervention booklets. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Content evaluations, readiness to quit smoking, cessation self-efficacy, smoking-related knowledge, and progress toward quitting (behavior changes). Assessments occurred by mail at baseline and at 1-month postintervention. RESULTS: Similar to the earlier study, the placebo-tailored booklets produced superior evaluations and smoking-related cognitive and behavioral changes. Moreover, the pretreatment expectancy priming successfully altered participants' tailoring-related expectancies and also produced superior evaluations and outcomes. CONCLUSION: Findings support a causal role of tailoring-related expectancies on the efficacy of tailored interventions and suggest that interventions can be enhanced via expectancy priming.