Mind-Wandering and Childhood ADHD: Experimental Manipulations across Laboratory and Naturalistic Settings

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - The conceptual overlap between mind-wandering and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)-related impairments is considerable, yet little...     

Profiles of Emotion Socialization Across Development and Longitudinal Associations with Youth Psychopathology

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - Although there is relative consensus in the literature regarding associations between certain emotion socialization (ES) strategies and youth...     

Intolerance of Uncertainty and Anxiety Symptoms: Examining the Indirect Effect Through Anxiety Sensitivity Among Adults with Anxiety-Related Disorders

Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment - The conceptual overlap between intolerance of uncertainty (IU) and anxiety sensitivity (AS) has gained recent attention, with researchers...     

Does Parenting Moderate the Association Between Adverse Childhood Experiences and Adolescents’ Future Orientation?

Journal of Child and Family Studies - Adolescents who think and act towards the future are more likely to thrive. This future orientation may, however, be affected by adversity and the parenting...     

Anticipatory looks reveal expectations about discourse relations

Previous research provides evidence for expectation-driven processing within sentences at phonological, lexical, and syntactic levels of linguistic structure. Less well-established is whether comprehenders also anticipate pragmatic relationships between sentences. To address this, we evaluate a unit of discourse structure that comprehenders must infer to hold between sentences in order for a discourse to make sense—the intersentential coherence relation. In a novel eyetracking paradigm, we trained participants to associate particular spatial locations with particular coherence relations. Experiment 1 shows that the subset of listeners who successfully acquired the location∼relation mappings during training subsequently looked to these locations during testing in response to a coherence–signaling intersentential connective. Experiment 2 finds that listeners’ looks during sentences containing coherence-biasing verbs reveal expectations about upcoming sentence types. This work extends existing research on prediction beyond sentence-internal structure and provides a new methodology for examining the cues that comprehenders use to establish relationships at the discourse level.     

Blessed,precious mistakes: deconstruction,evolution, and New Atheism in America

This paper explores the ways that Daniel C. Dennett’s bestselling 2006 book Breaking the Spell traffics in a set of distinctly American presumptions about the relationship between religion and science. In this Americanized atheism, religion is presumed to be a set of logically organized propositional beliefs–a misbegotten science in need of correction or elimination. I show that a convergent critique, drawing on both evolutionary theory and deconstruction, highlights the limitations of this approach. This convergence highlights the theme of accident in both pluralist evolutionary biology and continental philosophy of religion. Thematizing accident opens up a new conversational space between a deconstructive approach to religion and postadaptationist evolutionary theory, with implications not only for a philosophical understanding of religion, but for new, postsecular atheisms.     

Creative Imagination is Stable Across Technological Media: The Spore Creature Creator Versus Pencil and Paper

T. B. Ward (1994) investigated creativity by asking participants to draw alien creatures that they imagined to be from a planet very different from Earth. He found that participant drawings reliably contained features typical of common Earth animals. As a consequence, Ward concluded that creativity is structured. The present investigation predicts that this limitation on creativity is not restricted to drawings: the use of different technology will not change creative output. To investigate this question, participants performed Ward's task twice: once using pencil and paper and once using software made to design creatures (the Spore Creature Creator). Only minor significant differences were found. This preliminarily suggests that changing tools does not affect the overall rigidity of the creative process. This lends further support to Ward's thesis on the structural rigidity of creativity. We conclude by suggesting an elaboration to Ward's thesis that will be explored in future work. We suggest that aesthetics might be one of the factors that contribute to creative constraint, in that creatures that are too unusual would be less interesting.     

Spiritual Versus Religious Identity: A Necessary Distinction in Understanding Clinicians’ Behavior and Attitudes Toward Clinical Practice and Medical Student Teaching in This Realm

Social sciences view spirituality and religion separately; medicine views them together. We identified distinctions regarding clinical practice and teaching among clinician educators based on their self-identified spirituality versus religiosity. We emailed a 24-item survey on spiritual/religious (S/R) issues to clinician educators (n = 1,067) at our institution. Three summary scales were created. Responses to statements, ‘I consider myself to be spiritual’ and ‘I consider myself to be religious’ generated four comparison groups: ‘spiritual only,’ ‘religious only,’ ‘both spiritual and religious’ and ‘neither.’ Analyses employed ANOVA and T tests. A total of 633 (59 %) surveys were completed. Four percentage self-identified as ‘religious only’; remaining respondents divided evenly, about 30 % into each of the other categories. Groups differed from one another on all summary scales (p < .0001). Using T tests, the ‘spiritual only’ group differed from the ‘religious only’ group regarding teaching. The ‘spiritual and religious’ group had the highest mean ratings for all summary scales. The ‘neither’ and ‘religious only’ group had the lowest mean ratings. Clinicians’ spiritual versus religious identity is associated with differences in behavior/attitudes regarding S/R toward clinical practice and medical student teaching. These findings elucidate opportunities for faculty development to explore effects of beliefs on behavior and attitudes within this realm.