Friendships and Adaptation Across the Life Span

Friends foster self-esteem and a sense of well-being, socialize one another, and support one another in coping with developmental transitions and life stress. Friends engage in different activities with one another across the life span, but friendship is conceived similarly by children and adults. Friends and friendships, however, are not all alike. The developmental significance of having friends depends on the characteristics of the friends, especially whether the friends are antisocial or socially withdrawn. Outcomes also depend on whether friendships are supportive and intimate or fractious and unstable. Among both children and adults, friendships have clear-cut developmental benefits at times but are mixed blessings at other times.     

Relationship Closeness and Self‐reported Willingness to Falsely Take the Blame

One reason people falsely confess is to protect the true perpetrator. The current study examined whether relationship closeness influences people's self‐reported willingness to falsely take the blame. Utilizing theoretical work from the prosocial area, three potential mediators were investigated. Participants (N = 131) were randomly assigned to think of either a close or a casual friend and then read one of two scenarios that described a minor offense committed by the friend. Participants' willingness to take the blame was assessed, as well as their perceptions of reciprocity, feelings of empathy, and distress concerns related to their relationship with the offending friend. Results showed that, in both scenarios, participants more often took the blame in the close friend condition than in the casual friend condition. Reciprocity and empathy each uniquely and independently mediated relationship closeness, whereas distress concerns did not. Differences in the two scenarios, which describe different offenses, are discussed. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cognitive Pathways to Belief in Karma and Belief in God

Supernatural beliefs are ubiquitous around the world, and mounting evidence indicates that these beliefs partly rely on intuitive, cross-culturally recurrent cognitive processes. Specifically, past research has focused on humans' intuitive tendency to perceive minds as part of the cognitive foundations of belief in a personified God—an agentic, morally concerned supernatural entity. However, much less is known about belief in karma—another culturally widespread but ostensibly non-agentic supernatural entity reflecting ethical causation across reincarnations. In two studies and four high-powered samples, including mostly Christian Canadians and mostly Hindu Indians (Study 1, N = 2,006) and mostly Christian Americans and Singaporean Buddhists (Study 2, N = 1,752), we provide the first systematic empirical investigation of the cognitive intuitions underlying various forms of belief in karma. We used path analyses to (a) replicate tests of the previously documented cognitive predictors of belief in God, (b) test whether this same network of variables predicts belief in karma, and (c) examine the relative contributions of cognitive and cultural variables to both sets of beliefs. We found that cognitive tendencies toward intuitive thinking, mentalizing, dualism, and teleological thinking predicted a variety of beliefs about karma—including morally laden, non-agentic, and agentic conceptualizations—above and beyond the variability explained by cultural learning about karma across cultures. These results provide further evidence for an independent role for both culture and cognition in supporting diverse types of supernatural beliefs in distinct cultural contexts.     

An Operant Electromagnetic Chamber

Forty-eight middle-class fathers having their first child were divided into three groups: An Experimental Group received a demonstration of physical and behavioral characteristics of their own infants resulting in a doubling of the usual time for interaction during the first two days. A Hospital Group spent the same amount of time viewing a prepared videotape of the same characteristics of a newborn infant who was not theirs. An Office Control Group, without experimental intervention, was recruited to control for effects of demand characteristics of the experimental situation. All three groups attended their infants' one-month well-baby examination where outcome measures were obtained. Analyses of variance showed no differences between groups on demographic or pregnancy variables. Further, 108 analyses of variance for 36 father and infant behaviors scored from videotapes did not reveal significant group differences. It is argued that in addition to amount of early contact and sex of parent, crucial socioeconomic factors need to be considered.     

The Effects of Visual Orientation on the Maze Learning Ability of the White Rat

Since most studies which employ sociometric measures have either ignored the sensitivity of these measures to changes in group structure or have failed to indicate the relative sensitivity of the different types of measures across time and at different age levels, a way to categorize sociometric responses according to the usefulness in reflecting changes both across time and at various age levels was hypothesized. A total of 607 students in grades four through eight responded to a sociometric questionnaire. These responses were analyzed by obtaining test-retest correlations for choices given, choices received, and reciprocal choices. The results indicate that reciprocal choices are less affected by age and time changes than all other ways of interpreting sociometric data.     

The visions of Luciano Perez,contemporary native American Shaman

This paper presents an interview on the visions of the contemporary Native American shaman Luciano Perez. Born of southern Mexican Indian (P'urepecha) ancestry in Laredo, Texas, on 31 December 1950, he was trained in shamanic practice by the Lakota Sioux spiritual leader Leonard Crow Dog. He begins the interview with general comments on visions, how he experiences them and how they have matured him as a visionary providing him with spirit contact, revelation and power. He then remembers visions in childhood of the ‘little people’ and of hearing voices calling him. His first adult experience was a revelatory vision at the beginning of his spiritual quest (1973). Finally, he reports a healing vision from 1989 in a chiropractor's office where he sought medical help for severe back pain.     

Cognitive biases explain religious belief,paranormal belief,and belief in life’s purpose

Cognitive theories of religion have postulated several cognitive biases that predispose human minds towards religious belief. However, to date, these hypotheses have not been tested simultaneously and in relation to each other, using an individual difference approach. We used a path model to assess the extent to which several interacting cognitive tendencies, namely mentalizing, mind body dualism, teleological thinking, and anthropomorphism, as well as cultural exposure to religion, predict belief in God, paranormal beliefs and belief in life’s purpose. Our model, based on two independent samples (N = 492 and N = 920) found that the previously known relationship between mentalizing and belief is mediated by individual differences in dualism, and to a lesser extent by teleological thinking. Anthropomorphism was unrelated to religious belief, but was related to paranormal belief. Cultural exposure to religion (mostly Christianity) was negatively related to anthropomorphism, and was unrelated to any of the other cognitive tendencies. These patterns were robust for both men and women, and across at least two ethnic identifications. The data were most consistent with a path model suggesting that mentalizing comes first, which leads to dualism and teleology, which in turn lead to religious, paranormal, and life’s-purpose beliefs. Alternative theoretical models were tested but did not find empirical support.     

Self-verification as a mediator of mothers' self-fulfilling effects on adolescents' educational attainment

This research examined whether self-verification acts as a general mediational process of self-fulfilling prophecies. The authors tested this hypothesis by examining whether self-verification processes mediated self-fulfilling prophecy effects within a different context and with a different belief and a different outcome than has been used in prior research. Results of longitudinal data obtained from mothers and their adolescents (N=332) indicated that mothers' beliefs about their adolescents' educational outcomes had a significant indirect effect on adolescents' academic attainment through adolescents' educational aspirations. This effect, observed over a 6-year span, provided evidence that mothers' self-fulfilling effects occurred, in part, because mothers' false beliefs influenced their adolescents' own educational aspirations, which adolescents then self-verified through their educational attainment. The theoretical and applied implications of these findings are discussed.